551–560 of 1001 posts
My goodness the weight people put behind the verification check mark sounds absolutely insane as a person who is not at all invested in Twitter. As an outsider, this sounds like the only way to combat scammers on the platform, assuming non-paying viewers have an easy way to only see content from paying users.
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Because Musk fanboys have a deep drive to provide rational explanations for the myriad of idiotic things he states
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes. > Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The good: Twitter should not be editorally curating people through verification, making verification only about ID and being a real person is a broadly good change, as long as it's not necessary for participation. Brands, celebrities, those in the public eye could benefit from this. Needs to be implemented with care and ideally with a branding change so as not to confuse users as the semantics change. The bad: $8 is…
There's nothing good. When everyone can buy a checkmark, it becomes nothing. The next step is "only allow replies from blue checkmarks" both are bad ideas, and solely because of musk's obsession with bots. Without a mob to prop up people with retweets, twitter will be useless. You cant have the good parts without the ugly parts
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There's nothing good. When everyone can buy a checkmark, it becomes nothing. The next step is "only allow replies from blue checkmarks" both are bad ideas, and solely because of musk's obsession with bots. Without a mob to prop up people with retweets, twitter will be useless. You cant have the good parts without the ugly parts
> When everyone can buy a checkmark, it becomes nothing Where does it say everyone can buy a checkmark without verification? I read this as everyone can be verified, which is a good thing. And, it will go a long way to killing off the bots.
> There will be a secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure, which is already the case for politicians
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587527711228149765
So, secondary tags are the new verification checkmarks and checkmarks are the new "Twitter+" status symbol.
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My gut instinct is that the right price for verification is something like $1000 as a one-time fee. Lots of people who are active Twitter users will find that fee useful at some point in their life (as a business marketing expense), and Twitter will likely extract a lot more from them by charging $1000 once rather than $8/month.
Influencers and hustlebros will pay that, celebrities won't. If the celebrities leave, Twitter dies.
The people who won't get it for free (who have blue checks currently) are entry-level journalists with a few hundred followers and cryptobros. Both of those classes of people should have to pay.
A lot of hustlebros and cryptobros do pay for checkmarks, they just don't pay Twitter.
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Stephen King is addicted to Twitter? He's posted an average of 2-3 tweets per day — I wouldn't call that addicted.
That is quite a lot.
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That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal. So every user paying $X/mo to solidify their place in the graph makes some conceptual sense. In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. A tiny percentage of users are creators while the vast majority are c…
Stephen King’s tweet on that topic, to summarize: “ $20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.” https://twitter.com/stephenking/status/1587042605627490304?s...
The good news is that this should definitely reduce the volume of bot / troll accounts, by making it prohibitively expensive to run. That will mean a reduction of disinformation on aggregate - as what other purpose would there be to run a bot network? The bad news is that it recreates the lords vs servants dynamic that Musk is claiming to want to get rid of. $8 is not much for everyone reading on HN, but guess what,…
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Sure, but impulses among individuals like Putin, Biden and Xi Jinping have much bigger impact.
And that's why it's so important for world leaders to not act (or appear to act) impulsively! You might say the same is true for business leaders.