Selling Blue Checks hits the reset button on Twitter's anointed elite | Hacker News Reader

Selling Blue Checks hits the reset button on Twitter's anointed elite

boingboing.net

27 pointsBalgair44 comments

The blue tick used to signal that the account was "verified," which meant "My profile says I'm X, and I have a govt ID to prove that I'm X." At some point that wasn't enough, and you needed to be notable according to whoever decided you're notable at twitter. And with this, of course, ideological biases crept in with complaints rising that only people at one end of the spectrum were being verified.

This move, in a way, gets rid of that subjective decision making and restores the objectivity of the process back to just checking against an ID. Of course, this requires some infrastructure and resources, both human and machine, and the ongoing $8 fee (adjusted by PPP) is justified.

Why are celebrities so pissed about losing the badge?

Steven King went viral threatening to leave the platform and I and everybody pointing fingers at Elon and I’m just here thinking “why does Steven King care so badly?”

Celebrities are people whose lives revolve around status. A blue icon loss might be funny to you and me, but to them it causes real distress because their Narcissistic self depends on such minor status symbols. It's really sad.

The biggest benefit of the blue checkmark is it allows certain people with notoriety to counter fake accounts by saying "The company running this website has been convinced this account is controlled by the actual important person instead of someone running bitcoin based scams"

Charging for that is just hostile to the community at large. It basically holds everyone hostage. How do you know the account you are looking at is controlled by the "actual" person in question?

At least, probably I think this is an issue.

> the actual important person instead of someone running bitcoin based scams

“Important” is incredibly subjective.

It’s also extremely unlikely anyone would pay $96 per year, per bot, so it’s expected that problem would work itself out.

Misinformation sources are typically not random poor people.

Bitcoin scammers are also typically not poor, but usually have enough cryptocurrency to buy stolen credit card databases.

I have to disagree. The blue check mark does not verify who you are. It verified your political ideology matched up with that of the blue check mark committee. Half the US population is already being held hostage by that group.

You seem perfectly okay with those people being held hostage but then complain when a rule is applied equally to everyone. Seems to me your idea is: rules for thee but not for me.

Candace Owens is Verified, Trump was Verified, Ben Shapiro is verified, Ron Desantis is verified, Trump Jr is verified, Tom Cotton is verified. These are the people who's political ideology matches up with the blue check mark committee?

Then again so is Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi. Who is the other half of the US population being held hostage by that group. Do you really think Communists make up 50% of the US population?

Why don't you take a look at not well known people on the right vs not well known people on the left. There is a massive imbalance of checkmarks. There is some arbitrary committee that decides whether or not you get a blue check mark.

The person I responded to said its used to verify your identity. If that was the case anyone who verified their identity should have one. But that is not how it worked. You could verify your identity and still not get a blue check mark if the committee decided to not give you one.

Also I'm confused where you got communists? I never once said anything about communists. At least try to have a good faith discussion instead of making up random things.

I'm calling bullcrap. Tons of far right people have been verified. Give me a not well know person on the left that has been verified and a comparable right person that was turned down.

So you are too claiming twitter check marks are for verification. But they are not any more. Its really funny that you know better than actual official twitter support account.

https://nitter.net/TwitterSupport/status/930926295034224641

"This perception became worse when we opened up verification for public submissions and verified people who we in no way endorse"

Directly from the horse mouth. Blue check marks are for people they endorse. They changed to rules to ensure it stayed that way.

I don't think anybody is saying people on the right aren't verified. They are saying those on the right are not verified as often. There are lot of people on the left who aren't really well known and have the blue check, but those on the right who aren't well known don't have the check. I don't know the veracity of the claim though.

Do you have a spreadsheet out there with all bluechecks, plus people who applied who were refused a blue check, their political ideologies, notability metrics, to demonstrate this?

Otherwise I think there's too much counter-evidence to your anecdote.

No that is why I said "I don't know the veracity of the claim though." I was trying to clarify what I perceived the actual point was.

I can’t speak for anyone else but the person I responded to said, unqualified “ The blue check mark does not verify who you are. It verified your political ideology matched up with that of the blue check mark committee. ”

I know. I think they left out a qualification which is why I piped in about what I perceive the actual point was.

It's just the usual sense of entitlement common amongst celebrities. If they receive a certain privilege for a while then they think they're entitled to it forever, even if they haven't done anything to earn it.

But as a business, Twitter doesn't want to kill off their advertising revenue. I'm not a fan of Stephen King and don't care what he thinks, but his followers probably bring in more than $8 of ad revenue.

Progressives have officially (in the meme sense) decided Elon is a right-wing puppet. Anything he does must therefore be considered evil. Therefore, this change in Twitter policy is evil.

Stephen King cares because he aligns with the Progressive Left as his tribe.

It doesn't matter whether the policy is equally fair, it only matters whether it possibly allows people on the political Right to start speaking on Twitter again. Not that this move guarantees anything like that, but it is perceived that this could be the result.

tl;dr: Stephen King has been led to believe this is the plan to get Trump back on Twitter.

> Chief Twit Musk, fresh from sacking the company's C-suite, clearing out the board and threatening mass layoffs, must now double Twitter's annual revenue just to cover interest on the debt that financed his acquisition.

Twitter's revenue is $5 billion-ish. The new interest payments are estimated to be $1.3 Billion/year IIRC (~10%, as a large chunk of it was fixed in April 2022, when interest rates were better). Hardly a "double the revenue" situation. So that already stands out to me as a rather problematic start to the article.

That being said, the rest of the point of the article seems correct to me. But its incredibly important to get a good grips on the scale of the problem here.

Elon now needs to deal with a ~$1.3 billion/year interest on top of all the other costs of Twitter, in a rising interest-rate environment. I don't think $8 / month over even millions of users will get there (and I'm not sure if Twitter will get millions of users to subscribe to the model).

> Twitter's revenue is $5 billion-ish. The new interest payments are estimated to be $1.3 Billion/year IIRC

Most quarters Twitter operates at a loss. 2021 its profit was less than $1B.

I agree. But words like "Revenue", "Operating Profit (loss)" and "Net Profit (loss)" have meanings.

Looking at the 2021 10-k statement, I don't know what number has to "double" to cover the estimated new loans (and besides, no one seems to have reported on the details of these new loans either. Even the $1.3 billion/year estimate I put forward is just a round-assumption of 10%ish payments).

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That paragraph there is... complete nonsense. I think its fair of me to point it out.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/947c0c3...

I'm surprised that we haven't seen even a modicum of uproar from a contingent of the currently verified that selling their status for $8 a pop dilutes their prestige. Instead this is like the eight dollar version of "I Am Rich"[1].

1. https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/technology-blog/story...

FWIW Steven King said he'll quit Twitter forever since if he doesn't get to keep his blue checkmark for free

lol - just like everyone who was going to move to Canada if things didn't go their way politically?

No, he won't quit and neither will the vast majority of them either.

And then proceeded to say that twitter(a free service) should pay him.

It's not free if you have to see ads or have your data harvested.

As they should.

Why? Unless he's teaching you how to write great novels, King's opinion isn't really worth anything in the grand scheme of things.

He'd have to learn how to write great novels first.

Here's an idea: have 2 checkmarks, both paid.

A blue checkmark for everyone at $8/month. And a green checkmark with a pretty badge for extensively verified individuals. This green checkmark should be unique enough to stand out from the blue one. These individuals must go through an extensive process. and the cost is $100/month.

Twitter Black, for $1000/month, allows you to screen out any tweets by checkmarks of lesser colors.

Twitter Yellow: filter opinions and viewpointa that you disagree with

Isn't that already baked in with the ability to choose which accounts you follow? I'm not sure, I haven't used Twitter in a long time, so maybe they made it like Facebook where they put stuff into your feed that you don't follow.

Kinda. My experience is somewhat limited. I was perma banned for discussing hunter bidens laptop and Ashley Bidens diary.

Maybe I'm way off base here, but requiring payment seems to be less about making money and more about tying an identity to the user and the legal nature of the relationship between the user and the service.

I also don't agree the blue checkmark is an ego thing, but just that it's necessary to do publicity work on Twitter.

I can't help but feel like the blue check means more to the people who yearn for it than the people who have it. The phrase "anointed elite" just seems bitter to me. I wonder if there's something about the worldview has an anointed elite that makes people feel special, and sort of ironically, it's those people that aspire to it who are really the ones that will feel the effects of the reset button, and not the people who have it.

Edit: getting downvoted, because people think this is wrong, and that Twitter elites do care? Or does this somehow come across as trolling, or against the spirit of HN?

Hint: This is a risk with engaging in political HN threads; it's a comparatively harsher crowd. In my experience it's sort of a losing proposition, but Ymmv.

Why stop with blue checks? I think blocking people/restricting access to your profile should also be part of a premium subscription.

I would pay for Twitter Blue if it allowed me to automatically block all current blue checkmarks holders.

One of Twitter's best features IMO is that you can mute specific words and phrases, and mute/block specific accounts including advertisers.

I'm guessing this will soon go behind a paywall.

At the bottom of this the question is "what does Twitter verification mean"?

In the past, it meant that the platform backed you and thought you were important.

Verified status had nothing to do with actually verifying the identity of who the person actually was. If it did then it would have been available to everybody, not the coterie that Twitter management anointed and specially protected.

Making it a $8 sub without identity verification is just as meaningless as it current is except with expanded application and a way to make money instead of stroking the ego of those that have it and frustrating those who can't get it.

> Making it a $8 sub without identity verification is just as meaningless as it current is except with expanded application

Where does it say that they're dropping identity verification?

It did say nothing about having it, too. That is suspicious since mass identity verification of millions of users worldwide is all but simple.

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