[jeanlucneptune]

I'm a twitter "heavy user" - logging in daily and tweeting > 4x per week. Users like me make up 10% of users, but 90% of tweets.

I've been a heavy user X 15 years and I'm still not a blue check. I perceive no benefit in being verified and I doubt being verified would have/will change my experience as a user.

If they verified me for FREE I wouldn't care. $20/month to be verified on a site controlled by a maniac in the process of making the product unusable? No way.

After 3 days of Musk's ownership I'm already half-way out. As soon as these paid options are rolled out I will gladly be gone from the platform forever.

[MBCook]

Verification isn’t/wasn’t (supposed to be) about how often you used the platform.

It was so journalists and celebrities and such could be identified and you could tell if you were intersecting with the genuine article or a fake account impersonating them.

90 days to sign up before people lose their check mark. So 90 days until the clones come out.

I’m sure this has nothing to do with the MASSIVE amount of debt Twitter is now in and desperately needing money. Or getting back at all the journalists (a huge chunk of verified users) who Musk seems to hate.

3 days. It took 3 days to make a colossally stupid official policy change.

Also? Who comes up with a feature and gives the programmers a very short deadline with a threat to fire them if they can’t make it? That’s horribly cruel.

Oh right. Musk.

[ascagnel_]

> Who comes up with a feature and gives the programmers a very short deadline with a threat to fire them if they can’t make it? That’s horribly cruel.

This has to be a pretext to turn a layoff into a firing with cause, right? 7 days is absolutely ridiculous for something like this, even though they already have some (most?) of the plumbing laid via Twitter Blue.

Also, tomorrow is a non-governmental holiday in the US -- Halloween. I'd imagine quite a few employees with kids are taking time off, so this is also begging for a discrimination lawsuit -- CA law bars discrimination based on an employee's role as a caregiver of a child.

[minimaxir]

> I’m sure this has nothing to do with the MASSIVE amount of debt Twitter is now in and desperately needing money.

The irony is that even if every current Verified user paid in, it'd still not do much for Twitter's debt.

[MBCook]

I have really enjoyed Twitter. But based on some basic numbers I’ve seen, it wouldn’t surprise me if nothing Elon might do can save Twitter. It just seems doomed in the next few years purely from debt.

He may slow it down a bit. He could easily accelerate it. Companies that far in debt just don’t survive.

[ytpete]

He seems almost certain to accelerate it - Twitter is estimated to now owe over $1 billion per year in debt service payments due to the leveraged buyout: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-12/musk-s-tw.... If true they'll almost immediately be in a severe struggle to not fall into default.

[dragonwriter]

> Verification isn’t/wasn’t (supposed to be) about how often you used the platform.

It wasn’t, but it is now.

> Also? Who comes up with a feature and gives the programmers a very short deadline with a threat to fire them if they can’t make it?

Someone who wants to do layoffs, but characterize them as firings for failure to meet performance expectations.

[imron]

> official policy change

Can you point me to the official policy?

Because last I checked, official policy wasn’t determined by media outlets quoting anonymous sources with knowledge of the situation, who may or may not have their own axes to grind.

[insanitybit]

Same here. 2.5k followers, probably tweet 4x per day. I do not give a shit about being verified. I have never so much as investigated what it would take to get verified. If I had >1M followers I suspect that I would also not give a shit.

Maybe if I were a brand? But... idk. I guess our company account could get verified, not sure I'd bother.

For very large companies it seems like it's in Twitter's interest to have them verified, less so for the company. ex: fake "Coinbase" accounts are all over Twitter telling you to send them a dm to reset their account or whatever, it's in Twitter's interest to reduce that content on their platform. Making it harder to differentiate "real Coinbase" vs "fake Coinbase" seems like it will only increase their problems.

Similarly, everything I have seen from Musk so far has made me consider alternatives. In fact I wonder if the time for Twitter has passed for me. It was excellent for growing my career initially but at this point I'm more likely to network elsewhere, more likely to ask for tech help elsewhere, etc.

[jeanlucneptune]

Agree on the utility for corporations of having an "official" account to guard against impersonators. But if Twitter becomes a ghost town it probably won't even matter if you're verified or not.

[minimaxir]

A number of Twitter users have been correctly pointing out that anyone who pays $20/mo for a blue checkmark is more opening themselves to being shamefully dunked on than anything else.

[Nicksil]

>A number of Twitter users have been correctly pointing out that anyone who pays $20/mo is more opening themselves to being dunked on than anything else.

That says a lot about those Twitter users.

[superchroma]

It is really a thing for personal and commercial brands. You don't need it, evidently. Considering it's intended to prevent impersonation, making it a paid feature isn't an awesome idea unless there still is a documentation verification step.

[conanbatt]

It would still be free for you. What's the conflict?

[jeanlucneptune]

My belief is that under Musk being verified will have a significant impact on your experience as a user. In other words, I think we're heading to a regime where you get verified or you're forced off. No Twitter for free users.

[midoridensha]

Sounds good to me. I hope he jacks up the prices massively too.

[seydor]

he's counting that people like you won't leave, because the platform obviously matters to you and you already consider yourself invested. But now you have to kinda justify paying $20 ... probably by monetizing your audience or something. Going from $0 to $1 is a huge change for almost any social media following.

[miked85]

A blue check has never had anything to do with how many times you login to the site.

[ClayM]

same -i'm an extremely heavy user, now i'm investigating what alternatives are out there

[jeanlucneptune]

Jack's launching Bluesky soon, which is apparently just repurposed Twitter stack.

Tribel looks like another option that many people have been talking about.

Lately, I've been spending more time on Reddit.

Another option is to replacement Twitter with ... nothing.

Food for thought.

[reilly3000]

I’m not really read up on it, but I think Bluesky and Twitter are not really operating in the same space, and certainly not in the same way. Bluesky is building a protocol and selling a hosting platform. I started thinking about that model years ago, making a social protocol makes sense and it’s time for a Mastodon for the masses.

Twitter has built an incredibly resilient and scalable real-time message delivery over all IPN, email, and cell endpoints the world has to offer, and world class search, data, and ad stack. It used to make news when Twitter when down. It still does, and it set a record in July of being down for 45 mins. It doesn’t break at 1 billion messages/day. I forgot what the fail whale looks like.

If Bluesky the protocol rocks but the open source hosting sucks, Bluesky the business will do great. I’m sure their team can build a magnificent stack. I worry the business will be greedy, but the protocol will be widely adopted and centrally governed.

From their site https://atproto.com/:

Federated social

Connect with anyone on any service that's using the AT Protocol.

Algorithmic choice

Control how you see the world through an open market of algorithms.

Portable accounts

Change hosts without losing your content, your follows, or your identity

Twitter is crippled with debt and bursting with defectors. Bluesky or anyone else who wants to win the future needs to handle mass migration, user engagement, scaling issues, support, and needs to be able to do so quickly.

I love the idea of a marketplace for algorithms, and I think there will be a new class of moderation filters as a service. Perhaps there is a community baseline, and tools to make your own, but mostly people will pay to eliminate noise and curate their experience.

[pfraze]

> which is apparently just repurposed Twitter stack.

What makes you say that?

[holler]

Just replied to your latest tweet with alternative I'm building (https://sqwok.im). It's a slight twist where each post includes a live public chatroom instead of the reply model Twitter uses. Slightly different experience geared for fluid conversation.