[ea550ff70a]

You are missing the point. There is no value to paying 8 bucks a month as the perks are a joke and real verification is not a thing anymore, so why even bother? Also, these power users are amongst the ones that create content and/or drive traffic that Twitter needs (for advertisers). There is zero incentive for them to pay for it. And this is without factoring in the ideological/political battle happening on the platform. The platform is just Musk's toy now and the only thing he is doing a good job at is at alienating and pushing away long term users with his shenanigans.

[itsoktocry]

>There is zero incentive for them to pay for it

This sounds completely backwards.

They have to pay because they have to meet their audience where they are. It's how many nouveau celebrities make money. Some use every platform, pumping out vapid content to fans. They aren't going anywhere.

[anonymousab]

They don't care about meeting an audience, that's not the reason they use twitter; they create content for fun and for people who are interested to seek it out.

If you offered them a flat "we'll force 10,000 people to see your tweets specifically for just $5" they still wouldn't take it because that's not what they care about or what they are trying to do.

They are users of twitter just as much as they are creators and having their timeline flooded with the kind of content the new bluecheck users create has clearly given them a far worse experience, because the kind of people that would generally pay for the benefits your ascribe are generally the kind of people that these users don't care to interact with at all.

[itsoktocry]

They don't care about meeting an audience, that's not the reason they use twitter

Justin Bieber has over 100M followers, and tweets nothing but announcements. He's advertising. For free.

The idea that celebrities don't care about the audience they are reaching is utterly detached with reality.

[rsynnott]

I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding. When people talk about twitter power users, they’re largely not talking about influencers, they’re talking about accounts like dril, or about people who are well known for non-twitter reasons.

[oneeyedpigeon]

That might be true if the blue check were a sign of quality. As it is, at best, it's an unreliable sign of quality. And many power users have obviously concluded that it's a sign of poor-quality — why would you pay to associate yourself with poor quality?