Stephen King’s tweet on that topic, to summarize:
“ $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...
“ $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...
"Only on Twitter can we watch a man worth $200 billion negotiate with a man worth $500 million about saving $12 a month"
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.
...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.
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.
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.
> ...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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you pay 40 billion for something you expect a return on investment
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.
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.
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.
$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.