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Comment by memish | Hacker News Reader

The idea that someone who is addicted to Twitter and worth $500M would leave because they lose their special Blue Check over $20 is hilarious.

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.

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Anywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience. That's what's so funny about this particular example. There are indeed Twitter celebrities who depend on Twitter for their audience, but King isn't one of them: he's pumping more credibility into Twitter than he's extracting from it, and the platform (and all the Twitter celebrity remora attached to it) depend on people like him to keep doing it.

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.

I think it is true of most. If your identity is worth verifying by Twitter, it is apparently worth something to Twitter. If you wanted to prove that your twitter account was you, you wouldn't need their permission, right? Surely you could sign a file on your Twitter account with your PGP key or whatever.

This has always been the bullshit story Twitter tells itself about the blue check. In reality, the value of the check has practically nothing to do with verifying identities, and everything to do with conferring status on people "notable" enough to qualify. The energy source for that status is, in fact, people like King, Swift, LeBron, Obama (and Trump), J. Lo and Jimmy Fallon; Twitter trades off the idea that the check puts its users in the same status tier as those celebrities.

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.)

To be fair, it was specifically introduced because of how impersonation of well known people was becoming a problem. Twitter was sued by Tony La Russa because of an impersonation and had a bunch of celebrities complaining about it. [0]

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...

This is all accurate in my experience but I’d add an additional dynamic that I’ve noticed in a lot of accounts I follow- people who are somewhat popular but not huge celebrities who do have blue checks who since the announcement was made seem to be upset that their coveted blue check is going to be indistinguishable from one someone who didn’t “earn” it who is just paying for it. It’s somewhat like rewarding some kids in the class with a gold star then deciding later everyone gets one. Case in point: https://twitter.com/garyblack00/status/1587332152072568832

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.

>> Anywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience.

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?

Yes, this is really true. People on HN will see less of Stephen King, to the extent that they're not part of his audience (maybe HN is more of an Ari Aster crowd). But that doesn't matter: people aren't spending hundreds of millions of dollars on 2019 movies based on books he wrote in the 1980s because he's driving lots of Twitter engagement.

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 agree with you to an extent, but I will note that while most Americans don't directly use Twitter, I think a much much larger fraction are exposed to it. It's hard to escape when every news outlet and gossip farm cites it constantly and you have to factor that in when discussing its relevance.

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 left Twitter a few years ago, and other than stories about Twitter itself I can’t think of the last time I saw Twitter content.

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.

This is so true. Virtually all content in my feed is absolute shit and Twitter unlike Facebook and tiktok is terrible at driving engagement. Everything that’s suggested is crap. Probably just the nature of the platform and its content. I visit the site pretty frequently as a way to gauge stock market sentiment and for that it’s pretty decent but make no mistake the site overall is a bubble of a small sect of society who think they and the site are far more important than they are.

I don’t know a single person in real life who uses the site at all.

If he says something note worthy on another service won't news services and maybe even other twitter users report on it?

While this is true, I think twitter still greatly increases his outreach. It's the only reason most of us are hearing about him. Otherwise, I would definitely not be reading his blog. While I'm sure he would have a dedicated audience, it's not twitter. Not only that, but the more people start personal blogs the less viewers the harder it is to compete for views. For Stephen King, a generational talent, it may not matter-- but there is a calculation to be made for a lot of celebrities. It's kind of like what happened to Netflix; if every celebrity tries to start their own personal blog fans aren't gonna go check all their favorite actors, musicians, writers, developers, socialites, and youtubers blogs'.

Twitter is not greatly increasing Stephen King's reach.

Anecdotally this isn't true. The only time I have heard anything about Stephen King in the past few years has been in relation to a tweet he has made.

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.

People who have not heard of King before Twitter and only hear of him from Twitter are not going to be the people buying his books.

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.

Stephen King just reached me for the first time in decades.

Gross!

Outreach isn't reach. It's different for people to know you versus people actually following what you have to say every day.

Trump had 88.9mm followers on twitter. He has 3.9mm followers on Truth.

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.

Instead it should be $1/month to be allowed to post replies to blue-check tweets! (But leave quote-tweeting alone).

The Elon Musk dunk tank?

> Now any schlub with $8 can have the once exclusive symbol.

And as a consequence, it is not worth the $8. King's analysis is correct.

Stephen King is addicted to Twitter? He's posted an average of 2-3 tweets per day — I wouldn't call that addicted.

That is quite a lot.

It's quite a lot, but I wouldn't put it in the realms of addiction. It seems to be quite typical compared to even the personal (i.e. non famous) people I'm following; the higher profile accounts I follow tweet multiples of tens per day.

Not for someone who's fulltime job is writing and reading fiction.

Writing 3 lines of text a day is a lot for a professional writer?

It's really not

I would.

King writes 300-500 page novels at an age when most people are retired. 240 characters here and there is not evidence of much effort for him.

whoops! I misread, and didn't see the reference to King. I had thought it was a personal reference. Thank you!

I mean we could ask Stephen King I guess, he knows something about the topic.

And yet Musk was in his replies, haggling.

He wasn't haggling. He was mocking the blue check status symbol in King's face and audience.

$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.

We're not really discussing reality if you believe that Stephen King gets status from the blue check rather than it working the other way around. There are people that do (sadly, pathetically) extract status from blue checkmarks, but they're only able to do that because people like Stephen King play ball with this system. The "blue checkmark status" could literally be phrased as "people as high-status as Stephen King and those like him".

Obviously, substitute Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Selena Gomez, and LeBron in as appropriate to your particular interests.

Without people like Stephen King sharing their halo, the blue checkmark will soon be the mark of tryhards

To some degree it already is, for people who have the checkmark you haven't heard of outside of Twitter.

It's a well worn meme to mock people throwing a fit over not getting a checkmark.

When some dipshit pundit throws that hissy fit, the meme is dead on.

When Twitter annoys people like Stephen King, it's exactly backwards.

The elite have always used myriad silly ways to distance themselves from the unwashed masses throughout history.

The silly way Stephen King distances himself from the unwashed masses is the 400 million copies of his books that he's sold to them, and the various movies and TV properties built on his IP. Again: you're not talking about reality if you think people like King care about blue-check status more than Twitter cares about keeping them happy. You can wishcast that away any way you please, but that's all you're doing. Twitter needs Taylor Swift on the platform talking about Midnights. Twitter could kick Swift off the platform and do nothing at all to her popularity.

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.

“We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?”

If you can see mocking in those 3 sentences then I can metaphorically see you popping up and down on elons lap.

> [...] had no dollar value attached to it. It was literally unbuyable.

$44 billion seem to be the going rate.

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