Musk replying to King that paying for blue checks is the only way to deal with the trolls and bots is … something. Either his definition of trolls and bots is “liberals with blue checks who insult me to my twit”, or he’s planning on some serious restrictions on unverified accounts. Or both.
Or neither. Seems to be some variation of:
- I’m good at this monetization thing and at being on social media and tossing out brilliant ideas off the cuff
- I own Twitter and can post whatever I want
- …
- Profit!
Evidence:
Give him time. He’s clearly floating ideas and seeing the reaction. He’s already dropped the $20 to $8. But if you read that thread, he says he wants to use the money to pay content creators. And one especially good idea: He wants to work with large content providers who have paywalls to allow bluechecks to skirt the paywall when they follow a link - and Twitter will pay the content provider some money for allowing the user past the paywall.
I like this idea, a lot. I find it extremely frustrating to follow links when half of them wind up being behind paywalls. That doesn’t help anyone. But if a blue check gets you access to multiple newspapers and magazines, so long as you are following a link from Twitter, that makes Twitter a real value proposition. And it would encourage people to put their links to content on Twitter.
This should be good for the content providers as well. They get some money from people who wouldn’t otherwise buy a subscription, and if people like the articles they are seeing for free, it might encourage them to buy a subscription.
Paywalls have contributed to polarization. People on the left will never pay for a subscription to say, National Review, and people on the right won’t buy a subscription to The Nation. So both sides stop reading anything the other side has to say, even if they are curious and want to follow a link. Having an aggregator service like Twitter that acts like a paywall bypass for linked articles seems like a good thing for everyone. And it would give Twitter a huge boost over other social media that links you to paywalled articles.
I’m sure there are going to be many other ideas floated in the next few days. Some good, some bad.
Quit ribbing him!
Here’s the thing: For any celebrity, let’s say one named Big Celeb, there will be lots of accounts with that name, for example:
BigCeleb
RealBigCeleb
BigCelebOfficial
BigCelebOriginal
etc.
How do you know which is the real Big Celeb? It’s the one with the blue check, which could be any of the above accounts. If celebrities stop applying for the blue check, for whatever reasons, then it becomes very difficult to tell who you’re reading. And IMHO that destroys the entire value of Twitter. The whole point of Twitter is that when you read or respond to an account with a blue check, it’s the real person. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of random people talking nonsense.
Lol. Again, you and Musk just don’t get it. Let Matt Yglesias explain what is happening here:
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1587572115615670275?t=7n-FYxfTK7PzdhTVEwvlzw&s=19
Twitter will have a one billion dollar interest expense in 2023, to be serviced by net earnings of 600 million dollars. Their cash flow is $400 million deficient. There are not 1.6 million people who will pay $20 a month for this ‘status’.
…there is no way that the maths will ever add up. Just because he said that “he wants to use the money to pay content creators” doesn’t mean that he actually has an actual viable plan to pay content creators out of that money. Because he also said that he needs that money to pay the bills. $8.00 per month per person that wants to get verified just won’t cut it.
Moody’s has downgraded Twitter’s credit rating.
I don’t want to let this pass unremarked. I tip my hat to you, fine fellow.
I’m embarrassed that it took me this long to see it.
Good One Gatopescado.
Wow, that writer at The Verge must be psychic!
your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you
Then why pay the $20?
This only works if number of paywall passes for a given site is sharply limited – otherwise, it’d be cheaper to to use the bypass than to subscribe to the publication. Obviously, no provider is going to agree to cannibalize their subscription base. So, it comes down to the question of how many people are going to pay $8/month for one or two free samples of each of a list of online sources (most of which will be of absolutely no interest to any given subscriber).
If Matt Yglesias says it, it must be true.
I have no idea what plans he has other than what he’s said - and neither do you. Clearly the $8/mo is not Twitter’s only refenue, becuse it’s not even in place yet. It would be additional revenue to advertising and whatever other revenue streams may develop.
Now $8. But the purpose of paying is pretty obvious: If verification was free, millions of peoole would demand it, and it would cost a fortune and be very hard to do. Attaching a little money to it not only pays for the labor to validate, but it makes it impossible for botnets to be validated and it filters out the casual people who really don’t need a blue check but would demand one if it were free. Twitter’s answer to this was to only validate the ‘special’ peoole who have a certain amount of popularity already, and to ignore the average person who doesn’t count as a celebrity. Musk’s way is actually more equitable.
I would have thought the left would be in favor of opening up blue checks to the masses instead of only the ‘elites’.
Also, there is a lot of evidence that people behave better when they have skin in the game. People behave differently on services they pay for than on ones that are free.
This is mostly about control of spammers, foreign botnets and trolls. Musk’s current idea is that blue check comments and posts will go to the top of the queue, so that any spam or trolling that gets through will be located towards the bottom of a comment thread. Whether that works or not, I’m not sure.
All of thismis risky. As I said earlier in the thread, Twitter doesn’t really have the kind of social lock-in that facebook has, and it’s much easier to leave. Musk will have to be careful.
That explains the benefit to Twitter, but the question was why the user would be willing to pay $20, or $8, or two cents.
OK, that makes sense; some people might pay for it if it gives extra privileges. As for effectiveness in blocking trolling, my read is “discouraging bored loudmouths, yes; discouraging organized agent-of-influence troll farms, no”.
My understanding is that it would allow you to bypass the paywall for the linked article only. You’ll still have to subscribe to browse the site. But for twitter blue users who follow links to numerous articles on different paywalled sites, it would be great.
It remains to be seen if Musk can get other media to buy in. I expect Bluesky social may be the implementation mechanism for this kind of thing.
Well, getting past paywalls for linked articles would be valuable. Plus, Twitter Blue has other features, such as the ability to edit tweets and some stat information about followers, likes, etc. Probably more stuff than that is planned.
Even if so, that’s a problem. It’s not like there aren’t other Stephen Kings out there. If you don’t reserve the concept for the actual famous guy, then the verification aspect doesn’t work. And that’s assuming they can at least confirm the name on the card matches the person.
It needs to be selective to work, to let us know who is actually who. That’s the point of the system. If making people pay for the check would work, that would have already been done. Twitter was still a business, after all.
And you can’t democratize anything by charging for it when it used to be free. What he’s doing is just creating a pro tier that gets a little badge. Heck, if you’re paying for it, there’s more reason to not look too closely, lest you lose a lot of money from those with bots who want verification.
Do you think politicians wouldn’t want a bunch of “verified” accounts to follow them and do stuff? And if you get a decent chunk of money from that, in a private company that no one can look at and see what’s happening?
This has corruption written all over it. Don’t tie money to verification status. Tie money to services, not anything outward facing.
…we are watching the planning process happen in real time on Twitter. We saw the price come down from $20 to $8 as it happened. That isn’t how you do market research. That isn’t how you do a business plan.
There are no plans. The people at Twitter have been told the new system has to be ready to go by next week. They are literally flying by the seats of their pants.
I never argued that this is Twitter’s only revenue. You stated that “says he wants to use the money to pay content creators.” It won’t generate enough money on its own to pay “content creators” any significant amount of money and “pay the bills.” And a pledge to pay content creators means nothing without any indication of how that might possibly work. We are talking about the man who challenged Putin to hand-to-hand combat. Said we would be SpaceX launching two cargo ships to Mars in 2022. I take everything he says with a healthy grain of salt.
If it were that simple to develop additional revenue streams somebody would have come up with them a long time ago.
If the intention is to pay content creators, then that is the lede, not a mere footnote. And that ignores the fact that most blue-ticks right now don’t see themselves as “content creators.”
…but what does the media outlet get? The NYT already provides the ability to provide a “guest” link and other places can follow suit if they like. There needs to be a very clear value proposition here in order for media to want to actively participate. And the only real motivation here would be money: and that means that $8.00 per person is starting to look increasingly thin.
I understood the concern to be someone that is not the famous person opening the Twitter account, getting the checkmark, and posting as the person. This is the problem that the current verification process solves.
I agree that if a significant number of the 400k verified accounts leave (or maybe just drop their verification status) that would be a problem for Twitter. This very well might happen, but I don’t think $240/year would be the reason.