Twitter Blue for $8/Month

For quite a few "check marks" it will feel as a massive downgrade. Not only are they no longer special, they even have to start paying to be less special.

Yet for many, they have nowhere to go. Their current status (followers) is often unique to Twitter and not easily replicated elsewhere. Many came to power by years of unhinged "hot takes", the check-mark, and algorithmic boosting. This tactic doesn't really work on any other social network, not by posting small and ridiculous pieces of text.

Some dare to even flip it and claim they should not be paying, they should get paid, for they are "creators". I consider that to be quite generous. Sure enough they generate activity/traffic, but that's not the same thing as creating.

On Youtube, you can find videos of incredible production value. Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saWNMPL5ygk

Now, that's a creator. Tweeting "Biden sucks" creates outrage, but is not a creation. Stephen King is a creator as a novel writer, but his tweets specifically are not creations of any value on their own.

The way I draw this line is simple: can the creation stand on its own and widely be perceived as having value? For the video I linked to, clearly yes. For a tweet, when you disassociate it from who said it...nah.

With "value", I mean value to us. Clearly a rage tweet generating a lot of traffic and ad impressions has value to Twitter, but in my book that doesn't make you a creator that needs to get paid.

Musk has hinted though that he wants to onboard long form content and native video, so that could change things.

Finally, other than this leveling of status, I hope obscene algorithmic boosting is also looked at. One is often puzzled to see a random idiot having hundreds of thousands followers whilst producing nothing but mediocre garbage. The ultimate example has to be this:

https://twitter.com/nytimes

No, I have nothing against that newspaper nor do I find them idiots. That account has over 50m followers yet near-zero engagement.

If you're going to be a luxury product then all of your prices and/or offering has to be luxury or exclusive.

Disincentiving follower counts by how much VIP accounts costs doesn't make much sense. Unless you have some high end super VIP bracket that caps at 100-500k or whatever.

Elon's idea of rewarding creators as a byproduct of checkmarks sounds better than arbitrarily gatekeeping the checkmark system through some VIP criteria (like follower counts or public influence).

Everyone is a creator by default, creators should be rewarded after a certain level of contribution - always - but that's not the role of checkmarks (or the base level one at least).