Hm. One interpretation of the scant details is that springing for the more expensive membership will automatically get you verified. It doesn’t necessarily mean that famous people will have to pay to earn or maintain their checks.
Either way, I agree it’s stupid. The check is a status symbol. Letting anybody pay for it will dilute their brand.
Most likely outcome is two levels of verification. The kind anybody can pay for, and the kind given out case by case.
Elon’s new best friend Catturd accuses him of caving to the leftist mob for deleting his Pelosi conspiracy tweet.
I don’t know how much revenue this would generate, but I don’t think it is a terrible idea – especially since it seems likely there would be two levels of verified as @Johnny_Bravo suggested. It’s just another business expense.
I like it better than squeezing more ads in. Twitter is a marketing platform; it seems reasonable that the companies that want to market should pay instead of the customers.
I agree this is dumb. I don’t tweet much, but I do follow a lot of accounts, most with the blue check. If it becomes hard to tell who is real, or, even worse, those major accounts quit the platform entirely, the value goes down precipitously.
I suspect there is more to this than we know. Jack Dorsey is close friends with Musk. He talked to him extensively before, during and after the Twitter purchase.
More importantly, It turns out he was one of Musk’s investors in Twitter. Why would he do that while rolling out his own social media app?
I suspect Musk and Dorsey have a plan, and it involves Twitter being a major player in Bluesky. I think Jack and Elon may have cooked up a plan together.
I’ve looked through the technical docs of Bluesky. It’s not a Twitter competitor - rather, it’s a federated data model and API for connecting up multiple social media services. It looks very cool. It would also be impossible to censor, as the actual data is spread across many databases, user accounts can migrate from one to the other without permission of the original home of the account, algorithms and filters are pluggable and no one controls them.
For the technically inclined, here’s the protocol overview:
It looks to me like even message boards like the SDMB could be integrated, if Discourse decides to implement the API. This could be interesting,
Bluesky was started at Twitter.
So do you have more backstory on that? Was this something Dorsey championed but was overridden? Given that he has ownership of it, he must have negotiated that when he left Twitter.
In any event, the fact that Dorsey is involved in Twitter again suggests Bluesky may be part of the plan.
Bluesky is an independent Public Benefit LLC (PBLLC) that is funded by Twitter for $13M as of this April. Dorsey is on the board, but not the CEO. Twitter might continue to fund it if they can mine value from the protocol (like the speech/reach concept).
Beyond that it seems like the goals of the open AT protocol and Twitter the company are at odds – at least in a traditional business model. Usually the dominant company doesn’t want to adopt open standards. But maybe there is a non-traditional strategy like offloading problematic users to another network while still getting to promote them in your app.
Still it seems like it would be technically easier to split into communities with individual standards like Reddit did with subreddits.
Said another way: Bluesky is One Firehose to Rule Them All.
Or more precisely given Musk’s evident intent, one firehose to douse them all with infinite unstoppable propaganda BS.
No, it is an unimaginably stupid idea. Just ask Mr King:
I would like to note that when you look at the financials of the major tech companies like Google, FB, and Twitter, about 85% of their revenues are still ad sales.
Credit where it’s due, “how about $8?” was pretty funny.
King’s got a point. Knowing you have a feed from the real Stephen King or for that matter from the real Donald Trump is an asset FOR Twitter. They are the content creators and they were well off celebrities before there was a Twitter.
He absolutely does, and Musk’s response indicates that my guess upthread was wrong.
I can see the point that $20/mo would defeat many of the amateur trolls. But would be a minor incremental expense for the propaganda-mongers who run botnets and have lots of human trolls in their employ.
If I’m the Russian or Chinese ministry of Anti-Western Propaganda, spending an extra $20/mo/bot times my army of 50K bots = 1 meeellion dollars permonth. IOW, chicken feed on the budget of a hostile government. Hell, Murdoch or Koch would likewise consider spending $1M/mo to be a bargain to ensure they could spew at will on Twitter.
Assuming of course the audience stays there to be spewed at.
It’s just a variation on pay to play: Musk thinks he’s gotten a stranglehold on a key info conduit to the masses and now he wants to jack the price. Standard monopolist behavior.
Considering advertisers are still the main source of revenue, (rhetorically, because clearly there isn’t one) what is the plan when folks decide they don’t want to pay $20, the user base shrinks and/or disperse, and advertisers decide they don’t want to pay Twitter (or pay them as much) to reach a smaller, inferior audience?
Seems like Musk’s assumption is there won’t be a hit in ad revenue as a result (or one that is smaller than the increase in revenue from fees), which should be driving his finance people nuts. It’d be hard to guess if there’d be even one nano-second before competitors advertise as ‘fee free’ and take free pot shots.
Anyone who has been here @ the SDMB long enough knows what a disaster pay to post was. This Board never recovered.
And that is effectively what Elon has done/is doing/will do to the very people who attract the mass Twitter user base which already exists.
No, he’s not. Not so long as you can still post without a blue check. That’s what the vast majorith of Twitter users do now.
The blue checkmark was originally supposed to just be a verification thing. But because you can’t verify millions of people, it was applied to high status individuals only, and thus became a status symbol instead of just a verification of identity.
The reason people like King won’t like the $20 dollar thing isn’t financial, it’s because they lose the ‘special’ status that comes with a blue check. If anyone can get a blue check for $20, it’s no longer a special class status symbol. I think that’s part of Elon’s intent.
Whether any of this will work is an open question.
Sam, you’re as wrong as you can be. The verification process is to prevent people from faking being Stephen King while allowing the real Stephen King to speak in his own voice.
Now, I get to snipe on an up-and-coming performer, by buying a verification in their name.
Verification is a disinformation preventer, which is exactly why Elon Musk is working his team to exhaustion in destroying it… or get fired trying. If we had such a system here at the straight dope message board, we possibly might not have driven off Neil DeGrasse Tyson when he registered here.
Charging a man… one who makes 50 million dollars a year to write… $20 a month so he can create content in his own name on your platform is not just a stupid business practice, it is insultingly stupid.
If this was a serious legitimate business practice, he would be charging Stephen King $2000 a month, not $20. Pricing would be based on # of followers. It would still be a dumb idea destined to fail, but at least you could argue that… if you think checkmarks are just ‘clout’… the more clout you have, the more Twitter is worth for you, the more you need to pay Twitter.
This is designed to drive actual users away. No doubt about it.