[artfulhippo]

Twitter's success derives from how well it serves the people who work on Twitter. Think politicians, business leaders, investors, celebrities, influencers, tech workers, journalists.

People who work on Twitter, who have built a large following, who use Twitter to propagate messages, to network with peers, and to learn facts and rumors, would pay not just $4/month but $4000. Whatever the price Twitter would charge journalists, they would gladly pay; it's a cost of doing business.

Actually, in addition to being a business expense, Twitter is a super-addictive dopamine hit ego booster, a game that makes it's high-scoring players feel important.

Twitter's problem is that it makes the low-scoring players feel bad. To use Twitter without a Blue Check is just not that valuable to most people. Just like the Twitter elites derive a sense of self-importance from their internet followers, the Twitter masses feel a sense of illegitimacy, an angst against the platform for driving the public discourse into a dumpster fire.

As long as Twitter provides news and entertainment, it'll get used. But Twitter insiders and power users (Blue Checks) would be well-served to heed the infamous advice: "Don't get high on your own supply."

[brnt]

> Twitter's success derives from how well it serves the people who work on Twitter.

Black Rock and Cato pushed Dorsey out. I thought this was common knowledge and a clear sign of where Twitter is headed (and indeed where some notorious Twitterers would have liked it to go a while back).

Getting high on ones own supply is precisely the point. Its meant to be addictive, for Twitterers and followers alike.

[boldslogan]

Can you give links for further reading. I think I read about certain investors but never saw black rock names as one who wanted him out.

[arthurcolle]

Who is Cato in this? Presumably not the Cato Institute? Lol

[perrylaj]

I'd assume it IS. Dorsey has recently been directly targeted by numerous Cato Institute publications and lobbying efforts [1]. Which is comical, given just a couple years ago Cato was pressing government to stay out of social network regulation [2, 3]. It was only when Twitter started penalizing disinformation/fact checking that they started changing their tune.

1. https://www.cato.org/blog/brief-history-deep-deplatforming 2. https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/why-government-should-n... 3. https://www.cato.org/blog/keep-government-away-twitter

[jdavis703]

I’m not sure a blue check is very important for engagement. I don’t have a blue check, and easily drive more engagement than many verified accounts I follow. And I’m not the only one.

[riffic]

Blue checks are an arbitrary decree from above that someone inside Twitter likes you. The whole thing is a sham.

[ghaff]

Blue checks are mostly reserved for some specific categories of users: celebrities, mainstream media journalists, and politicians. It's not absolute but my experience is that being only reasonably well known (thousands of followers) in, say, tech circles isn't enough to get a blue check. So it's not so much being liked but being in a category which Twitter has determined is important to avoid people faking identity.

I had someone spoof my profile a while back. (Chose hard to tell apart user name and used my profile pic etc. to do some crypto spamming.) Twitter promptly nuked their account but wouldn't verify me afterwards.

[jlawson]

While there are many factors, an essential one is that someone in Twitter finds you morally acceptable.

If Twitter thinks you're not morally good, they will actually remove a blue check which they previously granted (e.g. they did this to Milo Yiannopolous). If blue checks were just about identity veritifaction, this would make no sense since Milo's account's identity was never in question. Ergo, it isn't just about identity verification.

[honkdaddy]

This has been my experience as well. A perfect example is podcasters - Anna [1] hosts a relatively popular and occasionally politically inconvenient podcast called Red Scare. No check. Alexandra [2], the host of Call Me Daddy, also a popular comedy podcast, naturally has a check. This is pretty openly discussed by e-celebs of middling fame. Until one reaches a critical mass of popularity, you won't get a check if you don't correctly toe the culture line.

[1] https://twitter.com/annakhachiyan [2] https://twitter.com/alexandracooper

[retpirato]

The expectation to "toe the line" is twitter's problem.

[notreallyserio]

Did Milo lose his verified status because someone didn't like him or was it because he broke some rule in the T&Cs? IIRC he was a big part of "gamergate", a movement that acted hostile to a subset of Twitter's user base.

[ByteJockey]

That still implies it isn't about identity verification.

[solarkraft]

It's even a badge of shame in some circles.

[paulcole]

Which circles is it a badge of shame in?

[jdavis703]

The folks who rage against the media and political establishment (blue checkmarks are basically granted automatically to journalists at traditional media outlets and to anyone running for office.)

[spacelamb]

Yes; among these political groups, "blue check" is a pejorative as belonging to the member of the "liberal elite" [0].

[0] https://theoutline.com/post/1323/verified-blue-checkmark-der...

[ctdonath]

Blue check used to mean "identity objectively verified", useful to confirm the twiterati using the name is the actual person/group others think they are.

Then came the Great Bluecheck Purge, where anyone exhibiting opinions not preferred by Twitter management had their blue check revoked/denied - which in practice was applied generally to Republicans, who constitute about half the USA. (We're talking mainstream views, not just weirdos.)

Ergo, anyone with a blue check is, by Twitter decree, not a Republican. For Republicans, blue check now amounts to a "badge of shame" indicating Twitter-approved opposition.

Blue checks were changed from "identity confirmed" to "one of us, not them".

[riffic]

this happens to leftists, journalists, and other critics, not just repubs:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ba...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions

[iszomer]

Wouldn't it be amusing if Twitter started doing verified red badges to signify Republicans? I guess if they really want to be all-inclusive, allow users to customize their badge colors too.

(I didn't know what a blue checkmark was until I turned off dark mode)

[kbelder]

Sure, but it wasn't so absolute. They didn't uncheck all conservatives, they just applied standards unevenly (but probably, in their minds, justifiably), which results in disproportionate results.

It's an echo chamber problem, but I'm not sure it's deliberate.

[dymk]

This one

[nathias]

the well-educated circles

[artfulhippo]

Assuming that you "work on Twitter", ie, your career is in part built on Twitter, what do you think the value of a Blue Check is? I would bet it's worth more than $1000/yr to the average person in the "Twitter Middle Class" (someone using Twitter for work but not at mega scale). Even a single digit percentage point boost in engagement is worth a lot, or do you disagree?

[spacelamb]

A lot of journalists are financially poor, or at least don't make much income from their jobs. $1000/yr is a lot of money for journalists, especially at local newspapers.

Quite a few accounts I follow also don't have a Blue Check. If it started to cost money, I'm sure a lot of journalists would just choose not to be verified. The reason is that I'm not convinced that a Blue Check is tied to engagement with your Tweets, but rather the quality of your work outside Twitter.

[jdavis703]

Twitter is worth about the same as say a Bloomberg News or WSJ subscription to me. Perhaps slightly more. That is to say I’d pay a few hundred bucks for it.

But there’s no way I’m spending $1,000 a year on it if I can’t expense or write it off taxes (right now my usage is a mix of personal and non-personal, so it’s hard to correctly account for it).

[johannes1234321]

An issue is that for some it's not worth as much as for Twitter. If my local police department uses Twitter to send out notifications on a current event the blue check confirms authority. Without the mark one can't distinguish original from fake/parody within the platform, which hurts the platform.

But there certainly is a demography who would pay well. Question is where to draw the line.

[aj7]

One or two people always ‘get’ my better tweets. That’s good enough for me.

[datagram]

> Twitter's problem is that it makes the low-scoring players feel bad. To use Twitter without a Blue Check is just not that valuable to most people. Just like the Twitter elites derive a sense of self-importance from their internet followers, the Twitter masses feel a sense of illegitimacy, an angst against the platform for driving the public discourse into a dumpster fire.

I don't really agree with this. In my experience as a daily Twitter user, most of the posts I see that aren't from specific sub-communnities I participate in are from low-follower accounts that had one of their tweets go viral. I think generally as long as you have some followers, you're only one timely/clever joke away from hundreds of thousands of people seeing your tweet.

[RandomWorker]

Totally agree, I’ve met with people in person after hanging around and chatting with my sub community, they know what I think through my tweets and I know what they think. We share resources etc. it’s wonderful. It’s harder to join different communities where you want to say different things. I hate following people that are all over the place. Twitter works well to create a community around a cause or topic. But it’s hard as a generalist to say multiple things and think diversely.

[vmoore]

> Think politicians, business leaders, investors, celebrities, influencers, tech workers, journalists.

I always found it amusing that common people who are not that interesting share the same platform with influential people / thought leaders / celebrities. The fact you can just cold tweet and @mention a famous person out of the blue is highly parasocial and strange.

[handrous]

Well—you can @ their social media manager, anyway. Not much different than "calling your Senator" and getting some secretary in their office.

Though I'm sure some do actually use it themselves (Musk seems to, for instance)

[solarkraft]

A lot of them seem to and that's the big deal. Though they likely won't see your mention if they don't follow you.

[artfulhippo]

Verified Users get a separate priority queue; the real benefit of being a Blue Check is that other Blue Checks will see when you mention them.

[siruncledrew]

I would be surprised if Twitter doesn't already have some kind of behind-the-scenes payment arrangement for these "VIP" level users to protect their accounts and do whatever other special things.

If Twitter doesn't already do this, then it's dumb, quite frankly, from a business sense due to all the extra labor (in terms of engineers, support, etc) to provide services for these VIPs compared to normal users. Like you said, if these Twitter VIPs are having their cake and eating it too with monetizing Twitter for their own benefit, why wouldn't Twitter ask for a cut.

Twitter's already done what even other major social platform has done and become dependent on advertising revenue. If Twitter becomes all paid and charges even $1/mo, that would wipe out a huge amount of "normal" users that are accustomed to paying the price of free, and then that's going to impact the ad revenue because of lesser targeted normal people to advertise to.

I think the problem Twitter is going to face is how to balance all the plates they have in the air with realistic expectations.

It's the "classic" problem that these platforms want to solve to keep up with investor expectations. So far, there's mostly a bunch of 'little' approaches to this like selling some random digital trinkets or paying for some 'meh' extra features, but these things are like side-dishes that don't reap enough benefits to compensate for appetites of continuous profit expansion.

This is sort of like being torn different ways. From one angle, if Twitter "changing the formula too much" makes the platform worse and people leave, then they don't grow and face shareholder backlash. From another angle, if Twitter hits a wall on monetization and can't figure out how to boost their cap, then Twitter becomes an unattractive investment and will just kinda flatline growth. And finally, people could still just find a new thing to go to anyways and if Twitter does not and stays Twitter, people still might get bored and move over to TikTok or Reddit or whatever.

Basically, even Twitter shows it's still hard to balance reality with desire with mission.

[rhino369]

>If Twitter doesn't already do this, then it's dumb, quite frankly, from a business sense due to all the extra labor (in terms of engineers, support, etc) to provide services for these VIPs compared to normal users. Like you said, if these Twitter VIPs are having their cake and eating it too with monetizing Twitter for their own benefit, why wouldn't Twitter ask for a cut.

They probably drive a ton of engagement, which benefits twitter.

[riffic]

> behind-the-scenes payment arrangement for these "VIP" level users

Twitter licenses premium data APIs. Twitter's "VIP level" users are those that pay significant amounts of money to consume these data APIs to extrapolate whatever sort of information the data can provide.

You can research and confirm this yourself but sources for my assertion:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-24397472

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/19/what-will-happen-t...

If you're paying money to Twitter for this sort of info, Twitter bends over backwards to support you.

[AniseAbyss]

Why is there this assumption that people will pay for something that's currently free?

[bingohbangoh]

You could offset the costs of building "customer" filters for super users as well -- ones that do a lot of work to ensure certain people never comment or their comments are downweighted.

[JumpCrisscross]

Cap the number of followers free accounts can have.

[throw_m239339]

> People who work on Twitter, who have built a large following, who use Twitter to propagate messages, to network with peers, and to learn facts and rumors, would pay not just $4/month but $4000. Whatever the price Twitter would charge journalists, they would gladly pay; it's a cost of doing business.

No they wouldn't pay $4000 a month, you vastly over-estimate the willingness of users to pay for social media. Any paid social media was a complete failure. Twitter customers are the advertisers and data hoarders, not the people who tweet.

[cageface]

I've felt for a while that a pay-to-post model with a straight chronological feed would solve a lot of the problems of today's social media. I toy with the idea of building it myself.

[BbzzbB]

Twitter offers a chronological feed, the little star thing on the upper right. Works well to get rid of endless scrolling if you don't follow hundreds of people.

[aldonius]

Yeah and it used to switch back every time I reopened the app.

So I use Twitteriffic now.

[raxxorrax]

This would be the usual rent seek if news publishers had to pay and would also consolidate the richest media houses. Not really a good idea for anyone aside from Twitter of course.

[gandutraveler]

I would monetize the reach of a post if i were Twitter CEO. Today leaders politicians, celebrities, corps etc have such a wider reach through Twitter due to their following, so Twitter can set a default max threshold on the how many audience the post will reach to and allow users to pay for boost their reach.

[javajosh]

I like this because "reach" scales with "moral hazard" and so adding default network decay would help dampen the outragememes. But if you pay to take the dampening off you can be accurately judged for paying to propagate helpful or harmful things.

[solaceb]

But isn't the bottom-line effect that your model becomes pay-for-clout? That sounds bad on its face

[scotu]

this is literally ads.. and we saw how well that works (for say Facebook)

[austhrow743]

Incredibly well. Article even makes the comparison to Facebook.

[dsalzman]

I agree. It really is becoming the Bloomberg Terminal 2.0.

[3maj]

Twitter will never replace bbg.

[authed]

> Think politicians

Twitter is biased, that's what I think.