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Twitter Blue for $8/Month

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Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#771
post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT ... > Almost all made famous by YouTube. I looked the top 50 in that list and maybe ~5 of them are what you describe. The rest are big music labels, TV channels, artists and other such independently popular figures, not very different from Twitter.

Unclear why this is getting downvoted, it is accurate statement. Only 20 of the top 50 channels are not brands. Of those 20 if you exclude music channels like BTS, Blackpink, Justin Bieber, etc. you're only left with 10 channels.

Wait, didn’t Justin Bieber get his start on YouTube?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#772
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some better takes on this from what I've seen: https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/1587381512500125699 > If one in five current blue ticks paid $20 a month that would raise just under $15 million a year for Twitter…Twitter’s current revenues (mostly from ads) are $5 billion a year. Musk’s apparent plan would generate about 30 hours’ worth of annual revenue. https://twitter.com/ashtonpittman/status/158750920240192716…

not that i think this is some brilliant revenue strategy but it does not strike me as a good take to automatically assume that the current blue check mark base is a strict superset of who will pay $8/month

He's really gotten in over his head on this one.

https://twitter.com/CMacCaba/status/1585914462951047168

> Musk has dumped $13bn of debt onto Twitter's company account, increasing the interest repayments from $51m to $1bn a year. Its entire gross income is c. $700m a year. Its net income is negative & it doesn't receive gov. subsidies that kept similarly loss-making Telsa alive

A longer thread informative thread here too: https://twitter.com/aidanpobrien/status/1587450510549852160

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

No. His last major film, from 2019, had the second-highest opening weekend of any horror film in history. His work might not be relevant to you (it's not especially relevant to me), but we're back in motivated unreality when we start talking about him being culturally irrelevant, or that "nobody knows he's still alive".

Are you referring to the second It movie? That was based on a book from 1986. Nearly 40 years ago.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#774
post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except of the social networks I browse, stephenking.com is not one of them. So really no I wouldn't hear of him. I'm sure his die hard fans will though.

> So really no I wouldn't hear of him I guess if you never step foot into a library, bookstore, movie theatre, etc. Sure. King does not sell books because of his presence on a social network. He sold 350 million copies of his books before Twitter was even invented. "die hard fans" the only ones to hear of King? Big lol.

He wrote his best works before most of his readers were online at all.

He’s highly culturally relevant, but not because of anything he’s done lately.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#776
post #322

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…

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…

>f you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value.

Maybe I'm an outlier but of my hundreds of follows ~1% have checkmark. The bulk of my followers are artists, photographers, niche bloggers, subculture news aggregators which are all creating content.

The verified checkmark is basically a non-entity to my time on twitter, maybe it's different if you mainly follow more mainstream western pop culture and political/news media.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Twitter may lose one Stephen King, but presumably now anybody with the same name can get the blue check. All those $8 per month will add up.

So Twitter's monetization system is basically going to work the same way domains do with squatters?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#778

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…

I went into twitter hoping to find more of the SWE community. I took the approach that when you're posting it's you to everyone. I went to a few conferences and made a few connections. But often times it thins out, and you really don't maintain that connection there.

It ended up feeling like it was nothing but tribes and influencers bolstering themselves or people trying to market their product (dev advocates). Theres no motivation to have productive conversations, learn new things, or really get a lot of value out of it. On top of that you have extremists trying to make sure you don't the wrong opinion.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#779
post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT ... > Almost all made famous by YouTube. I looked the top 50 in that list and maybe ~5 of them are what you describe. The rest are big music labels, TV channels, artists and other such independently popular figures, not very different from Twitter.

Unclear why this is getting downvoted, it is accurate statement. Only 20 of the top 50 channels are not brands. Of those 20 if you exclude music channels like BTS, Blackpink, Justin Bieber, etc. you're only left with 10 channels.

I think the point still stands. 6 of the top 10 on Youtube got their large followings being making content for Youtube. 0% of the top 50 on Twitter are primarily known for their tweets.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#780

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?"

https://twitter.com/daniel_loxton/status/1586846370753032192...
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