Twitter is planning to start charging $20 per month for verification
theverge.com
theverge.com
The stress of all this will have an additive effect, and make a salary cut more bearable if they have to change jobs.
Instagram has about 20,000 employees. Twitter has about 7,500. How many of those can it lose before advertisers start leaving in droves? At that point, whatever monetisation strategy Musk comes up with will be too little too late.
Plus, interviewing takes engineering time, since you need existing engineers to conduct those interviews. Engineers who are being asked to "show their work" won't want to take time away to interview their replacements.
But that's just your anecdote and has no actual affect on the time necessary to hire new software developers.
And the time it takes to hire has always been there; it isn't anything novel and certainly isn't stopping anybody from applying/hiring.
A "big valley tech" company? No. A big company? Yes. But you didn't explain why that mattered.
Many people will peace out if their job makes them feel stressed and insecure. They have options and remote work makes it even easier to both interview (on Twitter's time) and switch to a new job (the world is your oyster and job changing friction is minimal).
> and those that leave will be replaced immediately.
Twitter is gonna have a hard time differentiating itself as a job now. Why work for Elon who treats people like this? Maybe that one somewhat niche political/ideological faction in software will be more likely. Lifestyle devs (most of them)? Nah - there's 10 chiller options out there.
I don't think there's enough true believers out there to sustain even normal dev turnover of 1-3y. Maybe Elon will have to pay even more money on salaries to stand a chance. Or he'll give up since he seems a little Dunning-Kruger on this venture as SV CEO.
The companies rely on engineers on staff to keep the lights on. And crucially, they have 1000 other options who will pay as well without any relocation - unlike a specialist in rocket science or other hard engineering.
If the indication is true that Twitter is carrying a lot of deadweight, then Elon's purge is going to make Twitter a very lean and profitable tech company, not unlike Netflix.
If I was working at Twitter and Elon strolled in and said "Ship this (non-emergency fix) in one week or you're fired", I'd tender my resignation immediately. First, it's ridiculous. Second, we already know he wants to get rid of 1/3 to 2/3rds of the company, so there's no guarantee if you pull 80-hr weeks, weekend all-nighters, that you won't get fired anyway. And honestly, a CEO expecting people to regularly pull crazy hours like that is a red flag.
> told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of
> November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired
Changing the subscription price is presumably technically doable on short notice. But merging it with expanded verification for any and all who want it? Is that a one-week sprint to develop, test, and put in production?
Payment connects you to a payment identity.
Ban payment identities that fraudulently pretend to be someone else on their name and profile.
Twitter's blue checkmark is more "this person is notable", which is a different thing and maybe valuable, although I think makes the blue checkmark probably a constant source of frustration for twitter.
This almost certainly involves a massive streamlining (and reduction in rigor) of verification. Most identification verification processes online don’t take thousands of dollars of time, and the whole point is to take “verification” from a thing for a very narrow elite to a thing for a (Musk hopes) very wide paying audience. Musk has been clear since very early that he wants to convert Twitter to a mostly-paid social network by merging Blue and verification, making the former more attractive to support a higher price and the latter far more widespread.
Absolutely. But if anyone who pays $20/month can get a blue checkmark, it is no longer the status symbol you describe and its appeal totally disappears.
>The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users
Sure sounds like they’re planning on giving blue checks to anyone willing to pay. It wouldn’t make financial sense otherwise; there are currently only around 300k verified users, so this would only generate a maximum of $6M/month in revenue.
Not really great for the strategy of charging for it, if they think that the blue checkmark is going to be a valuable part of charging for Twitter. The second it's available to the general public, it loses 99% of its value and doesn't really do anything to serve it's purpose of making Twitter Blue / paid twitter more attractive.
I liked it was it was people, pretty anomalous Tweeting. That was an exciting time.
"Employees tasked with executing projects of Musk’s since he took control Thursday evening have been working late into the night and over the weekend."
Twitter is not a healthy product or work culture from what I can gather; and large changes in personnel, or the demise of companies, are the only ways we know to genuinely change lousy cultures at companies. Just sending a memo doesn't do it. The economy as a whole is harsh; not always as sudden, but often still more harsh. That's because killing companies is the only reliable way we have of changing company culture. It's capitalism's secret sauce.
FSD is barely alpha-level software. It's silly to even call it beta at this point. Oh and $15k for it? Don't waste your money.
Twitter wedged under a sideways parked semi trailer in 3.. 2..
it's the story of our time
or not - you're just some guy (like him)
so weird how engineers think some people are significant.
i don't and never have
Musk hasn't built shit, he just uses his diamond mine money to invest in people who do the work for him, he exploits people, nothing more.
Well I hope the meme that elon is some kind of benevolent and inspiring leader is truly dead and buried.
"Blatantly left leaning" is a joke. My trans friends wouldn't receive constant drive by harassment if that were the case.
If I worked at Twitter, I'd be trying to organize a union.
First demand: No one gets fired when Musk takes one too many bong hits.
Second demand: 99% of profits go to employee bonuses moving forward + 3x salary cap for execs.
Third demand: Employees get to vote on the new "diverse viewpoints" censorship board membership.
Actually, given what we've seen with Tesla, it will come with a host of promised benefits, which will be delivered over a randomish period of time, but which you will pay for as if they existed all along.
It’s a dick move by it is also an excellent way to filter out employees who have any semblance of work life balance or don’t think that Musk shits diamonds.
>The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge.
Like payment stuff and subscriptions is a nightmare when you have to deal with legal issues across the world. This is without going into needing to actually scope out the work, figure out how to integrate the changes safely, test them, roll them out and more. Plus it's disruptive to whatever work engineers were already doing to suddenly tell them 'do this thing NOW or you're fired'.
I really start to wonder how many people have actually worked as professional engineers.
The executive sponsor and their focus groups, product managers and their review committees, finance and their budgetary approvals, HR and their headcount approvals, the project managers and their technical working groups and sizing estimates, dev, UX, legal, test, deployment, DEI, customer advocacy, competitive analysis, etc all have to have representatives to develop a plan and sign off on it, meetings have to be scheduled, documents have to be created, approvals have to be stamped.
If you've ever worked in a true bureaucratic hellhole, you can understand how a few engineer-weeks turns into a 3 year 20 million dollar that can't be killed because too many "important" people would get egg on their face so it eventually gets rolled out, promotions and handshakes all around, and then it gets scrapped 2 weeks later because it is so terrible and nobody speaks of it again.
It's not about doable or not, it's about employee leadership.
I doubt that threats like these lead to high quality code.
Is this really a priority for the lower income countries out there?
Journalists from lower income countries, for instance, are still journalists, but they don't usually make enough money to pay $240 per year to justify keeping that badge. You may not think it necessary. That's fine.
Side question, but real question -- how do stock grants in a non-publicly traded company work, who can you sell them to how to turn them into monetary value?
New grants/options/whatever are at the whims of the company.
>Would you consider paying $20 monthly to get or retain a blue check?
Twitter seems to think they are the bee's knees. The mainstream press is already building the narrative that twitter is now rightwing because of Elon, and building a twitter competitor is not hard.
If he's going for creating the Internet's kitchen sink app.. that sounds exciting!
- Let me use Twitter to pay for parking in every city (right now I have to download tons of apps)
- Let me use it pay for other similar business transactions where there are of tons of apps you have to download to do X (paying for medical bills ...ugh so many portals)
- We need an Internet / public verification reputation system (not sure about paying $20 a month) as deepfakes are only going to get easier to use and more pervasive.
From my own experiment with twitter, verified account were mostly real human. And I don’t care much about them. As individuals they are sensitive to human connection and relationship.
The real issue here is the millions of fake account, managed by only a few human, adopting an aggressive herd behaviour: - coordinated mass harassment - coordinated mass report - coordinated mass insulting - coordinated mass influence - coordinated mass retweet/like to cheat those indicator of social credibility.
The c19 Covid was a very good time to observe such phenomenon.
As a French and having sympathy to Dr Raoult, for being at the first line of diagnostic and treatment, I had to fight with thousand of such accounts, acting in a temporal and geographical coordination on those specific topic to build ressent, create confusion, and discredit the communication of the official account of Dr Raoult.
Those account were always pretty similar in their twitter history, before becoming the finest of finest of epidemiology specialists, they were tweeting mostly: - soccer game, with affiliate link to bet website - computer gaming relaying mostly affiliate link to some online lottery to win a brand new graphical card from famous website.
Those two elements were 99% of their original content, often less than 100 tweets on the course of several years. But their “reply” content started to be active at the beginning of the epidemic and since then represented 100% of their activities.
Similar profile picture, similar wording in bio, What was funny is that in the following months I identified others subgroups of twitter bots With different history of “influence attempts”.
For instance it is well known that our president Macron online strategy was heavily based on Telegram top-down communication and order passing.
In political meeting, all the supportive crowd was connected to telegram chat room and were asked to join them before the event to coordinate crowd reaction during the meeting.
Once those groups were built, the online herd activity started with the apparition in the months before election of numerous similar accounts on twitter, all reacting to online twitter content about Macron, in same way with similar phrasing if not identical phrasing.
Lately I demonstrated with twitter search function, this behaviour by identifying almost 20 accounts exactly twitting the identical same phrase in reaction of a journalist about to release big news about Eric Zemmour.
So basically, the fake account and bot aren’t on the side of “verified account”, but only on the side of individuals, collective, lobbyist farming millions of fake account and either for money, or ideological passion they misbehave and manipulate the opinion of the tweeter crowd for specific purpose.
For instance and for those who can understand the reference, twitter is the perpetual modern replay of The most known form of injustice and crowd manipulation: the judgement of Jesus Of Nazareth by Ponce Pilate. Many fails to understand the this judgement was the birth of civilisation, as far as Christian civilisation is deeply tied to notion of justice and fighting against the essence of tribalism, double standard, and crowd justice from mass hysteria.
From this point of view twitter is the most powerfull weapon against civilisation as the biggest destroyer of Justice, and the biggest agitator of crowd.
To conclude, how this measure will fight against state level influence on twitter such as the well known Hasbara tactics with civilian/military hybridation for supporting Israel, and it’s online perception worldwide.
For instance, creating fake account, acting in coordination to support Israel politics, especially about Palestinian to reshape positively the feelings toward Israel is mandatory to obtain official degree in isrealian university, and supervised by Israeli military structure.
Addendum: the biggest move Elon Musk could do, and also the easiest to performs: remove ignore/block button and all block lists associated to any account. This also will have the advantage to spare a few MB of data on twitter DB, and diminished the load to filter the content of each account filtering their social feed.
I've been a heavy user X 15 years and I'm still not a blue check. I perceive no benefit in being verified and I doubt being verified would have/will change my experience as a user.
If they verified me for FREE I wouldn't care. $20/month to be verified on a site controlled by a maniac in the process of making the product unusable? No way.
After 3 days of Musk's ownership I'm already half-way out. As soon as these paid options are rolled out I will gladly be gone from the platform forever.
Tribel looks like another option that many people have been talking about.
Lately, I've been spending more time on Reddit.
Another option is to replacement Twitter with ... nothing.
Food for thought.
Twitter has built an incredibly resilient and scalable real-time message delivery over all IPN, email, and cell endpoints the world has to offer, and world class search, data, and ad stack. It used to make news when Twitter when down. It still does, and it set a record in July of being down for 45 mins. It doesn’t break at 1 billion messages/day. I forgot what the fail whale looks like.
If Bluesky the protocol rocks but the open source hosting sucks, Bluesky the business will do great. I’m sure their team can build a magnificent stack. I worry the business will be greedy, but the protocol will be widely adopted and centrally governed.
From their site https://atproto.com/:
Federated social
Connect with anyone on any service that's using the AT Protocol.
Algorithmic choice
Control how you see the world through an open market of algorithms.
Portable accounts
Change hosts without losing your content, your follows, or your identity
Twitter is crippled with debt and bursting with defectors. Bluesky or anyone else who wants to win the future needs to handle mass migration, user engagement, scaling issues, support, and needs to be able to do so quickly.
I love the idea of a marketplace for algorithms, and I think there will be a new class of moderation filters as a service. Perhaps there is a community baseline, and tools to make your own, but mostly people will pay to eliminate noise and curate their experience.
What makes you say that?
Maybe if I were a brand? But... idk. I guess our company account could get verified, not sure I'd bother.
For very large companies it seems like it's in Twitter's interest to have them verified, less so for the company. ex: fake "Coinbase" accounts are all over Twitter telling you to send them a dm to reset their account or whatever, it's in Twitter's interest to reduce that content on their platform. Making it harder to differentiate "real Coinbase" vs "fake Coinbase" seems like it will only increase their problems.
Similarly, everything I have seen from Musk so far has made me consider alternatives. In fact I wonder if the time for Twitter has passed for me. It was excellent for growing my career initially but at this point I'm more likely to network elsewhere, more likely to ask for tech help elsewhere, etc.
It was so journalists and celebrities and such could be identified and you could tell if you were intersecting with the genuine article or a fake account impersonating them.
90 days to sign up before people lose their check mark. So 90 days until the clones come out.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with the MASSIVE amount of debt Twitter is now in and desperately needing money. Or getting back at all the journalists (a huge chunk of verified users) who Musk seems to hate.
3 days. It took 3 days to make a colossally stupid official policy change.
Also? Who comes up with a feature and gives the programmers a very short deadline with a threat to fire them if they can’t make it? That’s horribly cruel.
Oh right. Musk.
The irony is that even if every current Verified user paid in, it'd still not do much for Twitter's debt.
He may slow it down a bit. He could easily accelerate it. Companies that far in debt just don’t survive.
This has to be a pretext to turn a layoff into a firing with cause, right? 7 days is absolutely ridiculous for something like this, even though they already have some (most?) of the plumbing laid via Twitter Blue.
Also, tomorrow is a non-governmental holiday in the US -- Halloween. I'd imagine quite a few employees with kids are taking time off, so this is also begging for a discrimination lawsuit -- CA law bars discrimination based on an employee's role as a caregiver of a child.
It wasn’t, but it is now.
> Also? Who comes up with a feature and gives the programmers a very short deadline with a threat to fire them if they can’t make it?
Someone who wants to do layoffs, but characterize them as firings for failure to meet performance expectations.
Can you point me to the official policy?
Because last I checked, official policy wasn’t determined by media outlets quoting anonymous sources with knowledge of the situation, who may or may not have their own axes to grind.
That says a lot about those Twitter users.
For example: someone will be a lot more concerned about crime if they’re getting steady messaging reinforcing the message that crime is out of control.
I still remember a Google interviewer where the guy jumped from being almost BDSMlike in the attention to detail he paid to my CV after I explained the CIA triad, then jumped to getting ornery when I pointed out my mind is weirdly visual, and I can remember the textbook - the very next page had a paragraph on nonrepudiation.
(That means we're getting out of this cycle of treating ambiguities during my resumé gap as chances for fishing expeditions -- I'm spending Halloween wandering around Appalachia in a Bernie shirt thanking people for putting their dogshit into a little bag.)
Rather than be at all deferential I should have said something to the effect of "You control the email service I registered as a child, it begins to make you people look like full on pedophiles if you keep someone this smart economically precarious long enough, stop being cute in these if you don't want civil unrest."
(I got kicked off Twitter for being too... partisan. I thought I made it clear -- call whoever you want? Just don't get mad if folks tell you "Oh, we knew about that. They sell mace at the sporting goods store. You were warned your ideas suck LOLbertarian."
not a chance.. if they billed me a few cents per tweet maybe (if they threw in no adverts).
Pretty much sums up the usefulness of your comment.
I would also find this extremely invigorating from the software developer side. I've worked on products at Microsoft and Amazon that have literally gone years between releases and seen so many features endlessly delayed by needless discussion and planning. I would love to get the assignment "ship this in a week or you're fired." It's not like we're splitting the atom here, Twitter Blue, a paid for thing, already exists and the verification badge already exists. If you are a Twitter developer who can't hammer this square peg into that round hole in a week...