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Twitter Blue for $8/Month

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Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#831

Post by dwaite »

robryan wrote: post #461
enumjorge wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke, but after reading some texts from Musk and his social circle [1], I find it plausible that that is how some of these business decisions get made. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...

This is probably fine though, it is the Elon way of doing business. Make fast decisions and try and whole heap of things. He then gets criticised for not delivering on the majority of them but still comes out ahead of orgs that take 6 months to make the decision in the first place.

> He then gets criticised for not delivering on the majority of them

He gets criticized for promising them, even selling them like in the case of vehicle autonomy, when there is no realistic timeline for delivery.

I mean, at least when Microsoft pitched vaporware on stage they didn't then take the money in advance.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#832

Post by watwut »

costcofries wrote: post #652
watwut wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Basically, who will loose are topical experts who tweeted about what they knew well about. Layers tweeting about law, developers tweeting about frameworks, academics tweeting about crypto, viruses, history. These wont pay and will be less visible. Who will pay will be grifters and ideologues.

These topical experts as you put it, make more than $8/month today from their engaged audiences. What Twitter should do is build better engagement tools for them and then monetize that at much more than $8/month. You think Stephen King, who is worth $500m, is going to drop Twitter for $96/year. That tweet itself was him doing a good job of using that platform (twitter) and his audience to get some free exposure.

Lol, no they don't. They are not rich and they live on fixed or unrelated salaries.

Stephen King is not subject matter expert. He is popular writer. He is also quite atypical in that he is so popular, then he really don't end twitter engagement all that much. I don't know whether he will ultimately pay, but he actually don't have to.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#833

Post by oblio »

rcarr wrote: post #617
colinmhayes wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really just think that this would mean people don't use the service. The internet has shown again and again that people will do practically anything to avoid paying for digital goods.

I don't know, I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that if we want to avoid the mess we're in now, we've got to start paying for things. Once you've hit 1 billion users, at that point you've pretty much become an institution. You've never marketed it as being free forever so everyone knows the score so they're more prepared. Sure some people will leave but I think the majority would stay unless ther…

> I don't know, I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that if we want to avoid the mess we're in now, we've got to start paying for things.

Maybe in your tech savvy circles.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#835

Post by oblio »

Loocid wrote: post #684
dgudkov wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of places where you can express your opinion absolutely free of charge. For instance, HN ;)

That's not the point. The publicly stated reason for this whole saga was Elon was claiming Twitter was suppressing free speech and wanted to make it free again. This play goes against all that.

And Musk lied, like he's been lying for decades.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#836

Post by qwertox »

The blue check mark was supposed to be a service for those consuming Twitter, so that they can have a bit more security by knowing that there's a higher chance to be following the person or thing they were intending to follow; it was not a service for those having the blue check mark.

That's why I don't understand why they want to charge for it.

Maybe a better thing would be to charge per-1000-followers (or per-10000 or bigger brackets) starting at a given threshold, as long as the account is used commercially, where being a star or influencer also counts as commercial use. But maybe even this is a bad idea, but in my eyes a bit better than charging for the blue check mark.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#837

Post by dwaite »

awb wrote: post #581
pkaye wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why is he able to get smart people around him? Its not like he pays them a lot or offer a good work/life balance in their job.

What would you rather have on your resume, Tesla or IBM?

Are those seriously my only two choices?

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#838

Post by gorgoiler »

paxys wrote: post #322
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…

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…

I assumed the verification fee serves a different purpose to gathering revenue: the cost to buy influence could go up by an order of magnitude. Economics will neuter the bots.

Everyone working at the IRA.ru troll farm now needs to be issued with (even more) stolen payment credentials and monthly costs go up by $8 per troll account.

Even worse, recruiting useful idiots — unwitting members of the public who are aligned with the troll message and who voluntarily amplify misinformation — is going to get much harder. Now you don’t just need Average Joe to retweet your carefully worded calls-to-action about missing emails or stolen elections. You need him to pay $8 a month too.

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#839

Post by Tomte »

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...

After Elon replied, a user came up with this gem:

"Only on Twitter can we watch a man worth $200 billion negotiate with a man worth $500 million about saving $12 a month"

Re: Twitter Blue for $8/Month

#840

Post by dragonwriter »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #639
peter422 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why YouTube is a platform with value and Twitter isn't.

Some dude just paid $44B for Twitter. Presumably that means it has value.

> Some dude just paid $44B for Twitter. v

Yeah, but that did a hasty negotiation that resulted in a no-due-diligence contract at that figure, tried very hard to escape the deal, including openly repudiating it and being sued to be forced to consummate it, and only relented and agreed to close on it in the face of court action to force him to which might have imposed additional costs as well.

So, while it is probably worth something, we can say that it is pretty clearly not worth $44B in the clear light of day, even to Musk.

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