The dynamics on Twitter are quite weird. There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life. If you’re a journalist, being on Twitter is basically part of your job so maybe you should have to pay a bit more just like the customer of some business software ($100 pa seems pretty cheap there). Indeed maybe media publications should be paying for the blue checks for their staff. But on the other hand, these people are going to represent a large part of the draw of Twitter and so maybe Twitter should be paying them instead.

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.