Will Twitter outlast this lettuce?

I think we can't really have a guesstimate without knowing the rest of the story because the rest of the story is about what you get by paying $8.

The blue tick as an ornament definitely doesn't bring 8USD of value but it can bring value as something else and IMHO that value would be much higher if they keep identity verification intact and much less if anyone can buy it.

If it was "account maintenance fee" I suspect brands and politicians would have paid much more than the $8.

If it is going to be anyone who pays gets in, then for example a politician with a few millions of backing can have hundreds of thousands paid accounts to run their campaign. There is already reporting about countries like Russia and Turkey running large scale social media operation which probably cost much more than $8 per account and Turkey's Erdogan already expressed interest in Twitter's new paid blue tick[0] and said it would talk with Musk for localised pricing.

But in this case, the Twitter becomes much less interesting for the regular people and they might reduce or even stop using the service if all they see is paid propaganda.

I would have paid monthly subscription fee just to use the site if the content was spam and bot free but that's not happening. It looks like the best Musk can do is to optimize monetisation up to a point that the site doesn't die, he needs to strike a point where the content is good enough to gather an audience when charging the content creators that want to do something to the audience(sell them something, convince them in something) because the model he seems to be creating is essentially native advertising for monthly fee.

[0] https://onedio.com/haber/erdogan-mavi-tik-ucreti-icin-elon-m...

As far as I understand Twitter had a paid option for $5 before, the change now is that they're raising the price to $8 and more importantly they are coupling this to the blue verified mark. But the reports also indicate that there won't be any verification of identity anymore, which to me sounds like it would entirely defeat the purpose of the thing. If random scammers can just buy blue checkmarks they will very quickly lose their meaning, and why would you pay for them then?

I think there is more to it.... They will probably require a non-anonymous credit card and if things line up you are verified.

So it is probably +$8/month -75% of the cost of that feature.

"Pull out your credit card and pay" is a nice anti-spam feature and verification is a bank duty anyway. So it is pretty likely that any abuse can be pushed down to the person doing the impersonation.

Plus it is most valuable to brands (even personal brands), so $8/month isn't much.

Advertisers now are in "victim of blackmail" position. Think about it, Volkswagen tweet handle being auction off to "anyone" with free reign to post using "Volkswagen" name worldwide. They have reach the Yelp position (even bigger) and more entrenched. There way more celebraties and companies than restaurants. Nearly every westernized governments (and their ministries and agencies) use tweeters to disseminate information.You are looking at easily 1B per month simply from this kind of susbcription. 8 dollar might just be the retail pricing. There is always the premium-enterprise special pricing.

I think he expects a large portion of the other 300m+ accounts to pay $8 too.

> My money's on Musk.

Same. Worst case scenario for Musk is he gets Tesla to bankroll the takeover with some BS synergies as justification (like he did with Solar City). With fewer engineering resources, I don't expect any major changes to the platform. Advertisers might flee due to the uncertainty (and couldn't care less about Twitter) but as for the user base, they have no credible alternative to Twitter. Users will likely stick around for a while unless Musk pushes a few more footguns.

Musk also isn’t elected.

Agree, but... Twitter clearly ain't the sort of business where Elan has done well, and it may be a bad fit for both his personality and public persona. Twitter could outlast the lettuce...but "win" with 0.1x the monthly revenue, or otherwise be headed for "the next MySpace" status.

Agreed. For all his warts, he runs a ton of successful businesses.

More important than matters of intelligence: Musk’s public unpopularity means nothing to his power, whereas it meant everything to Truss’s.

If it's true that he fired developers based off lines of code then I think Liz Truss is smarter.

Looking better than Twitter, at least.

Elon is getting quite delusional

If only Elon would stop saying and doing silly things

This is clearly a joke

Elon's hate is getting quite delusional.

In a month everyone will have moved on to the next trendy thing to rage about and nothing will have changed at twitter

Twitter has been "done" for half a decade now. It just keeps going despite being a cesspool. It was never the trendy or the biggest social network. I don't think it will collapse.

I personally only use twitter to follow things. It is handy. You can follow updates on software or services. You can follow politics, celebrities, friends etc. I don't want to watch people dance or post altered selfies all day long. I also don't want to follow a bunch of rss feeds and shit.

Look at antirez's recent post about linked lists. It cam from people arguing about linked lists on twitter. About freaking linked lists. This is usenet territory here. Won't find that on any other social network.

Only thing that is similar for me is Reddit and it is also a cesspool, also keeps going.

Why do you think this would end up like Parler 2.0?

It's too early to judge.

Nonsense. For example Yahoo had the opportunity to buy Google for $5 billion in 2002, and 20 years later Google is worth more than a trillion dollars. Or look at another trillion dollar plus company Microsoft--and remember that it was IBM that came out with the IBM PC in 1981--and then IBM totally blew it.

"This thing Elon Musk is doing is insane, it's never going to work" is bound to be true once in a while.

Let's just give this some time, though...

The last one to slowly decay into a festering pool of goop, colonized by competing microorganisms seeking to dominate the goop with their own tiny idea of what success looks like, while higher ad-versaries extract sustenance from them and the goop for a short while, until a sticky dead equilibrium is reached.

I suspect outlast will be either twitter suffers some massive temporary outage that shakes confidence in the service as a whole or the venture itself collapses.

The next step is for Elon M. to cleanout the stables at the mic primes

> actively promoting corporate censorhip

What does “corporate censorship” mean to you in this context? Genuinly currious.

There is at least two different ways I can interpret your comment and they are basically polar opposites of each other.

Its also amusing seeing left leaning people announcing their Mastodon in a form of protest, then just continue posting only on Twitter. And soon to start visibly ponying up $8/month to Elon.

> Liz Truss didn't have a vested interest to maintain a $44 billion investment.

Liz Truss had vested interests to maintain a $1 trillion investment.

Liz Truss tried to implement a $48 billion tax cut plan that mostly benefited the very rich. She wasn’t elected to her position either (Conservative party insiders chose her).

In a sense the Truss premiership was a risky investment by the British elite that would have given them a massive windfall if it had worked. And Twitter is a risky investment by the American right-wing elite, many of whom put in their money with Musk without doing any due diligence (Ellison, Andreessen etc.)