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by FullstakBlogger 1072 days ago
The smart thing to do isn't to remove it; They should charge for adversarial features.

Pay your fee, you get not only an attention boost, but the ability to un-boost blues. If the net result is 0, the Nash Equilibrium is that everybody pays.

Look how many people "#BlockTheBlue" on twitter right now. Just charge them to make it easy. The real value in someone who's willing to pay to be seen isn't in their 8$ subscription, it's in the 100 other people they incentivize to pay you to shut them up.

3 comments

I mean, if they want to turn Twitter into SomethingAwful, that would be a good route.

Honestly at this point it's in such a bad state that it would be worth considering; a gamified war might be better than just every high-traffic tweet having hundreds of nonsense bluetick comments before you get to the real comments. It'd at least be more interesting; the bluetick content is usually just very dull, and tends to bring to mind the writing style of those wannabe-influencer posts you see on LinkedIn. (I think a lot of people paying for it are doing so because they want to be... a Twitter influencer? Are there even Twitter influencers, beyond dril?)

Probably not a _great_ way to build a sustainable business, though.

> I mean, if they want to turn Twitter into SomethingAwful, that would be a good route.

I can't say I know that this is their goal right now, but it's impossible for me to distinguish their actions from those of someone with that goal.

Give me the ability to set sliders to filter accounts and replies based on metrics like the number of their followers vs the number of people who have blocked them, and the number of their posts vs the number of their upvotes -- things that help me find the good stuff, and make it possible for me to access the "wisdom of the crowd" -- and I'd pay $20/mo.