Twitter Blue for $8/Month
twitter.com
twitter.com
But other people use Twitter in different ways. If you mostly use it as a social network between your friends you might not care because they’ll presumably see your tweets because they follow you rather than because they found them in search or whatever.
If you’re using Twitter as a forum for discussions about some topic of your interest, maybe you’ll end up feeling crowded out in replies by people with the check. But if you’re at risk of being crowded out then maybe Twitter isn’t working so well as a forum. And I think that if eg A follows B and B retweets you, A should see your tweet whether or not you have a check. Maybe that isn’t so true with the non-chronological feed. If people in the community follow you then, depending on the dynamics, your opinions could still be spread via retweet rather than getting lucky in your position in the replies, no?
If you’re some reply guy, maybe your tweets should be downranked but then if you’re serious about it then I guess you’ll pay.
But when I do search for them, it is convenient to see the blue mark to figure out what might be the account I am looking for.
Now imagine the people you follow being deprioritized by the Twitter algorithm in favor of the LinkedIn-influencer types (you know they'll be first in line for the checkmarks)
If this is part of what blue checks were designed to solve, they're solving the wrong problem. Fix search and content quality / spam instead.
In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. A tiny percentage of users are creators while the vast majority are consumers. If 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.
An average user (part of the 99.9%) isn't going to care about any status or badges – they are only there to look at memes.
Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line, and (2) the platform needs them as much as they need platform.
So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.
That’s not entirely true, but for many of the ones that aren’t, blue checks and verification are often very much not in their interests.
And even if they tweet something worthwhile it’s usually followed by 98% garbage replies with “LOL you’re so stupid” so I’m not wasting my time sifting through that trash heap.
It is useful for events with people on the ground to share info - the story of the guy in Pakistan tweeting about helicopters when Bin Laden was killed was pretty amazing to be honest.
But those types of writers tend to die out after the event.
I think it's only Onlyfans that can get away with such a business model.
Arguably also Netflix, Roblox and free-to-play mobile games run on this sort of scheme as well.
> I think it’s only Onlyfans that can get away with such a business model.
OnlyFans is not (by far) the only site that has a business model of “consumers purchase from producers and the site rakes in a share from that”, nor even the only one (again, by far) with that model where what is purchased is digital content.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/25/23423510/spotify-total-s...
There is a very big difference between Twitter and YouTube, and it's obvious once you know it.
Look at the most popular people on twitter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitte...
All celebrities outside of twitter.
Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT...
Almost all made famous by YouTube.
Twitter has no real "content creators", YouTube does.
On twitter he's only at place 5,391 (https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/dril).
MrBeast and PewDiePie are both millionaires ($40M-$100M) thanks to YouTube, and each have 111M followers, that's around 65x @dril.
Can you state exactly what you mean with @dril == 100 * Mister Beast?
Sure he's successful in the real world but having money doesn't make you a celebrity. I wouldn't recognize most of the Forbes list if I passed them in the street. He's actual famous, instead of Wikipedia famous, because of how he's engaged his supporters through Twitter. The chance to interact with him or have him like your meme is the content.
Ah, you say, but Donald Trump was famous before Twitter!
He was, yes. But he wasn't President.
On the contrary there's plenty of room for genuine innovation in this space. For example FB short form videos don't have a dislike button, so I have no way to guide the algorithm, and YouTube reels seems to zero in on some local maximum (in my case, game of thrones and golf videos). There's so much room for improvement in this space.
Unless the US government decides to ban TikTok which is a not so crazy possibility.
While I think that Musk’s plan is going to backfire, it is worth noting that he tries to address this in a narrow respect, in that paid users under the new plan would be able to distribute longer video/audio content with tweets.
> 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.
Great trolling.
What's so special about Justin Bieber that disqualifies him from being counted as someone who became famous on YouTube?
Why limit yourself to the top 50? 0% of all Twitter users are primarily known for their tweets. Tweets are, by design, unsuitable for publishing content. They're useful for advertising content you publish somewhere else.
That's just an example of using Twitter to advertise your other content.
I agree with you that once you have those followers, you can leverage that with other content. But building up your audience mainly needs to happen through other channels.
This is false.
The original comment was a bit miseleading, but you have to admit that there is no equivalent to Pewdiepie on Twitter.
They would still be popular though.
YouTube hasn't even been that popular in South Korea until recently.
I agree with the observation that Twitter is for people who are already famous, especially those made famous by US media. YouTube seems to at least allow for creators to build their own following and more importantly: Make money off their work.
As a recent example, think of Pieter Levels (@levelsio). You think he would've gotten $10k first day sales on his avatar AI project without his Twitter account's reach?
Sponsored Spaces
Ticketed Spaces
Super Follows
Paid Newsletters
Tips
Twitter has made it INCREDIBLY difficult to find these products they've built, the insane thing is that they appear in one app but not others!
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.
As a centralized platform, Twitter creates more value for those who follow than those who broadcast. Because the broadcasters are primarily known for something other than the "content" they create on the platform, they would find their audience anywhere. Followers, on the other hand, can conveniently follow many people on the same platform. Regardless of whether they are interested in global celebrities, local politicians, or professionals in a specific subfield, they can often find those people on Twitter.
Blogs used to be popular among many of the groups you can now find on Twitter. I guess Twitter replaced them, because the short message format forces you to focus on the essentials. Creating a new post is much faster, and you will reach many more people, because reading the post is not a significant time investment.
Twitter is the middle-man.
If you had some opinions on the latest whatever, if no television station felt like interviewing you, you just told it to your friends or whatever like everybody else. No matter how famous you were.
Twitter was born out of the short "status updates" fad at the time, on both Myspace and eventually Facebook.
Those were born out of MSN Messenger and other IM programs at the time that had customizable social profiles of sorts - including an updatable Status that was shown as a subtitle in your contacts' respective friends lists.
I remember the general sentiment of Twitter when it started was that the short character count (120 characters or whatever it started with) was a fun novelty, nothing more. It wasn't seen as a "social network".
Twitter gets its name in part from the saying "A little birdie told me ..." intersected with the fact that your phone twitches (vibrates) when you receive an update. It mimicked the other popular app names at the time that often omitted a vowel, such as 'flickr'. The original site was thus called twttr.com. The whole point was to be short, concise, non-serious communication. "Yo" tried to take this to the extreme several years later and ultimately failed (or pivoted, not sure which).
When Twitter started gaining traction, it was clear that more involved discourse was nearly impossible with the shorter character count, thus the limit was bumped up to what it is now (240 or 280 or something). The initial response was, understandably, negative. People predicted at the time that this would devolve the platform into another battlegrounds for shouting matches and arguing just as Facebook had. In hindsight, they were mostly correct.
Threads were also added to improve cohesion within lengthy conversations, and those features alone are now what form the core of Twitter's major feature set.
It's worth noting that Twitter hasn't changed much, which is pretty widely regarded as a feature in itself and can earn long term retention even with on-the-fence users (see: Steam).
However, this is mostly just my recollection of events.
Absolutely true, but it doesn't PRESENT itself that way. It PURPORTS to be an egalitarian platform. The truth is that the specific way Twitter's network effects work, you simply don't matter unless you're a celeb (either in Hollywood, or in some particular niche) or a journo. Celebrities I can understand. I don't know why Twitter is so bent around journalists, but it is, and it's obvious. To me, it goes back to the insinuation that the platform has been specifically engineered to influence national public opinion, but I suppose it might be just a "lucky" side effect. In any case, just being a random person on the platform can sometimes be pretty frustrating, because all the engagement is eaten up by people with hundreds of thousands of followers.
It’s how I found my tribe and became part of a small specialist community 14 years ago
In my eyes YT is no social network, even though many claim it is.
The comment section, where the discussion and interaction takes place, is like SMS is to WhatsApp, in the sense that it has no surface to enrich dialogue. For example, you can't add images in replies to a comment, comments can't be embedded in websites.
I don't see how they can expand to a multimedia platform, which is what Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are. They're just a video platform and lack everything else which could move it towards a multimedia platform.
I don’t understand the logic. They can be both well known outside of Twitter and create content. Sure, that is not their source of income, but it is harder to monetise a Twitter account, so that’s more or less by design. From the point of view of random people there is not really any functional difference.
But a far larger number of people think they are or aspire to be influencers, and they're going to want the badge too.
“ $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...
Not sure if he cares about the blue checkmark enough to pay, but he is rich enough not to care. His net worth is half a billion.
SK will hem and haw but 6 months from now his team will quietly reinstate the account.
And Musk's answer was to offer $8/m
King wasn't talking about paying anything
Realistically.. is it worth more than 4$ a month? Probably not. Why would you pay 8 for that?
He's just butt hurt because the VIP room and symbol is being opened to the proles. Now any schlub with $8 can have the once exclusive symbol.
$8 makes it cheaper than a Netflix subscription for something that previously exclusive and had no dollar value attached to it. It was literally unbuyable.
Obviously, substitute Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Selena Gomez, and LeBron in as appropriate to your particular interests.
It's a well worn meme to mock people throwing a fit over not getting a checkmark.
When Twitter annoys people like Stephen King, it's exactly backwards.
What's pretty clearly happening in these conversations is that Twitter-believers are conflating blue-check remora users who have no public profile outside of Twitter with actual celebrities. King is right, and Musk knows it: if he's smart, Musk will in fact find ways to kick things back to King, Swift, and LeBron to keep them happy. He needs them, and they don't need him at all.
If you can see mocking in those 3 sentences then I can metaphorically see you popping up and down on elons lap.
$44 billion seem to be the going rate.
He's right: Twitter should be paying him. That's not true of all blue-checks, but it's true of many of the most popular of them.
How you know this is, there's a huge population of well-followed Twitter accounts without blue checks, and identity verification controversies virtually never occur. If you found a non-checked 50k-follower account tomorrow and tried to spoof them with a fake account, you'd get shouted down quickly enough that it wouldn't be worth the effort.
My point, again, is that the "verification" part of this is horseshit. It's not the value. It's not why anyone cares about the checks. The checks are endorsements of popularity and importance, and that's all they are.
Diluting that value (to zero, as seems to be the Twitter Blue plan) probably won't chase many celebs off the platform. Why would they care? Twitter isn't doing them any real favors; it's rather the opposite. But it'll lay bare the real dynamics of those stupid blue checkmarks. That might be a positive development for Twitter! But it's not going to make blue checks the next Bored Apes.
(Again: who knows? Maybe a critical mass of Twitter randos will pay for Twitter bling. Weirder things have happened; see apes, above.)
That it has also taken on a status aspect does not take away from its original intent and ongoing usefulness as a verification mechanism. That's especially true for celebrities, politicians, organisations, and journalists.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/facing-lawsuits-and-compla...
The other group are those who have decent followings who have wanted a blue check and have used the imposters argument as a reason for deserving one to protect their followers. In reality it’s a thinly veiled attempt to get what they believe is a symbol conferring status.
The whole thing is pretty pathetic and funny to watch and reminds me of the sneetches.
Is that really true? Suppose King goes to a new social platform. Sure, I might install that app, but without a critical mass or others on that platform, what are the chances I actually check that app frequently?
This whole discussion about King's relevance is super weird. I think it's just Internet poisoning (it happens to all of us). The fact is: Stephen King is probably more culturally relevant than Twitter. That a lot of people on this thread wouldn't even entertain this thought is a cognitive bias that comes from being very online. Most people aren't very online, and even among the very online, Twitter's relevance has been waning for many years.
Most people don't use Twitter at all! But it's actually possible that a significant fraction of the American public --- maybe even most of it! --- has seen or is deeply familiar with a Stephen King film. The #1 film in the IMDB Top 250 is a Stephen King film!
I simultaneously don't think I personally know a single person that uses Twitter regularly and yet I equally don't think I know a single person that doesn't know what it is and sees second hand content from it regularly.
I’m a middle aged tech dude and I see more tik tok content! And I don’t have any tik tok presence.
I think it’s really easy to over-estimate twitters impact. I virtually never see anything from it.
I don’t know a single person in real life who uses the site at all.
I think this is true for many significant accounts on the platform: I'm not going to read their blog or watch their Youtube video, but I'll probably see someone resharing a tweet they have made, whether on Reddit, HN, a news website etc.
Which is where I see the huge value in Twitter: a mainstream platform designed to present content in bite-sizes, appropriate for discussion or resharing. Twitter is a reach multiplier for many accounts for this reason.
So even if there were significant amount of people like you, he is not gaining anything from people seeing his Twitter. On the other hand, I have relatives who created Twitter accounts only to follow authors they like - the number of curated lists of notable literary figures is a testament to that fact.
I'm not saying Twitter is worthless to writers - readers talking about the books certainly helps sales, but that occurs regardless of whether the author themselves are on Twitter or not, and Twitter is certainly not the main platform people use to discuss books.
Trump will have people listen to him no matter where he’s writing, but one of these platforms is certainly a downgrade in terms of audience than the other.
And as a consequence, it is not worth the $8. King's analysis is correct.
Stephen King will quit Twitter just as credibly as Jay-z “retired” from rapping.... like Elon Musk gives a shit about convincing a person worth $500M+ that $20 vs $8/m is too much to ask.
Musk hasn't addressed how he will compensate or at least incentive creators yet. Having a mainline stream of subscriptions certainly provides more avenues for such a thing.
So personally I think the compensation or promotional quid pro quo deals are a very different animal than checkmarks. Unless it means multiple tiers of checkmarks.
Assuming a 100% conversion rate and that number is accurate, 3.2 million a month or $38 a million a year.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/31/elon-musk...
Just the notoriety of convincing Steven king to pay for a blue checkmark is worth outsized dollars to him and nothing to King.
Stephen King doesn't need Twitter to publicize his work, and he doesn't even need to work, since he seems to be quite well off. But most celebrities -- "most" is vague, I know -- live to be the center of attention, to be heard, to be considered. And a few years ago the platform was Facebook, then Twitter, after Trump's election, became more and more the place to be if you want to participate in the "discourse." King needs Twitter now or another platform now or in the future because, apparently, he needs to be heard, to be part of the conversation, to have his old man criticisms heard. But now that platform is Twitter.
When you pay 40 billion for something you expect a return on investment
It's like charging actors to act, or charging writers to write.
Without people like King, twitter has no chance of surviving long-term. It does nothing special. It was simply in the right place at the right time.
...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 about Elon's vision for the platform makes sense, but I really don't get leaving over the checkmark subscription.
Because the content on Twitter is generated by a relatively small number of users. A lot never tweet, quote tweet or retweet but it goes beyond that number once you weight it by audience. A small number of people have a large amount of reach and thus are responsible for a good chunk of the content.
That content is why the users are on Twitter and it is those users who are advertised to that pay for Twitter to exist. That's what Stephen King means.
Now you can turn this around and say that those power users are only there because the audience is and that they get value for being there but platforms need users and users follow creators more than the platform as a general rule.
The content for billboards is also "generated by a relatively small number of users", but those users still have to pay to use them. I've always seen Twitter as a personal billboard, and a checkmark as a coveted signal booster. But maybe that's wrong?
There’s certainly some marketing (“Check out our new paper”, “My lab is hiring”, etc), but it’s not particularly top-down; everybody does it to some extent. It’s also mixed in with actual scientific discussion, lab “hacks”, and some silly banter/blowing off steam. All in all, it’s been pretty helpful for me careerwise. I think I’ve gotten more useful advice about grant writing and papers to read than many more formal mentorship arrangements.
There are a few “blue checks”, but they’re mostly a) early adopters or b) people with some kind of public presence. As far as I can tell, neither I nor most others care about the checkmark per se. I talked about my research (twice!) with John Carmack and it was cool to know that it was really the Doom Guy, but I think I probably would have engaged with anybody equally curious about my work.
That's true, but for very small values of "produce content". After all, being rude or posting hot-takes in 140 characters has limited utility outside of your cohort of fans/friends.
> ...why?
Steven King is currently worth ~500MM USD. That money solely came from selling his words. So, we know they have a great deal of market value.
That's why.
They never do. Musk may or may not charge his $20, but King will pay it if he does, he's bluffing.
Meanwhile, platform dying cause people left is something that happened many times already. Usually they don't leave with one bang and they won't here. It happens over months slowly.
"This will also give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators"
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587505731611262976
So I guess they are actually planning to pay Stephen King after all, if he stays Twitter Blue. (Presumably his share of the money would be more than $8/month.)
How they distribute the money will be key. Would it be based on generic follower counts & likes & engagement - which will surely drive massive waves of spambot activity - or will each user's $8/month be distributed to the accounts they follow, almost Patreon or Flattr style? That might actually be interesting.
"Only on Twitter can we watch a man worth $200 billion negotiate with a man worth $500 million about saving $12 a month"
As Stephen King rightly pointed out: Twitter should be paying him - not the other way around (IHO). Anyway, this is going to be interesting.
I doubt you know what thoughts Elon has in his head. He likely has ideas for changes, similar to the linked page. After all, he purchased the company in order to make changes.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
> In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.
Twitter on the other hand is just text. Anyone can write tweets.
Not anyone can post YouTube videos.
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.
Musk is only doing with Twitter what Fark.com did over 20 years ago with TotalFark - you pay a small monthly fee for admission, and you get a shiny badge next to your username, along with a few perks.
Just like Something Awful forums did before that - paid admission - it's an excellent tool to weed out the obvious bots and low effort trolls.
Twitter has no "creators" - it's just a fancy message board.
Everything old is new again. The Gen-Z kids on Twitter and TikTok were still pooping in diapers when these sites ruled the Internet, and now have sadly been relegated to a dusty corner thereof.
This sounds like "pay to follow" (or at least "please donate X monthly to your favorite creators" ala Patreon).
I think to most Twitter users, content has a value of €0. If you ask users to pay then they'd rather switch to another free creator, or not use Twitter at all.
If users see any value in creators at all, that'll be having interacted with creators for a long time and having developed a deep connection. Or if creators started publishing "premium content" that's obviously worth in.
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.
I'm not sure why asking consumers to pay would be a good idea because we already have Patreon. Only a fraction of consumers would actually pay for content, so doing this would probably cause a lot of consumers to leave. Whereas the price for a content creator is very low, even at $20/month.
In other words, if you want the blue checkmark, you're definitely interested in the marketing yourself. So, why not pay for that privilege?
I think this completely misunderstands why social media products like Twitter are successful.
Those journalists (or gamers, or comedians, or porn stars) that you're arguing should be considering $9 a month as cost of business, they are the content creators and the only justification for a business like twitter having any value at all. Principally, twitter is a network, and these users are the highly connected nodes of that network. How fast will superconnectedness decline without them? Superexponentially.
The people with blue check marks aren't your customers or clients: they are your product.
Yes, those highly-connected nodes could easily kill the network... if they all coordinated to leave at once. Which is a real risk here, because of how high-profile and controversial the issue is right now. But normally, they're just as glued to the network as everyone else. Perhaps even more so, because...
... they aren't creating content for fun. They're creating it to make money off the audience. So they have to stick to where the audience is.
People with blue check marks would like to think they're special and valuable to the platform, but they're not. At this scale, they're a commodity too. They play a different role on the platform, but for the platform, users with different roles is just what makes the whole thing tick and print money.
Some of those get some reward from it in terms of added publicity, others in terms of building out their network, but a bunch even do it anonymously and seem to get no real world financial benefit from it other than sharing what they're working on and having discussions with other people interested in the same things.
Musk seems to fundamentally misunderstand not only how and why regular people use Twitter, but also how popular but non-celebrity people use it. He only sees it through his own lens, which is as a marketing tool, a way to move markets, and a place to shitpost freely. His changes make sense in that context only.
Paying $8 per month for this free advertising seems pretty great. How much would it cost to send this out via actual ads or eg mailchimp (but of course it is much easier to have new people see your tweets than your marketing emails)?
Blue checks should never be pay to play. They weren't designed that way. The problem is the ambiguity of the blue check leads to arbitrage that it seems all parties are interested in cashing in on. If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. Elon's backtracking about price parity just illuminates the capitalist nature of the entire thing. Charge what we can, not what we should.
We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.
And those areas don't proportionally don't matter to Twitter. Even so, the very next tweet by Musk, in reply to the linked one, says:
> Price adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity
So that addresses this complaint.
> If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. (...) We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.
Since when is Twitter our "modern Greek forum"?
Just until a few days ago, being critical of Musk was strongly correlated with the belief that social media companies are private entities, free to do as they wish (and in particular ban whoever they want). It's ironic how fast things change :).
That goes both ways.
25% of US Adults produce 97% of tweets on Twitter. 75% of Twitter users don't post a single tweet per month. 42% of Twitter users that produce < 20 tweets / month find civility issues with the platform, and only 27% of them feel politically engaged. Twitter has nothing to do with "humanity as a whole". It's obvious that the group that uses Twitter is niche yet highly engaged. Matters relating to Twitter's "social and intellectual needs" are only relevant to highly engaged Twitter users.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/1-the-views-... for all the stats
> Twitter has nothing to do with "humanity as a whole". It's obvious that the group that uses Twitter is niche yet highly engaged.
You are confusing posting on Twitter with using it. The vast majority are lurkers who still consume information and then regurgitate that information in real life on other platforms. The statistics you provided don't paint an accurate picture of the "usefulness" of Twitter in modern public discourse.
Do you have a better popular example of a modern day forum?
The Pareto Principle is just a rule-of-thumb, it's not an actual law of anything, and is just an expression of power law dynamics. It's true that power law dynamics are common in most online communities, but 97% of content being created by 25% of users is staggering, a much stronger power law than most other forums. This is a highly engaged, medium-sized community (though I realize the nature of the platform (followers, algorithmic priority, etc) means that there are multiple overlapping sets of communities rather than a single community, and that these communities often vehemently grief each other.)
> You are confusing posting on Twitter with using it. The vast majority are lurkers who still consume information and then regurgitate that information in real life on other platforms. The statistics you provided don't paint an accurate picture of the "usefulness" of Twitter in modern public discourse.
Only 23% [1] of Americans use Twitter. Compare that to 81% of Americans using Youtube and 69% of Americans using Facebook. Only 13% of US Adults [2] get their news from Twitter, while 31% from Facebook and 22% from Youtube. Americans are the largest users of Twitter, followed by the Japanese. It's main significance in the public discourse derives from the 69% of American journalists [2] that use Twitter as part of their job, and this is not "public" discourse as much as journalist discourse.
> Do you have a better popular example of a modern day forum?
I know very few people in my real life that actually use Twitter. The ones that do are mostly in subcultures with a large presence on Twitter. My family doesn't use Twitter, most Twitter employees I know don't use Twitter. My partner only uses Twitter because she networks with other artists on it but doesn't actually use it for news or politics. Most of my friends don't use Twitter. Most people in my network know of Twitter only through quoted reports in news articles.
I think, and unless you have statistics to show otherwise, that the idea of a "modern day forum" role for Twitter lies only in the minds of highly engaged Twitter users. I mean I'm a highly engaged user of HN and I would be quite sad if it went away and actively fight to maintain its culture. I've watched a lot of online communities rot over time so I understand what it's like to watch your community change. But I don't pretend that HN or other online communities I'm part of are somehow a vital resource for all of humanity. The only noteworthy thing about Twitter's community is the number of journalists and celebrities talking to each other on it. That's all.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/05/10-facts-ab...
[2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/27/twitter-is-...
I never said otherwise.
> 97% of content being created by 25% of users is staggering
100% agree, it's just not surprising and is within a range observed in other communities. It's also unclear how many accounts constitute as active.
> I know very few people in my real life that actually use Twitter.
I don't know if most citizens necessarily hung out at the forum all day either, I'd be curious what percentage of ancient Greek and Roman populations made use of forums, and how frequently. If, besides commerce, discourse was often left to highly engaged citizens.
> I don't pretend that HN or other online communities I'm part of are somehow a vital resource for all of humanity.
I think positive networking is one of the most important activities our generation should be engaged in. We should be forming rich, useful and sustainable social networks which allow us to tackle problems at scale. A lot of serious relationships, companies, and ideas come out of places where similar minds meet such as Hacker News. Whether it's vital to some arbitrary societal metric is of little interest to me, as it is personally vital to my own life and I'm sure my individual experience is common enough to warrant nurturing.
75% of actual users or 75% of user accounts? I'm guessing the latter since the former is impossible to count. I'm almost surprised it's not higher — I think I have 5 twitter accounts and I definitely haven't posted from 4 of those for way over a month.
Saw a roundtable about this and a film maker said it was really hard when they're about to release a film and someone uses a fake Twitter handle that's close to theirs releases the trailer or footage before they wanted it released.
Paying to have a blue check on their account would cut down this type of piracy or release of trailers before the producer wants to. They said it would be very worth it to maintain the legitimacy of what they're doing.
I'm assuming other types of creators would see the value in being able to say, "If its not from my verified account, then its not (me, my work, my companies work) and you should ignore it."
Actual scammers I expect have stolen credit card databases to test.
Wait until you see how they begin marketing the subscription.. it will be ridiculous. Might as well be trying to sell snake oil.
Look at LV 'hyperloop' [0], and people who paid upfront for FSD [1] and are issuing a class action lawsuit and re-think what you just said about 'might.' I think this isn't about Tesla or SpaceX or any specific company he is CEO of as they are all amazing feats of tech/engineering, it's about Elon's horrible PT Barnum type marketing that worked for a bit but has lost all of it's luster at this point.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040 1: jhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040
(Genuine question, not rhetorical)
Quite a lot of his twitter presence is reactions to the decline in America and America's politics. Musk would probably prefer King's voice quietened.
he's a famous author. he's got a website, a publisher with an advertising budget, and other social media channels. his audience will follow him. he can post on facebook, his mailing list, his own website, or none of the above.
basic is free
oh you can pay to have your nft shown
then additional packages for people that want to use social media managers
that deal with impersonation
etc
One would think, but I rarely see tweets from people I follow.
For example, I just scrolled my feed, and 51 out of the first 60 tweets were from strangers (the other 9 were either tweets or retweets from people I follow). One of the tweets was even from Taylor Swift. I have no idea why Twitter thought I'd want to see that, since I mostly just follow devs. Downranking people who don't pay the subscription means I'm going to see even less of those devs than I already am.
If you scroll back through my post history, you'll see me singing Twitter's praises and telling people that they just need to curate their feed if they don't like what they're seeing. This is no longer the case. I admit defeat.
But for personal data collectors and advertisers, the largest size is the only one that fits. Quantity not quality. Audience. Reach.
Twitter also needs them so it’s a symbiotic relationship. In some cases I’d say Twitter needs them more than they need it. Like popular music celebrities, sport stars etc. So Twitter has to tread carefully not to antagonize such crowd pullers lest they migrate to a competitor social media.
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.
If you charge for it, you are essentially inverting it purpose, and eventually what will happen is that readers will no longer have that protection, since authors might not pay for it.
Given that, Twitter becomes a less secure place for readers and, if people are smart [1] they will leave it in favor of networks where they can at least trust that what they read came from who they think wrote it.
1: people usually aren't, so I wouldn't be surprised if only a small percentage of people give up on Twitter after this. Still, that's what should happen.
Edit: typos
Twitter should not be editorally curating people through verification, making verification only about ID and being a real person is a broadly good change, as long as it's not necessary for participation. Brands, celebrities, those in the public eye could benefit from this. Needs to be implemented with care and ideally with a branding change so as not to confuse users as the semantics change.
The bad:
$8 is way more than the profitability of an ad supported user. There's no excuse for "half the ads", it should be none at all. See: every streaming service. (Edit: ok some streaming services have ads, but for most online content - video, journalism, etc, if you subscribe there are no ads, it's just nickle-and-diming users to give them a bunch of ads, particularly when the marginal cost for Twitter Blue is essentially zero).
The ugly:
Paying $8 to get your voice heard by more people biases towards those with means rather than those contributing to the conversation. At best this will reduce conversation quality on Twitter, at worst this is ripe for abuse.
Plenty of streaming services have ad-supported versions that are in this price range (e.g. Hulu, HBO Max). I don't disagree that having ads at all on Twitter Blue is bad, but I'm not sure the comparison with streaming services works.
* Youtube premium has a mix of user content and licenced content but doesn't have ads (other than live reads which don't count here)
My thinking was based on YouTube Premium, Apple TV, Netflix (currently), 4oD, Disney+, etc.
[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/netflix-ad-supported-tier-price...
Companies aren't voluntarily charging barely enough to cover costs - they're being forced to do it by competition. Normally, they'll charge you as much as they can get away with.
It would be news if Twitter, or anyone else for that matter, decided to voluntarily charge less for the sake of fairness to the users.
I do wonder whether their days are numbered though. I can see it going one of two ways – full ban of all third party clients, or a far more open API. Musk is so unpredictable, both would appear to fit his viewpoints on these things.
I'd assume the $8 high-rollers can still retweet and amplify the poors.
I'm not sure this is a bad thing. If you are a user who actively contributes to the conversation and get's value out of being in that conversation, then it's likely you derive enough value to pay $8. The difference however is that now your contribution is more likely to be seen. You might even engage more now.
If you aren't that user, then maybe you don't derive enough value from conversation because you are mostly a consumption user. So you continue as you do today, consuming and occasionally replying to tweets but hardly ever having your response seen or acknowledged.
I disagree. Diverse input results in better conversations – less of an echo chamber, less black and white thinking, more visibility for other viewpoints, more empathy.
There is diversity among people who want to spend $8/mo on Twitter, but there is far more by definition among all Twitter users. Plus you're likely to discriminate against already marginalised groups in most regions, as marginalised groups (whatever the categorisation) tend to have less disposable income.
But how many different people are necessary to give the diversity of thought on a particular topic? I bet it is not many, certainly fewer than 100, maybe 50, or on some topics even just 20.
Is this your experience with Twitter?
On the other hand, paying to boost your tweet regardless of its actual value is going to be a great tool for spammers, troll or people who really care more about saying something than they care about its utility to the conversation. This will definitely drive down quality (and I'm ready to bet that browser extensions to just block out anything from paid users will start popping up).
Who will pay will be grifters and ideologues.
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.
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.
Point being: this whole thing was terribly poorly thought out, a lot of details left uncovered, in a niche where exactly those details are of crucial importance.
Every network analysis of Twitter shows that the majority of people are not all engaging just with the blue checks or the most popular accounts. There's a huge long tail that keeps most users on the platform.
Adverse selection. The people willing to pay to remove ads are probably your most profitable users to show ads to.
Similar to how people self selected into iOS and android and to this day its way more effective to advertise to less price sensitive iOS users than Android users with cheap phones, though the effect was even larger in the early days.
Continuing to show ads to paying content creators is double-dipping.
$8 entry fee seems reasonable from a pyscological perspective. It sounds like the modern version of $9.99, since 3 numbers is taboo on the Twitter style internet and 8 sounds better than 9
Basically a tier for global brands that manage multiple regional accounts and need top level support. Which I'm sure already exists informally like all B2B SaaS sites that have listed monthly fees where big accounts are handled personally.
But more to your point I think there should be a paid bracket below that tier of global mega corps which is formalized and public. At least for transparency and marketing reasons.
Just one thing — add a couple more zeros. $100k/yr is not unreasonable for an enterprise offering here. They could introduce all kinds of B2B features for companies that want to use Twitter as a support forum (or, given Twitter's popularity, are forced into using it as a support forum).
Off the top of my head — things like rolling up different sub-accounts under one main corporate account, formalizing the ability for multiple support staff to work one account (and charge per seat!), having deeper integration with Zendesk and other ticketing systems, extracting metrics and showing dashboards for how support (and sentiment) is doing, introducing some AI/ML to help companies match Twitter accounts of their customers to internal customer IDs, enabling ML-powered DMing of targeted offers, introducing chatbots that can be trained to field support queries over DM, etc, etc.
Anyway, it's a really good idea. Maybe you should've bought Twitter.
Where does he say there will be any verification around ID? Twitter needs to make sure that I can't just name my account @WhiteHouseCommunications and pay $8 to get a blue checkmark. The whole point of the blue checkmark was to personally review those accounts to make sure they are who they say they are. Is Twitter still going to put in this manual effort for a greater base of verified users especially after they seemingly plan to downsize staff?
The conflating of an authentically derived status ("This person is real") with a paid form of status both defeats the purpose of the first, and is somewhat telling about a particular mindset.
I don't think so. Twitter's ARPU from advertising in Q2 2022 was around $4.50. ARPU from advertising in the US was more than $14.
Users likely to subscribe at $8/month (power users in western countries) are more valuable than average for advertising.
No ads for $8/month would probably be a very bad idea.
$8 is a lot - relatively speaking.
Q2 revenue: $1.18 billion
Q2 revenue per monetizable user: $4.96
Revenue per user if they're paying $8 a month is $24 per quarter (there's 3 months in a quarter!)
That's definitely more than the profitability of the average user. If I got the numbers wrong then please show me how.
On Facebook, for instance, US users bring in 5x the worldwide average revenue per user.
That is why it's only a reduction in ads. This deal reduces their revenue per user if they went ad free for those users.
he is full of bad ideas and will bring twitter down with most of them
though I like the idea of bringing vine back.
> Paying $8 [...] At best this will reduce conversation quality on Twitter
Really? That seems completely contrary to my experience. In every online community I've seen, a higher barrier to entry has always been positively correlated with the quality of the conversation.
Not saying there won't be downsides to this, but I very much doubt a lower quality of conversation will be one of them.
You can already filter out non-verified mentions and replies. Presumably that's not going away, and will be used by far more people after this change. It very much is a barrier to entry.
And the people most likely to pay to ensure that their responses are seen broadly are narcissists and people who want to sell you stuff like their latest get rich quick scheme, newsletter Subscription, etc.
Actual verified users will dwindle in comparisons and the value of filtering out non “verified” responses will plummet.
How?
That's irrelevant, and very often false. But the options offered by the market at any given time are generally better at higher price points, which is, oddly, exactly what the commenter upthread was outraged by.
> It's a higher barrier to having a good experience, which I can't think of many successful examples of to be honest.
The way I read the poster is that they think being asked to pay more will create worse experience, which is implied to be stupid. Except it isn't, it's literally what's happening in every market all the time. Getting people to pay more for worse product is entirely normal, and the way it usually works is by removing the option to keep paying the same amount for the product they currently enjoy.
>> It's a higher barrier to having a good experience, which I can't think of many successful examples of to be honest.
> The way I read the poster is that they think being asked to pay more will create worse experience
That is something they say, but the quote you pulled isn't related to it. You were looking for this one:
>> At best this will reduce conversation quality on Twitter
But they never bother to justify that.
> which is implied to be stupid.
The quote you pulled is stupid. Nothing is more common than successful examples of placing a higher barrier in front of the good experience than there is in front of the bad experience.
Regardless, it’s not as “stupid” as you claim. How many social networks have added a premium tier for non commercial users, while degrading the quality of the free tier and been successful?
Closest I can think of are dating apps, which have a unique driver behind them that Twitter doesn’t have.
Sure, but I hope as mainly a reader of Twitter this change comes along with a box I can check that says 'only show Tweets from people I follow and those who are verified'. Overnight, most of my bot issues are fixed. And, any people I don't want to hear from again are easily blocked.
The key difference is that streaming services purchase valuable content and resell it. There is obvious demand and the market clearly exists.
Twitter provides little in the way of mass entertainment, unless you enjoy watching people argue with trolls in an algorithmically-created drama. The content is not created by twitter. There is no obvious market demand; the vast majority of people on the planet wouldn't bother using twitter even if it was free.
"wouldn't bother" should be "don't bother".
For the world, around 290 million [1], with an internet population of around 4 billion [2], that's around 7%.
Things are a bit better for the us, with 41.5 million active users [1], assuming they're all over 18 (209 million), that's about 20% of US population.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/10/25/twit...
2. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=number+...
excellent point - I should use the active present tense. That is: "most people alive today don't bother with twitter, despite the fact that it's free."
Is it "free" in other meanings of the word - free of charge, free speech, free expression, freedom of religion, freedom to lie, freedom to intimidate? Time will tell.
Than an average user. But if you are a power user, you have just sent a valuable marketing signal.
> Paying $8 to get your voice heard by more people biases towards those with means
Strong disagree. Twitter currently only exists as a bullhorn for already famous people, or a few lucky early adopters.
Not if you curate it at all.
My two Twitter accounts are dominated by...my fellow academics on one of them, and niche hobbyists on the other.
Even after your edit, this isn't true. NYTimes includes ads in their paid subscription products. AFAIK, most premium news and editorial still includes ads. It's not nearly as many or as intrusive as the free pubs like NYPost, but there's still ads even though I'm paying $20/mo for NYTimes
There is an entire generation of entitled people who grew up in 0% VC-funded businesses who are accustomed to getting great products for free who have to adjust to the reality of cost of capital.
The publishers of those paid for the content, paid for editing, paid for the physical medium, paid for physical distribution.
Twitter is distributing short pieces of text, some images and video on a medium that is famously cheaper than everything that came before it, while not paying anything to the authors and has no editors.
The next step is "only allow replies from blue checkmarks"
both are bad ideas, and solely because of musk's obsession with bots. Without a mob to prop up people with retweets, twitter will be useless. You cant have the good parts without the ugly parts
that s a very odd way to remove spam . and personally i dont see twitter bots because i dont go searching for them. Musk is completely obsessed with the wrong problem
I think it's more likely that the real goal of this "Twitter Blue" proposal is to start getting users to pay for bling. Which could work! It certainly works in gaming communities.
Certainly, services for current blue-checks can't be a big part of the plan here, because of:
(1) The Stephen King problem, which is the (correct) observation that people like King are adding far more value to Twitter than they extract from it, and are reasonably not inclined to ante anything up to Musk.
(2) There aren't enough of them to make a dent in Twitter's cash flows.
Before you couldn't trust non-checkmarks. Now you can't trust any account.
Where does it say everyone can buy a checkmark without verification? I read this as everyone can be verified, which is a good thing. And, it will go a long way to killing off the bots.
> There will be a secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure, which is already the case for politicians
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587527711228149765
So, secondary tags are the new verification checkmarks and checkmarks are the new "Twitter+" status symbol.
$0 - you barely get heard
$8 - you kind of get heard
$88 - you really get heard
$888 - everybody thinks the exact same thing as you do and you can manipulate portions of the population (lol)
Every time I see a post it's just followed up by 100 meme gifs, not discussion.
Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"?
How do I know what half should be? We've all been there: "it feels like YouTube has cranked the ads way up lately..." Will "half" just become "full" when "full" gets doubled next year?
Publishers charge for digital ad impressions by the 1000. It's easy to measure because usually they receive an HTTP GET request indicating the ad has been served.
For TV that uses traditional broadcasts you have to sample and scale. This is what Nielsen and other ACR companies do.
In any case, how are people going to verify on their end they're getting what they paid for? Maybe in 10 years they'll have a class action resulting in everyone getting a dollar back.
It's hard to imagine that the conversation started from "half as many." My hunch is that it started as "no ads" and somehow backed down to "half" for one reason or another.
A couple reasons I can imagine are: - They could've justified No Ads at the rumored $20 price point. Cut the price in half? Add half the ads back. - They want to make room for a $20 SKU later and need to reserve some features for it, which could include getting rid of all ads. - They want to anchor at "half" so that "No Ads" sounds even better if they change their minds down the line.
Or some combination of all those.
>"Burning Twitter to the ground seems quite counterproductive"
Good faith or not, it doesn't mean someone can't be misguided. which is why I asked, who cares about their faith??
Sorry I think I read something that wasn't there, apologies. My bad for being jumpy.
> I'm more fascinated that people see someone doing something wildly illogical and then say to themselves, "well it's Musk, he must have his reasons"... yeah, I'm sure he has his reasons. That doesn't mean they are good and I have no idea why anyone would assume so given how all of this transpired.
For me it's curiosity. Twitter always seems like the struggling social media. Unable to really make a revenue despite it's disproportionate influence in developed nation discourse. At this point, I consider Musk to be a loose canon and I would not do business with him unless costs appropriately reflected risks.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Could result in amusing ads where the top half is aimed at the richies and the bottom half has "stick it to the man" discounts that only poors would see.
It's a completely nonsensical compromise. Musk's product ideas for Twitter seems to assume that what everyone wants is for Twitter to be more complex, with more knobs to fiddle with.
Right. But that $8 doesn't only buy you halving the ad load, but also all the other things like better reach and the "I'm a paying user, I'm better than you non-paying ones" checkmark. I mean, if it works on GitHub...
> And adblock is an option sitting in the wings.
Yes, but! Most people use Twitter through the app, and blocking ads there isn't as simple as having your tech-savvy friend install uBlock Origin in your browser. Adblocking in apps is, even for techies, something between extremely sophisticated and downright impossible.
Broadcast television and radio have always done this. How could they do anything else?
I'd considering paying Twitter $8/month if it was no ads. Or, you know, I just keep using Tweetbot for $10/year and there's zero ads there and a straight reverse chronological timeline to boot.
They'll just double-up ads for non-paying users in the current ad slots on the feed.
Why? Two reasons.
1) Funding social media through advertising has led to dysfunctional outcomes like outrage being more visible than high-quality content. I’m in favor of alternative revenue streams, although they have to provide value, and removing ads doesn't count as providing value.
2) My Twitter account is part of my consulting business. Eight dollars a month isn't much to pay if it improves my visibility or perceived legitimacy. I'd be willing to try it for a year and see how it works out.
FWIW, I wouldn't have been willing to try it at $20/mo.
If you're going to be a luxury product then all of your prices and/or offering has to be luxury or exclusive.
Disincentiving follower counts by how much VIP accounts costs doesn't make much sense. Unless you have some high end super VIP bracket that caps at 100-500k or whatever.
Elon's idea of rewarding creators as a byproduct of checkmarks sounds better than arbitrarily gatekeeping the checkmark system through some VIP criteria (like follower counts or public influence).
Everyone is a creator by default, creators should be rewarded after a certain level of contribution - always - but that's not the role of checkmarks (or the base level one at least).
1) Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam
2) Ability to post long video & audio
3) Half as many ads
I also expect the following:
4) Increase in perceived legitimacy
#1 and #4 are valuable to me. #2 I don't care about at all, because my long-form content goes on my blog and YouTube. #3 is 'meh'--it'll be nice to have fewer ads, but my brain glazes right past them anyway.
By most accounts the additional tools they provide in terms of filtering aren't that valuable.
In Musk's proposal basically a slightly better Twitter Blue.
> Eight dollars a month isn't much to pay if it improves my visibility
What you're describing in that second quote is advertising. You are paying for additional reach, in this case you'd get those additional impressions via "priority" in replies, mentions & search. What they've done is dressed up advertising as a membership feature because it'll make people like you more likely to advertise.
This sort of “advertising” is a class system, with one class of users getting some sort of visibility bump over a second class of users. The incentives are aligned with making sure the verified content is perceived to be high quality, so that being verified is a status symbol.
You could argue that a system with literal second-class citizens is worse than the current one, and you might be right, but I’m interested to see how it turns out. Nothing is perfect—everything has tradeoffs—and the current engagement-driven approach is a dumpster fire.
Also you greatly simplify how current advertising works. It’s not anywhere as simple as you describe.
I understand you were mostly making an incentives point and there I think we just disagree.
Here's what I expect to happen:
1) First, Twitter introduces paid verification. They cut back on their content moderation efforts on unverified accounts, but they exercise more control of spam and scams on verified accounts, including permabans (which are easier to enforce, due to better knowledge of the people behind the accounts—a credit card number, at the very least).
2) Next, they introduce an option to hide all non-verified tweets, other than from people you follow. People will use it because non-verified tweets have a much higher proportion of spam and scams.
3) At this point, they've successfully price discriminated between professional content creators (such as myself) and consumers / casual creators. I expect additional price discrimination to follow, such as charging for API access in order to target people using tools such as HootSuite to manage large fanbases.
All of this is predicated on people adopting #1, which is why it's important for Musk to find the right price point. It looks like he's just spraying out ideas, but I think he's doing price research.
But we'll see! My own speculation is that they lean more into trying to convince ordinary users (or content creators like you) to get more into the advertising game to replace some brands that may leave. Think of dating apps and features like Super Likes, Boosts, etc. Tinder and others figured out how to get money out of regular folks without a traditional ads interface. If I were them, I'd hire folks from Match Group.
Frankly, I'd rather see an ad for a random content creator than for some of the weird brands that advertise to me. Right now the top "Who to follow" for me is Lamps Plus, "the nation's largest lighting retailer." As you could imagine, I'm not interested. Instead, they could give everyone a free 30-min account boost and give their premium Blue members four or five more a month.
Getting ordinary users into advertising is their old game. My middling popular tweets all have a "Boost" button I can click. I've clicked it a few times, but they're looking for bigger campaigns than I have appetite for... $50/day, minimum two days, reach of only about 2,000 people each day. I'm not willing to throw away $100 on a two-day campaign that's very unlikely to move the needle in any meaningful way.
But, obviously, I am willing to throw away $100 to try a status symbol for a year... but only if it actually is a status symbol. The difference is the longevity. Nobody makes the decision to hire me after two days; they make the decision after seeing my content and name for months and years. Four thousand people seeing my name once is basically worthless to me. Fourteen thousand followers have a better chance of seeing my name for a year is quite likely to be worth it.
This is why the Model X has those silly doors.
Looks-wise, it's basically indistinguishable from a Model 3 (which are everywhere), so hardly iconic in any way.
OK let's say it sold $30k, and Tesla made a profit of $100k (more than the car sells for) for each car.
That's still less than 50% of the F150 yearly profit. LOL.
Compare it to other comparable cars in the same segment and it looks pretty damn good.
Lower volume high margin cars are really worth it for companies and Ford wishes it had an EV in that classed that sold have as well. The Model X sells in numbers not unlike Mach E while having double the price.
That's what the parent said. Not "in the EV market segment", not "looks pretty damn good".
I agree it's a silly comparison to make normally, but it's a perfectly apt reply to someone stating something so obviously out-of-touch, like the Model X being the most profitable car in the modern era.
The profit MARGIN of the model x is great tho.
In terms of total profit, the Model Y will be the most profitable car next year, overtaking the F150.
A model 3, the budget/everyman car is $40k, and the Model Y is almost $70k.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/07/03/tesla-model-3-model-y-m...
However the X and the S have very high margins in all configurations so they bring in an outsized amount of profit given their share of sales.
That said the margins on the Model 3/Y are nothing to snuff at and are superior to any other mass market vehicle.
When compared to cars like the F150 that bring in literally billions of dollars in profit a year?
Are you sure?
Oh, you're going to say you weren't counting trucks ;) Mercedes, BMW, Lexus still blow Tesla out of the water with their lineup.
The doors are an interesting example since they always seemed strictly worse than the traditional design, unlike the rest of the car.
I have a Model 3 and the handles DO freeze over, though I normally pre-heat my car (EV FTW) and it normally isn't an issue.
Model X also sells fine in Norway of course.
A touchscreen is objectively worse than traditional physical controls for operations that need to be performed while concentrating on driving.
Teslas are also not known for the quality of their manufacturing, although that's a different kind of design issue.
I know that Tesla has a lot of negative press due to autopilot (and rightly so), but they are still a leader in both self-driving and electric vehicles.
There's also a lot of potential (depending on who you ask) for autopilot, although I think it was a mistake to switch from lidar to pure computer vision. Time will tell.
He's a pretty crazy guy, but I can think of few people/companies who are doing things that could have as big of an impact as Tesla, Starlink, and SpaceX.
I understand how you could have doubts with Tesla, but that how could those feelings not dissolve when seeing those reusable boosters land on their own? How many other organizations could do such a thing?
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...
Hasn't this approach been proven successful with the current push towards solar and electric cars?
The article even says:
> The payoff for the public would come in the form of major pollution reductions, but only if solar panels and electric cars break through as viable mass-market products. For now, both remain niche products for mostly well-heeled customers.
Neither of these products are as niche today as they were in 2015 (when the article was written).
But, claiming that SpaceX, Tesla, or Musk personally were uniquely competitive, successful, or disruptive while they had a buffer of 5bn USD in the back pocket is misleading.
I'm sure you can find _plenty_ of examples of people spending billions less effectively, e.g. the city of Boston spending $22 billion on a tunnel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
I'm not saying he's a genius or unprecedented, just that he is successful, and that his success was not guaranteed.
And yet his companies are some of the most difficult to get a job at. Interesting.
It’s more difficult to get a tech job at FBI/CIA than Google. Does that make the US government a more desirable place to work?
As an aside, top talent definitely does NOT work at Elon’s companies. Top talent knows that “a good company mission” does not pay for rent, mortgage, or daycare.
This is just not true. There's tons of exceptional engineers working at various of Elon's companies. Would you really claim that SpaceX doesn't have world-class engineers?
No, that car is essentially a failure and I'm amazed Tesla hasn't completely cut it from production.
It sold 1,316 units in the US September. They were selling almost 4,000 in September of '18. Even if you wanted to go by year, you're talking about 26,000 sold in the entire US in 2020 (it's best year and I'm ignoring '21 since there was a factory shut down)[1].
It's just not a good vehicle, doesn't sell well, and is utterly unusable if you live anywhere with rain or snow.
[1] https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-model-x-sales-figures-us...
Also most Tesla customers would buy a Y these days.
I see many X in Norway, which has a lot of rain and snow. What are the issues you mention?
That may not mean what you think - you may be waiting for them to have enough orders for them justify retooling the factory back for a short run.
Its a luxury car, Audi is selling less e-Trons then Tesla is selling Model X in the US. The Model X this year sold almost as many vehicles as Ford Mach-E while costing 2x as much. If you compare the Model X to other cars in that price class the Model X is doing fine.
And of course they did a major revamp completely changing the architecture and have to deliver the car from 1 factory to whole world. The Model S had priority at first and the Model X was only slowly added to production again.
If you think Model X is a failure you don't understand the car industry. A car with that kind of margin is well worth doing even if it peaks at 40-50k a year globally.
> and is utterly unusable if you live anywhere with rain or snow
This is simply inaccurate.
This pricing clarification is most likely due to Stephen King's complaint: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
> We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?
If Elon is successful, even I will read the business school case study on it, because it flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems and... well just about everything. The only way this works is if Elon's internal processes are way different from his public persona.
He’s probably right, although it doesn’t generalize to most celebrities who do have a vested interest in paying to promote themselves.
I think Elon has the right idea, you gotta dip their toes in the water, then jack up the price later.
When Oprah is seen dining at a restaurant, the restaurant gets more value from the PR than Oprah gets from the meal. That does not lead to the conclusion that she should go open a restaurant.
I mean yes, but that value might be so low as to not be worth paying for. Not even for the monetary cost, but for the effort involved in setting up the payment (entering card details, etc) and then checking your bill is what you expect for the rest of time. That tiny amount of extra effort might make twitter not worth it alone for some people, even without the financial cost.
And even that yes it does offer value I'd qualify in that the value might ultimately on reflection be considered to be ultimately a loss on net. For example a heroin addict gets value out of heroin, but on balance the value they get (a fleeting pleasure) often isn't worth the damage done to their lives, but you could say "well it obviously offers value or they wouldn't be taking it". Note that I'm not claiming twitter is addictive or damaging like heroin, just trying to point out that "must have value because they do it" isn't really a solid argument a lot of the time
"flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems" indeed!
Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day, "you know what, !@#$ it. We're done managing this complex system. Let's assume Russia doesn't have or won't use nukes and change our entire doctrine overnight. Get ready to deploy everything."
There's a real possibility Elon buys Twitter for billions and runs it straight into the ground because he does not understand complex systems. Or maybe he gambles and is lucky. Or maybe he really does _get it_ and this is all in some absolutely bizarre way, calculated.
And when it comes to a $44 billon purchase, it sounds like a nightmare to affect it so impulsively.
At least, unlike the nuclear fallout, it's not my money, I guess.
If you dig significantly you might find that they're not as impulsive as they seem, that the person was actually considering many aspects but playing their cards close until cut-off time.
But I do think one difference at least from where I’m sitting, is usually the response is, that’s crazy, but if it works you’ll be rich!
I’m not even really clear on what the “if it works” is in this situation, I guess if he proves that people are willing to pay $8 per month for a social network?
For me, there is enough track record to prove he has some very unique business skills, and often succeeds by doing things that conventionally looks crazy.
That said, Elon's Twitter may well be a failure regardless. Pretty sure it won't be boring though :)
(And regardless of any of the above, I've never been particularly enamoured of criticism of a person because of who their parents are or what their parents did. Blaming Elon for being the son of white people in South Africa is kinda gross, actually.)
"Who payed for those computers in the 90s that Musk had access to?"
Its like yeah ok, he wasn't found in a dumbster during a civil war. Is that the level now, where nobody can get any credit because they were not born into abject poverty?
That just basically means that 99% of people who achieve anything don't deserve credit for anything.
Its basically materialist logic taken to an absurd degree.
Or even more hilariously, that Elon is some kind of marketing genius. Seriously, the guy is the opposite of a smooth communicator, and leans heavily into his autistic sense of humour. Yet apparently the only reason anyone ever bought a Tesla is because they were suckered in by a slick sales pitch.
For instance, his connection to Roelof Botha, who in turn leveraged the connections made by his father when he was spending a lot of time in the US as South Africa's last apartheid-era foreign minister.
https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/elon-musk-fired-twi...
"The basic problem with Musk’s efforts to walk away from these severance agreements — beyond the lack of actual arguments — is that if he can stiff these executives then no golden parachute is binding. The point of a golden parachute is that a CEO with a golden parachute will sell his company to a buyer whom he doesn’t like, if that’s what is best for shareholders. If the buyer can stiff the CEO on the parachute payments because they don’t like each other, then no buyer will ever pay severance, and no CEO will ever trust it."
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221031165639/https://www.bloom...
Oh, this is going to be a fun read.
In response to your quote, I guess he did it as revenge for making him go through with it.
Musk has a reality distortion field. I think he is a bloviating jerk but I know a lot of really really smart and dedicated engineers in software and in more traditional fields like mech-e and aerospace who would rather work for Musk than any other person and are willing to take pay cuts to work for him. This means he really can surround himself with very skilled people who can distill his "fuck it, we are doing FOO" commands into real plans.
What this tells me is not that Musk is a visionary but that a lot of shitty visions are nevertheless achievable if you've got enough smart people around you.
Twitter on the other hand... "Oh I work at twitter doing software". That's.... nowhere near as exciting or epic a thing to tell people that you do.
So he might have a harder time finding smart people willing to work for less than market rates at twitter compared to finding them for SpaceX and Tesla
Imagine a new form of news and communication that solves all of our social woes, allows people to be informed, and have constructive discourse.
That would be world changing.
I'm not saying Twitter could ever be that. But maybe someone else could be convinced it is possible.
I did imagine that happening once - I imagined the internet would lead to that. The state of things now is very different from what the me of 15 years ago imagined, in part because of things like twitter in fact. I now believe that social woes have significant parts that aren't just misunderstandings they are big problems that can't be solved only through dialogue. Further many of the misunderstandings are actually deliberate misrepresentations - how many people who are pro-choice have you seen making the incredibly bad faith argument that pro-lifers just want to control/punish women? (Note I am pro-choice myself, but that particular argument is a really shitty obviously untrue argument and I see it constantly and it really gives me the shits).
> I'm sure Elon will have a mission statement that will appeal to some people. This I do agree with, but I think the pool of people that are willing to work crazy hours at sub-standard pay is smaller when the work is making whatever Musk's improved version of twitter looks like than it is for putting someone on mars or making electric cars mainstream.
I think the gamification of communication on the Internet is one of the worst inventions, feeding into a lot of very negative neural architecture. Encourages people to seek quick validation from there like-minded peers, and encourages a sense of superiority people can only get from knocking down strawman. This is exacerbated by brief and content without any Nuance or resemblance to reality. In a lot of ways, Twitter incorporates the worst aspects of this. Reddit is arguably worse in terms of gamification, but at least it doesn't have a 144 character limit and tools to curate your consumption.
Twitter by design exacerbates a lot of these problems though IMO. Character limits, the way replies work and things are displayed such as to make any particularly active comment section practically impossible to follow, etc
EDIT: I do actually genuinely hope that Twitter dies, but I am scared that is a monkey paw where whatever the next thing happens to be it ends up being worse
Twitter has been too complacent in the market of communication apps. By all reports, including from Elon himself, big changes are on the way.
I think that a lot of people also don't have to directly work with him, and there are a lot of assholes running companies. That being said, Musk's behavior personally turned me off from all of his companies' products, despite maybe 5 years ago thinking "if I ever buy a car, it'll be a Tesla"
I don't get this reference, how does a person like that act in uni?
Someone who ends up getting something done, but in the most chaotic manner possible and with loads of unforced errors because they are not absorbing information from their peers.
No, I definitely won't forgive you your 'analogy', because it's sneaking in a highly irresponsible argument for military escalation into a completely unrelated discussion.
I think one could criticize that the analogy hyperbole, but I’m quite amused at the pearl clutching that somehow I’m trying to push for nuclear annihilation. Saying the words three times in a mirror doesn’t make it happen.
King (aptly named) would be happier if it was a Veblen good that cost $100,000/mo, which he could afford, but the peasants can't.
Elon is mocking King and his status symbol by saying "fine, how about $8?", which from the King's perspective, is worse than $20 because even more peasants will have it. The Blue Check is easier to get than a Netflix subscription.
I think you’re not familiar with a King as a person or an author based on your comment.
Finally, you thinking Musk was mocking is also wrong. He was using Kings viral tweet as a jump off point for the tweet this HN post is based off of.
What an absolute clownish take.
I think he was insulted at the idea of having to pay anything to be verified on the platform, when both his presence and his being verified are helpful to twitter and make twitter money, even if they do also drive some book sales for him. I took it as his saying that he'd respond to such an insult (being asked to pay) by simply leaving, because Twitter and whatever little extra money it's making him don't really matter much to him.
I doubt he's alone in that thinking. Though sure, some celebs, most or all brands (that's who they should be soaking with monthly charges), and the media will stick around until/unless the platform enters clear decline and a viable alternative emerges.
So it is essentially, charge the people who bring the users to twitter.
Also, HN has a rule against asking people whether they've read the article. Asking people whether they know who some famous person is, is obnoxious in the same way.
"This will also give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators"
The entire point of these things were so that it was an indication that these people are who they say they are: experts and celebrities.
This absolute loon wants to charge the people who are the only reason that twitter even still exists.
It's not original, it's not adding to the discussion, and it just sounds like sycophancy.
I can see someone like Stephen King being annoyed at having to pay anything when his presence is probably helping Twitter quite a bit to begin with.
[EDIT] My point is, from King's perspective, this likely looks like "you're here and making $X over what you would if you just relied on your fans to repost all your stuff on here for you, we're making $Y more than we otherwise would because you're here, plus we've given you this blue-check thing to solve a problem we have, but now $Y isn't enough and we're going to make you pay money to keep participating in this program that exists to solve a problem for us."
You can see how, unless $X is pretty big, someone who's already rich might say, "well fine, fuck you too" over such a thing.
That may have been true at one time, but I'm not so sure it is any more.
Thing is, the "blue checks" aren't all Stephen King level famous. If you're doing much notable at all, and using the platform, you've probably got a blue check. I do not, for the record—I'm not sure I even have an account?—but I see an awful lot of them on fairly niche but interesting & active personal accounts. Take them out and the best content goes back to being "I'm a Twitter Shitter!" kinds of stuff, like in the very early days—and the novelty for that is long gone.
If these posters stay but let their blue checks lapse, we go back to having an impersonation problem, which is mostly a problem for Twitter, which they may want to solve. Perhaps for accounts that are likely to be impersonated they could introduce some kind of free verification system....
They do, though. The premise is simply wrong here.
"If you're not paying for the product, you're the product."
Though to truly resolve this, they need 0 ads, not 50% fewer.
You'd think the Elon, having a notable and active Twitter account, would realize how bad it is even with those measures in place.
If the celebrities leave, Twitter dies.
Whatever else the blue checks are, they're also a solution to a problem for Twitter, and those blue-checks and their activity are a huge part of why everyone else engages with the platform. If they make people pay, they better hope the adoption rate is incredibly high among existing blue checks (who cares about the unknowns who pony up for it, in addition) or they're gonna be in for a bad time.
The people who won't get it for free (who have blue checks currently) are entry-level journalists with a few hundred followers and cryptobros. Both of those classes of people should have to pay.
A lot of hustlebros and cryptobros do pay for checkmarks, they just don't pay Twitter.
> "Stephen, I'm trying to market your books, but the publishers aren't seeing any engagement on Twitter".
> "Oh I left because I don't want to pay $20 / month to someone I disagree with politically."
> "Have you been hitting the bottle again?"
End of conversation. The value most of these celebrities get vastly exceeds $20 / month. The Twitter-celebrity relationship is symbiotic, nor parasitic.
One would hope that still took place, but the haphazard approach so far doesn't provide much confidence that it did.
5d chess and all that.
Or he's impulsive and tweets dumb shit basically all the time. It might just be that.
The entire point of the blue check is that Twitter has an impersonation problem, what happens when some fraction of users find it worth paying $8 to impersonate a celebrity?
"I was going to charge $20, but then Stephen King told me it was too much."
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...
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.
there is little to no evidence it was ever really $20, and even less evidence that Elon's mind was changed by Stephen King of all people... Who care what Stephen King thinks?
More likely it was always going to be $8
Look, he's spitballing ideas and playing it a little fast and loose. It may pay off, it might not - it looks a little stupid to some of us on account of how much he's paid for the company, but it shouldn't really surprise anyone and he doesn't need anyone making excuses for him.
I do not count reporting based on anonymous sources as evidence of anything, Elon never said, and no official at Twitter ever said the price as going to be $20, so I have no evidence to believe outside of Rumor from sources that have been showed to be negatively biased on the subject and widely inaccurate on the subject, so why should I trust their $20 figure?
I trust traditional news sources less than I do the government today, for which I would trust a Cartel bass more than the government.
Except that he did. In the tweet he made just before he said it would be $8. If you discard the tweets where he said it would be $20 and then $8 - then yes your statement holds. But we shouldn't, because those are the tweets where he said those things.
For example, out of the top 100 twitter accounts (https://socialblade.com/twitter/top/100), almost all are musicians, sports figures, politicians or news outlets.
If the top 5 musicians and the top 5 sports figures got together and started posting content exclusively on a new platform, I wonder if it would be enough to cause a gravitational shift.
I think the loss of trust from consumers is the bigger risk, successful impersonations are relatively high profile and people don't like being tricked.
I am not okay with a random group of people being able to decide whether or not someone is trustworthy. I prefer the checkmark to mean this person pays x dollars versus this person has been deemed worthy of a secret group of people at a company that has massive bias issues.
That's the exact problem with the blue checkmarks. I've seen plenty of complete loons with that mark on Twitter spewing utter racist or bigoted garbage. At least now the criteria of receiving the blue mark of coolness are getting clear and the same for everyone.
However, there is a lag time between when the status-conferring benefits end and the semantics of the blue check mark in the minds of users catches up. They can potentially make a lot of money in that lag time and bootstrap a new valuable semantics around the verified label.
Is that what you think when you see a blue check?
I expect more changes are ahead that might address these concerns.
this is basically how it operated before, except with political bias
The checkmarks won't be a status symbol anymore, but the masses will want their tweets prioritized.
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.
It feels like I'm being asked to pay $8 to solve a problem that belongs to Twitter (too many bots), not a problem that belongs to me.
As you point out, the answer is "all of the relevant ones, with very little effort on his part"
When asked about this potential problem, Elon actually replied "That already happens very frequently".
He has no plans to solve this problem. He accepts it as the cost of doing business. He sees no problem with this. There's nothing to solve.
I think I saw somewhere where he commented that Twitter wouldn't be able to survive on advertisers alone. Well that's because advertisers are likely to flee.
Forget about the idea of it becoming a "free speech" hellscape. It's going to become a scammer's paradise.
His lackadaisical attitude shows he really doesn't care about making Twitter better. It's now an expensive toy that he owns. And that's how it always was going to be.
That's the real town square. Let me sleep in the gutter!
No politician nor public servant nor government department should be able to use it under those circumstances.
They really need silent accounts, that cannot tweet and are completely anonymous.
Otherwise, impersonators can pay to get the blue check. In the long term, maybe this is fine, but in the short term every Twitter user is going to have to adjust from the old meaning of the blue check (user $foo is actually person $foo) to the new meaning (user $foo pays $8/mo).
[0] - "The blue Verified badge in Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic" - https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
As one of the former heads of product at Twitter said they wanted to add multiple types of badges. You have a badge for verified identities, you have a badge for people who want to remain anonymous but pay to participate so they can provide a hint they're not spammer, and you provide a badge for notable personalities.
Now there's a $8/Month incentive for the top users to leave ... seems backwards. They should be paying the top users to stay so the 95% has something to read.
Imagine if youtube creators had to pay instead of be paid.
Isn't that essentially what demonetization is, just without the predictability of a regular monthly bill?
Granted, it's not a perfect 1:1, I just wanted to find an excuse to snipe at YouTube.
Instead of conversation about how Elon would use twitter to undermine democracy, civil discourse, whatever, everyone is talking about what’s a fair price to pay him to undermine democracy, civil discourse, whatever.
However, politicians lying and gloating after basically yet another domestic terrorist attacks, politicians trying to make it harder for opposition to vote will stay.
> We’ve launched Twitter Blue in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In these regions, Twitter Blue is available for in-app purchase on Twitter for iOS and Android, or on twitter.com through our payment partner Stripe.
This is not going to help their finances either. Someone [1] did a calculation:
"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 $5 billion a year. Musk’s apparent plan would generate about 30 hours’ worth of annual revenue."
I think your analysis oversells the potential.
"$COMPANY_NAME is currently free to use. Unfortunately, we do have employees and computers to pay for to keep things running. When we hit 1 billion users, we intend to start charging all our users a very small fee: 1 hour of minimum wage in whatever country you live in for an entire year's access. For example if you live in the UK, this means you'd only pay £9.50 for the entire year. If you live in Portugal, you'd only pay €4.38 for the year. Your first year will always be free to see if $COMPANY_NAME is right for you.
Your IP address currently shows you're from $COUNTRY_NAME. This means a year's access for you would be $COUNTRY_MINIMUM_WAGE. This fee will only ever increase if your government increases the minimum wage of your country and will always stay pegged to that rate.
This means that, regardless of where you live in the world or how much you earn, access to $COMPANY_NAME only requires, at most, a single hour of your time each year to continue using. This allows us to keep the platform free from ads, tracking, and from wasting money on useless VR products nobody wants. Help us build a better, fairer future for everyone: not just shareholders."
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 there was some seriously good competition. I think most minimum wage workers will see one hour of work out of an entire year as reasonable, it's a lot less than most other tech subscriptions. And to anyone earning above minimum wage it's begins to become practically nothing. There would be moaning for sure, but compared to other utilities it's an absolute bargain.
I think social media needs to start being seen as a boring utility which it really is rather than the never ending frothy hype machine of myspace/facebook/instagram/snapchat/tiktok/future platform which only really serves the VCs and investors who earn money. I think there's a lot of people out there who don't want to have to keep on learning new platforms endlessly, they just want something that everyone they know is on, that works well, is simple, and that doesn't track them or bombard them with ads. I think this is part of the reason why LinkedIn has been so successful in that it is quite boring and doesn't change much.
In a way there should be the frothy hype machine apps for the youth and then the one boring adult platform for when you grow up and stop being an idiot and don't mind hanging out with your parents again. Facebook kind of was this platform, but then most people abandoned it other than the elderly (e.g the completely tech illiterate) because of how manipulative it got.
The other alternative, which I think a lot of people would hate but might actually solve the problem, would be for Apple to finally give it a shot and release something. They're already a heavily moderated walled garden and verification could easily be proven through Apple Wallet. They could easily plug things into the existing apps, e.g an instagram photo feed in the photos app, facebook style groups in the messages app, profile page integration into the contacts app etc. Maybe one new standalone "Community" app which has two tabs: an "everything" feed from all your contacts and then a Discover tab for popular posts nearby in your town. A focus on your actual family, friends and community rather than videos of randos dancing a million miles away that add nothing to your life. I think they may end up with some regulatory heat on them if they succeeded though; they would end up being extraordinarily powerful.
Maybe in your tech savvy circles.
In my experience, poor people are not adverse to paying things, they are just being priced out by poor salaries and greedy shareholders. These services don't need to grow and change. Every company does not have to be a trillion dollar rocket ship of growth. Hacker News has been the same for years. Just offer me a basic, functioning service and a small fee for the upkeep. Anything else only serves shareholders rather than actual users.
- Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam
- Ability to post long video & audio
- Half as many ads
He starts off with "Power to the people", but this is just "power to the people with money"(which is the status quo). If you don't have $8/mo disposable income to spend on a vanity feature, then what you have to say will be overshadowed by the people who do.
This makes it available to anyone who is able to get a Netflix subscription.
It goes from a status symbol to a commodity. The Lords will hate it because it makes it available to the peasants.
Why would I pay $8/month for a materially worse experience?
But it seems reasonable for an app having payd and free tiers, with the free tiers being add supported.
Somehow the app has to pay bills and staff.
If I'll find Twitter of any use at some point in time, I will pay $8 if that will yield some benefits over free tier.
Some people can't afford to pay or don't want to, which is why there is also a free tier. It isn't like Musk forces everyone to pay, but if you derive some value from Twitter it is normal to pay.
I guess some people hate Musk and they are going to great lengths to justify their hate coming with puerile reasons about why Twitter suddenly became 'bad' and predicting it a quick death.
“Are you poor? Then, shut up”
FTR: I never used twitter
Explain the existence of libraries, parks, and medicare to me then.
So turning it into a paid-for service puts Twitter in a weird spot, where they can probably be sued again about this because "verified only if you pay" is alternatively interpretable as a shakedown racket - and Twitter knowingly allowing people to misrepresent their identity to defame people makes Twitter liable again.
But (2): this just isn't worth any money to anyone. There just aren't that many people for whom Twitter-verified is a worthwhile expense. Word-of-mouth verifies accounts easily, and once everyone knows @nyTimes is the New York Times official account or whatever, then its entirely unlike something like TLS where the process provides an active component in validating or securing the content or link. Optimistically this is worth like USD$30 million a year to Twitter...out of about USD$5.5 billion of year-over-year revenues. Or about 47 hours of revenue.
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ton...
There will probably be a new advertisement segment for users of Twitter blue. Companies will be able to advertise specifically to users willing to pay to disable ads aka more likely to have disposable income. Premium ads for the high spenders.
is anyone sick of this salesman shtick? it's even more egregious when used as some form of crusade for the people.
let's be clear here, the 8 dollars a month is the motivation. He doesn't give two-shits about any moral sense of right or wrong or the well-being people that used the service.
he'd be more respectable/relatable if he had said "It's 8 bucks a month because I need to pay back the loans."
The same logic for twitter gives $45B/400M users = ~$110/user.
99% of those users are useless but 1% are not.
In my view, Twitter is a propaganda machine with its 1% influencers/journalists/prophets that overflow world media and their billions of viewers/consumers/voters.
If it succeeds, then the containment mechanism of Twitter is intensified even more, due to twitter-users feeling the need to "get the most" out of their reoccurring monthly bill, in effect leaving the remaining fun outskirts of the internet unmolested by comparison.
Asking as someone who doesn't care about social media at all, and has never used Facebook or Twitter, except for clicking the occasional link to some tweet.
So, if I get rickrolled on twitter, I can tell whether it was a post by the real Rick Astley or by some impersonator.
Or for another more topical example, the tag #TrumpIsDead is currently trending on Twitter. If I click on that for more information, the verified check might tell me who has notoriety as a journalist or which accounts represent official news organizations, vs who is trying to further promote a false meme (in protest for Elon forbidding content moderation in the lead-up to the US elections)
That said, this doesn't really say "Global Town Hall".
At best assuming approximately the 420,000 [see Ref.1] folks currently on twitter will pay $8/Month - which gives about $40 Million in *annual* revenue.
Will the economics work if the advertisers stay out ?
Also, why charge in the first place if the number is too low ( < $40 Million).
Source : [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/28633/verified-users-on-twitt...
I guess what I am trying to say is that for 8$ every month you should be getting more than just a status symbol (which possibily not that many people care about anyway) and be stuck with ads.
Also, if Twitter is serious about creating a revenue stream for creators it should focus on creating valuable experiences for users that incentivize loyalty to the creators and not hand out verification status (which would become insignificant anyway if everyone has it).
Probably this will increase SNR of twitter to some degree, we'll have to see!
> Musk wants to start charging people to have a little blue check mark next to their names on Twitter. I wrote yesterday about reports that the price will be $19.99 per month, but that seems not to be a final decision, and other numbers have been suggested. Also last night Musk was personally negotiating the price with Stephen King. “$20 a month to keep my blue check?” tweeted King. “[No], they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.” Musk replied: “We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?” I absolutely love that, in between his busy schedule of reading printouts of 50 pages of code per Twitter employee to decide who to fire, Musk is personally going to negotiate commercial terms with each of Twitter’s hundreds of thousands of verified users. I have a blue check, I’m gonna tweet “I’ll pay $7.69” and see what he says.
An obvious solution could be revenue-share similar to how YouTube does - post a viral tweet that generates $x in ad revenue for Twitter, receive some percentage of that. Make it available only to blues who pay and ... (Musk if you use this send me car or a rocket :P )
Sure seems like Musk will be selling the desiccated corpse of Twitter to Verizon within a decade. On the bright side for him, he'll never have to pay tax again after writing it off.
The verification badge will only be used to know whether someone is human verified against an ID. And the other indicator will tell whether they’re a celebrity.
This way we will still have a way to know whether it’s a celebrity, and it will also solve the bot problem.
They should have:
1. Created a new “VIP status symbol” icon (diamond?) for people who care / need / want the prestige (charge for it or don't) - I'd almost fork the existing checks over to it for simplicity.
2. Kept blue check for actual identity verification (this is a real human).
3. Added features people care about (editing / etc…) to Blue and charge for them.
Tying the verification to features is...just odd. #sigh
I think cost might be a problem with Blue. I mean, I collect domain names for fun. I don't think Twitter can provide the right tools to guard against false blue account claims.
They were using phone numbers for antispam; hopefully $8 will serve the same purpose.
Twitter’s had employees that sold user PII to murderous foreign governments. It is not safe to have PII associated with a sufficiently controversial Twitter account. Maybe they can accept crypto payments for this during signup.
I bet they can sell this twice. Once here and once to advertisers that want to advertise to the more exclusive crowd
Edit: They already plan to add a tag for public figures.
Should be: $1.99 for every user with optional $7.99 upgrade to validated ID/Blue checkmark. No ads. Way fewer bots.
Focus completely on functional/feature engineering and dismantle advertising system.
Branch out into VOIP/Email services. Total communications platform instead of "social media" should be his direction.
If it does, $8/mo for a blue check and reply priority seems like a pretty good deal for all those people impersonating Elon musk to run crypto scams
However, the existing Twitter Blue is still being listed as $5/mo.
While nice to think that every comment I make to a tweet is read by the original tweeter, at the end of the day I honestly am not heartbroken if they do not.
And I most definitely do not reply to tweets with the idea that others will be so amazed by my brilliance that they follow me. Is that really a thing?
This would align the value and goals for both Twitter and blue checks.
Would it have made any financial sense? Of course not. Would it have been the ultimate post-modern, trollish, liberating move imaginable? Absolutely.
It really wouldn't even be worth it either, because Musk is worshipped on Twitter and Reddit and nowhere else. He isn't Trump, he can't mobilize half a country to love him unquestioningly. This is the only place where his childish taunts about turning Twitter HQ into a homeless shelter will find an audience.
Up to 1000 followers = free tier
1000 - 100,000 followers = $8/month
100,000+ followers = Call us
Edit: The fact that Truth Social was bankrolled to the tune of millions of dollars should illustrate the value of being able to tweet to the masses.
Just killed the spammers and bots.
This is less about making huge profits and more about making it not worth it to pay money to spam and get banned.
It's a tough engineering problem but surely someone could solve it ...
1. Charge $8/mon and a bunch of people will pay 2. Fire a bunch of engineers 3. Twitter looks way better on paper 4. Flip the company in 18 months when rates go down and market is better esp tech
Charging for the blue check moves it from a status symbol to a utilitarian one.
It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money.
https://twitter.com/naval/status/1587523978456748033
The blue checks wanted to abolish billionaires, in the name of equality.
The billionaire will end up abolishing the blue checks, in the name of equality.
roughly speaking: blue checks are about status and tech billionaires about startups. It's old money vs new money.
Old money wanted to kill new money. New money is wiping out the status of old money.
The blue check actually arose as an anti- impersonation tool. Twitter was forced to implement it after complaints.
But people who are impersonated tend to be "important". So it became a status symbol. Especially for writers.
The one form of equality a journalist will always resist is the idea that everyone is now equal to a journalist.
But that's what universal verification does. Everyone who needs one can pay for a blue check. Bots get taxed. Twitter makes money. Establishment journos hardest hit.
Further reading
1) @sriramk on social networks as games: https://a16zcrypto.com/social-network-status-traps-web2-lear...
2) @eugenewei on status as a service: https://eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
There is no mechanism for anti-impersonation if all it takes to get a blue check is payment. Bot farms can also pay money for blue checks...
Raising the costs has a general effect of cutting out people who do not care enough to pay - be it individuals, companies, or governments.
----
[0] - https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
I still have no clue why bots would care to have it though, since there is obviously a very high percentage of people who don't.
I guess I don't get this 5-D chess the masters of the universe are playing. From my plebian plane it looks like a monkey flinging poop at a wall.
At $8/month, that's patently not true. Why should verification be anything other than a pay-once deal, if it has to be paid for at all?
Who needs one that cannot afford $8/month? Does anyone really need it?
> Why should verification be anything other than a pay-once deal, if it has to be paid for at all?
It is not just verification though. Verification is just part of the subscription.
A lot of freelance writers, in my experience.
> It is not just verification though. Verification is just part of the subscription.
That's a fair point, but why not make verification free (or a one-off payment) and remove it from the subscription feature package?
"There will be a secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure, which is already the case for politicians"
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587527711228149765?s=46...
All the Musk fans, happy to see their messiah disrupt an institution, played like an absolute fiddle. This is hilarious.
The king is dead, long live the king!
Or just a person likely to be impersonated for various scams or other social attacks? How does anyone see a blue check as anything other than that?
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/1587509202401927168
> Absolutely no one should pay $8 or $20 a month to support Elton Murk's latest scam. Asking low-income Twitter users to pay $92 a year so their tweets don't get hidden and deprioritized alongside bots is not giving "power to the people."
This proposed subscription prioritizes content based on who can/decides to pay $8 a month.
How exactly is this leveling the playing field?
And the offering is not just about verification, but other Blue features. Personally I have no interest in a blue check, but I'd happily pay $8/month to remove ads (unfortunately only half the ads will be removed in this iteration).
I'm curious how many low-income Twitter users now have a blue-check.
Until suddenly there are yellow checkmarks available for $100/month, and red checkmarks available for $500/month, and enterprise-only green checkmarks for $5,000/month.
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
It doesn't have to be either/or: make something cool, throw out a link to it, repeat.
E.g., someone in poverty today isn't particularly comforted by knowing they have luxuries that former kings didn't have, like plumbing, because well-being is tied to relative scales
It is objectively better to not have to go out in the cold to take a shit at night, even if you're "poor".
Consider that fact that at one point in the past you probably thought what you have now would make you happy. And maybe for a short time you were. But invariably that feeling of well-being wanes. You can say your new car is objectively better than your old one, yet after having it a few years it feels exactly like the previous vehicle from the standpoint about how much it contributes to your well-being. If well-being were an objective fact, you'd still feel happier with the new car. Most of the time, we have an innate ability to shift the goalposts, which keeps us continuously striving. To that extent, well-being is all subjective. I'm sure people in 200 years will wonder how we ever got along with our miserable existence without the creature comforts they take for granted.
I agree with your point on human psychology, but survivorship bias is relevant here.
One way in which my new car is objectively better is that it has better safety features, which makes me less likely to die in a crash. My feelings about it may well normalize over time, but only if I survive long enough.
The correlation is not perfect, but lots of creature comforts actively make us live longer. In addition to the comfort of pooping indoors, indoor plumbing also makes it easier to wash your hands with warm water afterward, harder to trip and fall on the trip to the outhouse, both of which make you live longer. The people who die don't get to psychologically adjust to their premature deaths.
>My feelings about it may well normalize over time, but only if I survive long enough.
Based on what you said, it implies that well-being drops as a time-dependent function. Yet when we study psychological well-being, we see the opposite trend except at the very, very end of life when well-being dips. If your assumption were true, wouldn't well-being be expected to continually drop across one's life? (Unless, I suppose, the other assumption is that we bolster that through more consumption.)
I think this is change in how you initially framed the problem. If "better" can be objectively measured and "better" correlates to happiness, then I wouldn't expect it to normalize at all. The fact that it does change implies that subjective well-being doesn't actually hinge on how objectively better something is.
No, sorry, that was not my intent at all. My point was to get you out of thinking of well-being as a purely psychological phenomenon.
Dead people have no well-being at all. Many advances improve our well-being in an objective sense by keeping more of us alive longer. This is not a psychological effect.
And there is definitely survivorship bias. When you survey people about their psychological state, you only survey the ones who aren't too dead to respond.
What is the correlation to outcomes? Are you saying a negative outlook correlates to higher survivability so we are primed to view everything through a more negative lens?
That makes sense from an evolutionary psychology point of view, but doesn’t explain why we the well being wanes rather than just stays low from the onset.
Would you say the same about GitHub stars? There's no end of people obsessing about those, completely oblivious to the fact that they're first and foremost bookmarks, and do not confer any particular sentiment for a starred repository. And yet, they're a popularity contest.
Journalists and VCs care about this because enough users care about this that it can be used to print money.
Despite being in tech and working adjacent to Big Tech, in my circles only HN and Twitter users are this up in arms about Twitter. They seem to be more concerned about this than even friends of mine who work at Twitter (who are more peeved by the current instability in the company than anything going on with the product.)
It's fun popcorn on HN right now but if this continues it'll get pretty tiring IMO.
There is no mystery here. It went like this:
1. Musk signed a binding agreement to buy Twitter.
2. And then he got cold feet when he decided he didn't like the deal he made and he spent six months desperately trying to not buy Twitter.
3. And then he finally understood that he would lose the court case and that he had to live up to the contract and so he bought Twitter at the originally agreed price.
4. And now Musk wants Twitter users to pay for his poor business decision and fund him out of his debt.
If 1% of twitter accounts pay then that is $400M/yr which is a decent chunk of revenue for twitter. It is absolutely about making money.
All the government and official accounts along with CEOs, actors and other public personas will be almost forced to pay up. The existing blue check marks who don't pay up will probably be made up for 10x by wannabe youtube personalities that pay for it.
The "blue check establishment journos" are also almost all upper middle class liberals, there's not much of a morality story here other than PMCs and capitalists having a squabble.
The old money (journalists of mainstream newspapers) can leave and take all the audiences with them. Their audience is there for the narrative and ideology, not because they are fond of Twitter.
Twitter does not have a "native" audience, because it claims to be a platform. If they engaged deeper with content producers (like substack does) they might have. It's a solely megaphone, hence useless without a voice behind them.
Old money reigns supreme because the "new" voices are not independent. They go on twitter so they can graduate to mainstream media (or to onlyfans)
Are you implying there are no legitimate discussions between non-checkmarked users today on Twitter? That there is only a leader(check-marked users) and follower dynamic?
twitter is propped up by the mainstream media, not the other way around. if mainstream journalists leave, twitter will be tumblr. for new twitterers, twitter is not a platform to stay on, but a bridge to graduate to somwhere else or build your audience and move it elsewhere (a book, podcast, youtube, articles in mainstream newspapers etc).
For example, one can say that Joe rogan used to have a 'home' on youtube, now on spotify. Who has a permanent home on twitter?
I can't wait to be disregarded just as a spam bot because I thought it's an embarrassing waste of money.
So it becomes worthless to the ones who want it as a status symbol. Why pay if you aren't something special afterwards?
Crypto scammers make so much that paying $8 is pocket change if it means having scam tweets be more visible.
If (say) 5% of people leave Twitter, will journalists notice? Of course not, they'll just keep pretending like "people on twitter" == "people".
That said, I killed my twitter accounts on elonday, and saw a dozen accounts' worth of coworkers do the same in just a random slack thread. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't have a ton to do with elon, it was just a good time to say goodbye to a service that I've failed to find utility in over the past dozen years or so, just like the vast majority of America, and, indeed, the world.
I have a blue checkmark, and twitter doesn't know who I am technically.
The problem more is that I don't believe he has anyone he trusts inside Twitter to bounce ideas off of, or whom he values input/feedback from.
I honestly don't believe he knows the technical challenges of the service, only having perception as an external user. And I don't think he really sees value in understanding how Twitter currently operates, seeing how he waived all his rights to due diligence when he made his original bid.
Identify with a document issued in country x...? You pay the price adjusted for that country, regardless of your IP geolocation.
Like paying to watch ads on television.
The bad news is that it recreates the lords vs servants dynamic that Musk is claiming to want to get rid of. $8 is not much for everyone reading on HN, but guess what, we are very much the in the globally privileged 1%. He later adds something about purchasing power equivalent, but localised pricing suddenly makes this into a much bigger technical challenge
I don't know how the financial transactions & stuff work in the background, but the point is that you have more information and more options.
This move perhaps limits spam as practiced today, but the attacks that will happen once the network changes will be different in ways that are difficult to predict.
For quite a few "check marks" it will feel as a massive downgrade. Not only are they no longer special, they even have to start paying to be less special.
Yet for many, they have nowhere to go. Their current status (followers) is often unique to Twitter and not easily replicated elsewhere. Many came to power by years of unhinged "hot takes", the check-mark, and algorithmic boosting. This tactic doesn't really work on any other social network, not by posting small and ridiculous pieces of text.
Some dare to even flip it and claim they should not be paying, they should get paid, for they are "creators". I consider that to be quite generous. Sure enough they generate activity/traffic, but that's not the same thing as creating.
On Youtube, you can find videos of incredible production value. Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saWNMPL5ygk
Now, that's a creator. Tweeting "Biden sucks" creates outrage, but is not a creation. Stephen King is a creator as a novel writer, but his tweets specifically are not creations of any value on their own.
The way I draw this line is simple: can the creation stand on its own and widely be perceived as having value? For the video I linked to, clearly yes. For a tweet, when you disassociate it from who said it...nah.
With "value", I mean value to us. Clearly a rage tweet generating a lot of traffic and ad impressions has value to Twitter, but in my book that doesn't make you a creator that needs to get paid.
Musk has hinted though that he wants to onboard long form content and native video, so that could change things.
Finally, other than this leveling of status, I hope obscene algorithmic boosting is also looked at. One is often puzzled to see a random idiot having hundreds of thousands followers whilst producing nothing but mediocre garbage. The ultimate example has to be this:
No, I have nothing against that newspaper nor do I find them idiots. That account has over 50m followers yet near-zero engagement.
Now you can experience FreedomTM for only $8/mo.
License and taxes extra. May not be available in Hawaii and Alaska. Freedom is a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc. Some users experience nausea and vomiting, shingles, anxiety, and social destruction.
It is in fact not a non-story, since obviously this changes everything about how "verified" users should be considered in your feed (as nothing more than pay-to-play, where before there was at least a facade of curation).
how is that prioritizing your speech over others? There's a million ways to do it, and if you're a big boy you're probably throwing the big bucks. 8/mo is indeed not that much.
Just a product with slightly less disposable income.
$8/mo: Choose 2
$12/mo: Choose 4
$15/mo: Choose 6
etc.
Then people vote with their dollars which sources are important to them.
Simplicity would be challenging. It wouldn't work if it devolves into something resembling tiered Cable TV packages.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434502/twitter-blue-ad-...
Not only do I find the content vastly uninteresting, the way the content on twitter is reported by mainstream media is exhausting. I could really care less about the stream of conscious tweeting of celebrities and politicians. It's not "news worthy" in my estimation.
But clearly a lot of people find it useful, I am completely mystified how this could be.
To share another perspective, as a gamedev I'll miss Twitter. I doubt there will ever be as many creative people sharing their works in one place again. Things will get siloed and harder to find. Today, it's pretty cool to sign in and see amazing, inspiring work-in-progress. Reddit doesn't come close in my experience.
Because it pollutes other more "reliable" sources of information.
Because it's internet boredom distilled into its purest form.
And it's popular with journalists because now they don't even have to leave their house to ask the "man on the street" questions, they can just read twitter and regurgitate what they saw and be done with it. More and more articles are just Twitter posts reformatted, and once you start noticing it it gets painfully obvious how much there is.
Today, for example, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder posted a series of tweets criticising this article: https://phys.org/news/2022-10-bell-theorem-quantum-genuinely...
It was interesting to read and I'm not sure how I'd have seen her thoughts otherwise, unless she makes one of her YouTube videos about it.
I'm not trying to say Twitter is the greatest or even that you should join, just that Twitter has a lot of interesting people posting stuff that has nothing to do with politics or celebrity culture and some of us find it valuable.
So I guess it's kind of neat in one regard, but I think people might underrate how powerfully it rounds away distinct viewpoints or novel findings.
It looks like I'm using it exactly the opposite of your "real time event" mode. I follow people that are not journalists and don't comment on people nor events. Strictly ideas. There are other media much better suited to covering people and events and in real-time.
Not having an account - don't see how that can work. In incognito - which I presume is similar to me not having an account - I get to see only a single page with few messages, nothing more. And ofc not possible to follow accounts and thus shape the TL.
I never subscribe to trends, themes, areas of interest and similar devices used by Twitter to guess what tweets I'd like to see. Twitter is hopeless there (as is the rest of social media). Just "show me what the account I selected to follow posted" is plenty good. I can't divine why Twitter does not do that only, why the extra complications wrt what messages I see on my TL. It's not like it can't show me enough adverts while showing only messages from accounts I follow.
Aside: I'm mystified how one goes from "don't like it" to "should not exist". Why, what's wrong with "live and let live"?
This is Elon tactics 101.
You anchor people high with leaking outlandish (incorrect) pricing, that way when you officially announce the (always intended) pricing - it seems like a deal.
I have an alternative suggestion. How about I don't pay Twitter one red cent and continue to block their ads?
Literally it has penis pics, OnlyFans referrals, and an occasional sliver of humanity which has me question what they did to be flagged as always dead. But not my replies.
My replies only appear on my profile under the Tweets and replies tab.
In some cases, I would rather be in the click for more 'penis bin' than be shadowbanned.
People should Tweet directly at the person instead of hogging the reply space with OT insults.
edits: wording