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Twitter Blue for $8/Month

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Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#711

Post by parineum »

tptacek wrote: post #683
tsol wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is true, I think twitter still greatly increases his outreach. It's the only reason most of us are hearing about him. Otherwise, I would definitely not be reading his blog. While I'm sure he would have a dedicated audience, it's not twitter. Not only that, but the more people start personal blogs the less viewers the harder it is to compete for views. For Stephen King, a generational talent, it may not mat…

Twitter is not greatly increasing Stephen King's reach.

Stephen King just reached me for the first time in decades.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#712

Post by bedast »

The blue checkmark started as a way to verify high profile accounts to make it more difficult to impersonate them. Twitter made a huge mistake opening this up way too broadly and failed to course correct. Now Elon wants to turn this into a free-for-all and scamming on Twitter will be easier than ever, with the low low price of $8.

When asked about this potential problem, Elon actually replied "That already happens very frequently".

He has no plans to solve this problem. He accepts it as the cost of doing business. He sees no problem with this. There's nothing to solve.

I think I saw somewhere where he commented that Twitter wouldn't be able to survive on advertisers alone. Well that's because advertisers are likely to flee.

Forget about the idea of it becoming a "free speech" hellscape. It's going to become a scammer's paradise.

His lackadaisical attitude shows he really doesn't care about making Twitter better. It's now an expensive toy that he owns. And that's how it always was going to be.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#713

Post by jdlshore »

elicash wrote: post #665
jdlshore wrote: post #569

I'm likely to pay for it at that price. For reference, I have a bit more than 14K followers on Twitter. Why? Two reasons. 1) Funding social media through advertising has led to dysfunctional outcomes like outrage being more visible than high-quality content. I’m in favor of alternative revenue streams, although they have to provide value, and removing ads doesn't count as providing value. 2) My Twitter account is par…

> Funding social media through advertising has led to dysfunctional outcomes > Eight dollars a month isn't much to pay if it improves my visibility What you're describing in that second quote is advertising. You are paying for additional reach, in this case you'd get those additional impressions via "priority" in replies, mentions & search. What they've done is dressed up advertising as a membership feature because i…

Although you’re technically correct, I think there’s a qualitative difference here. Traditional advertising is priced on number of impressions. As a result, publishers are incentivized to juice engagement numbers. Practically speaking, that means outrage-generating content and similar garbage.

This sort of “advertising” is a class system, with one class of users getting some sort of visibility bump over a second class of users. The incentives are aligned with making sure the verified content is perceived to be high quality, so that being verified is a status symbol.

You could argue that a system with literal second-class citizens is worse than the current one, and you might be right, but I’m interested to see how it turns out. Nothing is perfect—everything has tradeoffs—and the current engagement-driven approach is a dumpster fire.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#716

Post by parineum »

Fomite wrote: post #486
slg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>making verification only about ID and being a real person is a broadly good change Where does he say there will be any verification around ID? Twitter needs to make sure that I can't just name my account @WhiteHouseCommunications and pay $8 to get a blue checkmark. The whole point of the blue checkmark was to personally review those accounts to make sure they are who they say they are. Is Twitter still going to put…

This. The conflating of an authentically derived status ("This person is real") with a paid form of status both defeats the purpose of the first, and is somewhat telling about a particular mindset.

I don't think that's the goal. I think the goal is to reasonably be able to know a checkmark isn't a bot.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#717

Post by dorkwood »

dan-robertson wrote: post #285

The dynamics on Twitter are quite weird. There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life. If you’re a journalist, being on Twitter is basically part of your job so maybe you should have to pay a bit more just like the customer of some business software ($100 pa seems pretty cheap there). Indeed maybe media publications should be paying for…

> If you mostly use it as a social network between your friends you might not care because they’ll presumably see your tweets because they follow you rather than because they found them in search or whatever.

One would think, but I rarely see tweets from people I follow.

For example, I just scrolled my feed, and 51 out of the first 60 tweets were from strangers (the other 9 were either tweets or retweets from people I follow). One of the tweets was even from Taylor Swift. I have no idea why Twitter thought I'd want to see that, since I mostly just follow devs. Downranking people who don't pay the subscription means I'm going to see even less of those devs than I already am.

If you scroll back through my post history, you'll see me singing Twitter's praises and telling people that they just need to curate their feed if they don't like what they're seeing. This is no longer the case. I admit defeat.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#719

Post by harry8 »

dmak wrote: post #708
harry8 wrote: post #616

Twitter now blocks you from reading a timeline unless you have an account and are logged in for which they require a current phone number. No politician nor public servant nor government department should be able to use it under those circumstances. They really need silent accounts, that cannot tweet and are completely anonymous.

You can create an account with just your email

That might be true in some countries.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#720

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

hello639 wrote: post #706
thepasswordis wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Elon is the PM from hell. And yet his companies are some of the most difficult to get a job at. Interesting.

> And yet his companies are some of the most difficult to get a job at. Interesting. It’s more difficult to get a tech job at FBI/CIA than Google. Does that make the US government a more desirable place to work? As an aside, top talent definitely does NOT work at Elon’s companies. Top talent knows that “a good company mission” does not pay for rent, mortgage, or daycare.

> As an aside, top talent definitely does NOT work at Elon’s companies.

This is just not true. There's tons of exceptional engineers working at various of Elon's companies. Would you really claim that SpaceX doesn't have world-class engineers?

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