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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

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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