Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Blue for $8/Month

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#731

Post by AOsborn »

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.

Anecdotally this isn't true. The only time I have heard anything about Stephen King in the past few years has been in relation to a tweet he has made.

I think this is true for many significant accounts on the platform: I'm not going to read their blog or watch their Youtube video, but I'll probably see someone resharing a tweet they have made, whether on Reddit, HN, a news website etc.

Which is where I see the huge value in Twitter: a mainstream platform designed to present content in bite-sizes, appropriate for discussion or resharing. Twitter is a reach multiplier for many accounts for this reason.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#732

Post by samatman »

arkades wrote: post #445
paxys wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Reminds me of all the people who swear up and down they're moving to Canada or Europe after the latest disappointment in the voting booth.

They never do. Musk may or may not charge his $20, but King will pay it if he does, he's bluffing.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#733

Post by [deleted] »

cvwright wrote: post #653
tptacek wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not really discussing reality if you believe that Stephen King gets status from the blue check rather than it working the other way around. There are people that do (sadly, pathetically) extract status from blue checkmarks, but they're only able to do that because people like Stephen King play ball with this system. The "blue checkmark status" could literally be phrased as "people as high-status as Stephen King…

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#734

Post by teovall »

Waterluvian wrote: post #51
mikkergp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such... odd behavior. For sure Stephen King who has a net worth of $500 million dollars does not mean "the price is too high". If Elon is successful, even I will read the business school case study on it, because it flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems and... well just about everything. The only way this works is if Elon's internal processes are way different from his public persona…

One of the things I admire about Elon (which is saying a lot...) is that for whatever reason, he's ready to bet the farm over and over. Whether he's some genius tactician or an impulsive moron, he just bought Twitter and is poised to drastically alter it. "flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems" indeed! Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day, "y…

It's easy to be impulsive and make risky decisions when those decisions aren't actually risky for you. He's the richest person in the world. Even if he made a terrible decision to "bet the farm" and lost 99.5% of his wealth, he'd still be a billionaire and in the top 0.00005% of net worth in the world.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#735

Post by samatman »

tptacek wrote: post #530
memish wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that someone who is addicted to Twitter and worth $500M would leave because they lose their special Blue Check over $20 is hilarious. He's just butt hurt because the VIP room and symbol is being opened to the proles. Now any schlub with $8 can have the once exclusive symbol.

Anywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience. That's what's so funny about this particular example. There are indeed Twitter celebrities who depend on Twitter for their audience, but King isn't one of them: he's pumping more credibility into Twitter than he's extracting from it, and the platform (and all the Twitter celebrity remora attached to it) depend on people like him to keep doing it. He's right: Twitt…

[flagged]

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#736

Post by FPGAhacker »

dorkwood wrote: post #717
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…

You can make lists of people you want to follow and only see their tweets. I'd never use twitter if it weren't for this option.

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#737

Post by perryizgr8 »

wlonkly wrote: post #721
CivBase wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they should pay me ...why? As someone who doesn't use Twitter, remarks like this have left me very confused. Clearly these people found Twitter valuable before. Does not having the checkmark make it less valuable? Is there an alternative service that provides similar value? The blue checkmark is a service. Now they want money to continue that service. If you don't want it, don't pay for it. Leaving over concerns ab…

I wish I could remember where I saw this to credit (and not paraphrase), but I saw a tweet which said, basically: "Twitter somehow got Stephen King, Taylor Swift and thousands of others to produce content for them for free. And now they want to lose them over $20/month?"

> Twitter somehow got Stephen King, Taylor Swift and thousands of others to produce content for them for free

That's true, but for very small values of "produce content". After all, being rude or posting hot-takes in 140 characters has limited utility outside of your cohort of fans/friends.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#738

Post by rurp »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #720
hello639 wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

A company can employ some world class engineers and still be easier to get a tech job at than the FBI/CIA.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#739

Post by paconbork »

sumeno wrote: post #427
at-fates-hands wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> But other people use Twitter in different ways. Saw a roundtable about this and a film maker said it was really hard when they're about to release a film and someone uses a fake Twitter handle that's close to theirs releases the trailer or footage before they wanted it released. Paying to have a blue check on their account would cut down this type of piracy or release of trailers before the producer wants to. They…

If the barrier to a checkmark is $8 then all the scammers are going to have checkmarks too

If you can't stop the bots, might as well monetize them?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#740

Post by VicFrank »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #737
wlonkly wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could remember where I saw this to credit (and not paraphrase), but I saw a tweet which said, basically: "Twitter somehow got Stephen King, Taylor Swift and thousands of others to produce content for them for free. And now they want to lose them over $20/month?"

> Twitter somehow got Stephen King, Taylor Swift and thousands of others to produce content for them for free That's true, but for very small values of "produce content". After all, being rude or posting hot-takes in 140 characters has limited utility outside of your cohort of fans/friends.

Posting tweets may be lame, but it is also the entire value of Twitter!
Post reply on HN