from Hacker News

Twitter Blue for $8/Month

by BryanBeshore on 11/1/22, 5:42 PM with 967 comments

by dan-robertson on 11/1/22, 9:28 PM
The dynamics on Twitter are quite weird. There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life. If you’re a journalist, being on Twitter is basically part of your job so maybe you should have to pay a bit more just like the customer of some business software ($100 pa seems pretty cheap there). Indeed maybe media publications should be paying for the blue checks for their staff. But on the other hand, these people are going to represent a large part of the draw of Twitter and so maybe Twitter should be paying them instead.
But other people use Twitter in different ways. If you mostly use it as a social network between your friends you might not care because they’ll presumably see your tweets because they follow you rather than because they found them in search or whatever.
If you’re using Twitter as a forum for discussions about some topic of your interest, maybe you’ll end up feeling crowded out in replies by people with the check. But if you’re at risk of being crowded out then maybe Twitter isn’t working so well as a forum. And I think that if eg A follows B and B retweets you, A should see your tweet whether or not you have a check. Maybe that isn’t so true with the non-chronological feed. If people in the community follow you then, depending on the dynamics, your opinions could still be spread via retweet rather than getting lucky in your position in the replies, no?
If you’re some reply guy, maybe your tweets should be downranked but then if you’re serious about it then I guess you’ll pay.
by danpalmer on 11/1/22, 6:17 PM
The good:
Twitter should not be editorally curating people through verification, making verification only about ID and being a real person is a broadly good change, as long as it's not necessary for participation. Brands, celebrities, those in the public eye could benefit from this. Needs to be implemented with care and ideally with a branding change so as not to confuse users as the semantics change.
The bad:
$8 is way more than the profitability of an ad supported user. There's no excuse for "half the ads", it should be none at all. See: every streaming service. (Edit: ok some streaming services have ads, but for most online content - video, journalism, etc, if you subscribe there are no ads, it's just nickle-and-diming users to give them a bunch of ads, particularly when the marginal cost for Twitter Blue is essentially zero).
The ugly:
Paying $8 to get your voice heard by more people biases towards those with means rather than those contributing to the conversation. At best this will reduce conversation quality on Twitter, at worst this is ripe for abuse.
by Waterluvian on 11/1/22, 6:18 PM
"Half as many ads" fascinates me deeply.
Has a business ever publicly quantified how many ads you get? Does YouTube say, "we expose you to an average of x seconds of commercials and y pixels of static ads"?
How do I know what half should be? We've all been there: "it feels like YouTube has cranked the ads way up lately..." Will "half" just become "full" when "full" gets doubled next year?
by jdlshore on 11/1/22, 11:36 PM
I'm likely to pay for it at that price. For reference, I have a bit more than 14K followers on Twitter.
Why? Two reasons.
1) Funding social media through advertising has led to dysfunctional outcomes like outrage being more visible than high-quality content. I’m in favor of alternative revenue streams, although they have to provide value, and removing ads doesn't count as providing value.
2) My Twitter account is part of my consulting business. Eight dollars a month isn't much to pay if it improves my visibility or perceived legitimacy. I'd be willing to try it for a year and see how it works out.
FWIW, I wouldn't have been willing to try it at $20/mo.
by pkulak on 11/1/22, 10:39 PM
Elon is the PM from hell. Has some shower thought and starts throwing tickets on everyone's board 45 minutes later.
This is why the Model X has those silly doors.
by minimaxir on 11/1/22, 5:48 PM
The price 100% was $20/mo as previously reported by journalists until Twitter dunked on it, and Elon's interpretation of the backlash is "the price is too high" and not "any price makes no sense at all."
This pricing clarification is most likely due to Stephen King's complaint: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
> We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?
by thorum on 11/1/22, 6:21 PM
Blue checkmarks are not just about verification and extra features. They’re a status symbol. They mean you are cool and notable enough to deserve one according the shadowy and mysterious Twitter checkmark committee. If they become a commodity that anyone with a little money can buy, they lose a big part of their appeal to the average person.
by qwertox on 11/2/22, 6:54 AM
The blue check mark was supposed to be a service for those consuming Twitter, so that they can have a bit more security by knowing that there's a higher chance to be following the person or thing they were intending to follow; it was not a service for those having the blue check mark.
That's why I don't understand why they want to charge for it.
Maybe a better thing would be to charge per-1000-followers (or per-10000 or bigger brackets) starting at a given threshold, as long as the account is used commercially, where being a star or influencer also counts as commercial use. But maybe even this is a bad idea, but in my eyes a bit better than charging for the blue check mark.
by Imnimo on 11/1/22, 7:44 PM
I don't really grasp the value proposition here. I can have "Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam", but is that valuable to me or to my audience? If I'm a regular no-name user, do I care if I'm lost in replies and search? And if I'm the Steven Kings of the world, that other users want to see content from, does it do more harm to me or to Twitter if my posts are hidden because I'm not paying $8 a month?
It feels like I'm being asked to pay $8 to solve a problem that belongs to Twitter (too many bots), not a problem that belongs to me.
by bedast on 11/2/22, 2:01 AM
The blue checkmark started as a way to verify high profile accounts to make it more difficult to impersonate them. Twitter made a huge mistake opening this up way too broadly and failed to course correct. Now Elon wants to turn this into a free-for-all and scamming on Twitter will be easier than ever, with the low low price of $8.
When asked about this potential problem, Elon actually replied "That already happens very frequently".
He has no plans to solve this problem. He accepts it as the cost of doing business. He sees no problem with this. There's nothing to solve.
I think I saw somewhere where he commented that Twitter wouldn't be able to survive on advertisers alone. Well that's because advertisers are likely to flee.
Forget about the idea of it becoming a "free speech" hellscape. It's going to become a scammer's paradise.
His lackadaisical attitude shows he really doesn't care about making Twitter better. It's now an expensive toy that he owns. And that's how it always was going to be.
by trh0awayman on 11/1/22, 7:24 PM
I would pay $10 a month for Twitter Black - it would block everyone with Twitter Blue and you get to interact with the dregs, the most controversial figures of all of Twitter, based on most reports/blocks/flags, etc. (minus the bots, crypto stuff).
That's the real town square. Let me sleep in the gutter!
by harry8 on 11/2/22, 12:05 AM
Twitter now blocks you from reading a timeline unless you have an account and are logged in for which they require a current phone number.
No politician nor public servant nor government department should be able to use it under those circumstances.
They really need silent accounts, that cannot tweet and are completely anonymous.
by tyrust on 11/1/22, 6:47 PM
My understanding was that value of verification was, well, verification that you were, in fact, that person [0]. I wonder if this property will be maintained.
Otherwise, impersonators can pay to get the blue check. In the long term, maybe this is fine, but in the short term every Twitter user is going to have to adjust from the old meaning of the blue check (user $foo is actually person $foo) to the new meaning (user $foo pays $8/mo).
[0] - "The blue Verified badge in Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic" - https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twit...
by VectorLock on 11/2/22, 3:01 AM
Increasing costs for spammers is one of the few effective ways you can combat spammers.
As one of the former heads of product at Twitter said they wanted to add multiple types of badges. You have a badge for verified identities, you have a badge for people who want to remain anonymous but pay to participate so they can provide a hint they're not spammer, and you provide a badge for notable personalities.
by sliken on 11/1/22, 10:40 PM
Seems pretty weird to me. I read an article that the top 5% of users are responsible for 90% of tweets and most of the profit. Said 5% have been leaving the platform for the last few months.
Now there's a $8/Month incentive for the top users to leave ... seems backwards. They should be paying the top users to stay so the 95% has something to read.
Imagine if youtube creators had to pay instead of be paid.
by ljw1001 on 11/1/22, 7:30 PM
I think this worked well.
Instead of conversation about how Elon would use twitter to undermine democracy, civil discourse, whatever, everyone is talking about what’s a fair price to pay him to undermine democracy, civil discourse, whatever.
by jxdxbx on 11/1/22, 6:30 PM
Verification is more of a benefit to Twitter than to verified users. At least for mega celebs. I am verified because years ago I knew someone who worked at Twitter. I wouldn't pay a penny for it though.
by frankjr on 11/1/22, 6:39 PM
I wanted to check how much it costs in Czechia adjusted for purchasing power and quickly learned you cannot actually buy it from here. Oh well.
> We’ve launched Twitter Blue in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In these regions, Twitter Blue is available for in-app purchase on Twitter for iOS and Android, or on twitter.com through our payment partner Stripe.
by throwaway04923 on 11/1/22, 10:34 PM
What is this going to solve? Blue checkmarks was intended to find the real public person instead of thousand scammers. If it now means that you have paid for account, then what is the point?
This is not going to help their finances either. Someone [1] did a calculation:
"If one in five current blue ticks paid $20 a month that would raise just under $15 million a year for Twitter… Twitter’s current revenues (mostly from ads) are $5 billion a year. Musk’s apparent plan would generate about 30 hours’ worth of annual revenue."
https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/1587381512500125699
by Nition on 11/2/22, 7:47 AM
Having some experience with Steam games and cheaters, I can predict based on these tweets that one thing that will happen is spammers will find a way to buy check mark subscriptions through the country with the cheapest price.
by corytheboyd on 11/1/22, 10:39 PM
My goodness the weight people put behind the verification check mark sounds absolutely insane as a person who is not at all invested in Twitter. As an outsider, this sounds like the only way to combat scammers on the platform, assuming non-paying viewers have an easy way to only see content from paying users.
by rnxrx on 11/1/22, 8:19 PM
Maybe I'm missing something but wouldn't the paid-for check mark also mean that a given account can be more specifically targeted, thus increasing the potential ad revenue to Twitter?
by rcarr on 11/1/22, 7:48 PM
Here is what the next big aspiring social media company should put on their website.
"$COMPANY_NAME is currently free to use. Unfortunately, we do have employees and computers to pay for to keep things running. When we hit 1 billion users, we intend to start charging all our users a very small fee: 1 hour of minimum wage in whatever country you live in for an entire year's access. For example if you live in the UK, this means you'd only pay £9.50 for the entire year. If you live in Portugal, you'd only pay €4.38 for the year. Your first year will always be free to see if $COMPANY_NAME is right for you.
Your IP address currently shows you're from $COUNTRY_NAME. This means a year's access for you would be $COUNTRY_MINIMUM_WAGE. This fee will only ever increase if your government increases the minimum wage of your country and will always stay pegged to that rate.
This means that, regardless of where you live in the world or how much you earn, access to $COMPANY_NAME only requires, at most, a single hour of your time each year to continue using. This allows us to keep the platform free from ads, tracking, and from wasting money on useless VR products nobody wants. Help us build a better, fairer future for everyone: not just shareholders."
by BryanBeshore on 11/1/22, 5:42 PM
You will also get:
- Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam
- Ability to post long video & audio
- Half as many ads
by yoelo on 11/2/22, 8:50 AM
As much as I don't like Musk, I think there is a good proposition for the YouTube-model of paying for an ad-free experience. However, aside that YouTube is a place with much better content, YouTube costs ~$5/monthly and is actually ad-free instead of half ad-free. How one can think this is a good idea is beyond me
by woodruffw on 11/1/22, 6:37 PM
I've had Twitter Blue lite for years: I use an adblocker, and I manually block every single advertisement that sneaks through by blocking the advertise's entire Twitter account. The end result is that my feed is nearly entirely organic, followed content.
Why would I pay $8/month for a materially worse experience?
by DeathArrow on 11/2/22, 7:01 AM
I don't care much about Twitter, I didn't like the way the platform was policed, I didn't like the sheer amount of bots and for sure I didn't like the limit on text messages.
But it seems reasonable for an app having payd and free tiers, with the free tiers being add supported.
Somehow the app has to pay bills and staff.
If I'll find Twitter of any use at some point in time, I will pay $8 if that will yield some benefits over free tier.
Some people can't afford to pay or don't want to, which is why there is also a free tier. It isn't like Musk forces everyone to pay, but if you derive some value from Twitter it is normal to pay.
I guess some people hate Musk and they are going to great lengths to justify their hate coming with puerile reasons about why Twitter suddenly became 'bad' and predicting it a quick death.
by Finnucane on 11/1/22, 5:47 PM
The power of Stephen King.
by XorNot on 11/2/22, 12:43 AM
So two things about this: (1) Twitter verification was started as a way to dodge lawsuits about people registering fake Twitter accounts.[1] Verified Twitter was a way to ensure you couldn't register yourself as "realLocalPolitician" and be mistaken in a way which made Twitter liable.
So turning it into a paid-for service puts Twitter in a weird spot, where they can probably be sued again about this because "verified only if you pay" is alternatively interpretable as a shakedown racket - and Twitter knowingly allowing people to misrepresent their identity to defame people makes Twitter liable again.
But (2): this just isn't worth any money to anyone. There just aren't that many people for whom Twitter-verified is a worthwhile expense. Word-of-mouth verifies accounts easily, and once everyone knows @nyTimes is the New York Times official account or whatever, then its entirely unlike something like TLS where the process provides an active component in validating or securing the content or link. Optimistically this is worth like USD$30 million a year to Twitter...out of about USD$5.5 billion of year-over-year revenues. Or about 47 hours of revenue.
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ton...
by tlhunter on 11/1/22, 10:37 PM
Only disabling half of the ads makes sense from a business point of view. Most likely, the users who are the best audience for an ad (in the sense that they have spare money and might purchase an advertised product) are the ones that would actually spend money disable ads.
There will probably be a new advertisement segment for users of Twitter blue. Companies will be able to advertise specifically to users willing to pay to disable ads aka more likely to have disposable income. Premium ads for the high spenders.
by eric_b on 11/1/22, 9:49 PM
I guess I'll go on record and say I think this is a great idea. There's too many journalists who just spew hot takes all day - at least make them pay for the privilege
by schmichael on 11/1/22, 9:20 PM
Your own mastodon instance is $6/mo: https://masto.host/pricing/
by serf on 11/1/22, 10:35 PM
power to the people... for only 8 dollars a month!
is anyone sick of this salesman shtick? it's even more egregious when used as some form of crusade for the people.
let's be clear here, the 8 dollars a month is the motivation. He doesn't give two-shits about any moral sense of right or wrong or the well-being people that used the service.
he'd be more respectable/relatable if he had said "It's 8 bucks a month because I need to pay back the loans."
by MKais on 11/1/22, 10:30 PM
If I'm not mistaken, a few years ago, the basic social network (facebook & Co) was valuated on this ad basis: one user = $10.
The same logic for twitter gives $45B/400M users = ~$110/user.
99% of those users are useless but 1% are not.
In my view, Twitter is a propaganda machine with its 1% influencers/journalists/prophets that overflow world media and their billions of viewers/consumers/voters.
by KingOfCoders on 11/2/22, 7:45 AM
It looks now like Twitter needs to pay an additional $1B/year for the credits Musk bought Twitter with. This is going to sink them.
by registeredcorn on 11/1/22, 11:05 PM
Personally, I see it as a win-win. If it fails and Twitter dies, then Twitter is dead.
If it succeeds, then the containment mechanism of Twitter is intensified even more, due to twitter-users feeling the need to "get the most" out of their reoccurring monthly bill, in effect leaving the remaining fun outskirts of the internet unmolested by comparison.
by LrQSs8Dq on 11/2/22, 7:15 AM
Can someone explain what the deal with twitter verification is (I know what it is) and why everybody is so upset about that it's going to be a premium feature?
Asking as someone who doesn't care about social media at all, and has never used Facebook or Twitter, except for clicking the occasional link to some tweet.
by cocoland2 on 11/2/22, 4:34 AM
General question, There is so much toxicity in Twitter (even on Linkedin) and very little sane conversation (May be not just twitter, many social networks in general). For example recently saw someone post with POTUS on some ground breaking work on Immunotherapy for cancer (this was their 8 year research), replies and comments were outright bad to vulgar (did he smell your hair! went one). Mind you this was not a 4th grader but senior staff, well educated MBA's. Has social media become a frustration venting outlet? Pretty sure one would come out of the browsing experience exhausted! Who would use this for 8 USD a month! P.S. not on any social network except for messaging apps (once a day with notifications off)
by bentt on 11/1/22, 6:23 PM
This is interesting. I have increasingly looked at Twitter as a business tool. This will push me further in that direction. It will make less sense to just hop on and drop hot takes without any purpose. I think I like it.
That said, this doesn't really say "Global Town Hall".
by lapcat on 11/1/22, 10:22 PM
On iOS, Apple will of course demand $2.40 of that $8.
by SandersAK on 11/2/22, 2:54 AM
I guess it's better than the 7% you gotta pay to get an Orange username on HN.
by tmellon2 on 11/3/22, 8:09 AM
Does someone have a better sense of economics of charging $8/Month ?
At best assuming approximately the 420,000 [see Ref.1] folks currently on twitter will pay $8/Month - which gives about $40 Million in *annual* revenue.
Will the economics work if the advertisers stay out ?
Also, why charge in the first place if the number is too low ( < $40 Million).
Source : [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/28633/verified-users-on-twitt...
by caldarons on 11/1/22, 8:45 PM
In a certain sense it feels like it's the right direction. But if you are essentially paying 8$/month how can you justify still displaying ads?
I guess what I am trying to say is that for 8$ every month you should be getting more than just a status symbol (which possibily not that many people care about anyway) and be stuck with ads.
Also, if Twitter is serious about creating a revenue stream for creators it should focus on creating valuable experiences for users that incentivize loyalty to the creators and not hand out verification status (which would become insignificant anyway if everyone has it).
by anarticle on 11/1/22, 9:04 PM
I thought they would go for Something Awful style forum registration, $5 to join, and if you're banned, $5 to join again.
Probably this will increase SNR of twitter to some degree, we'll have to see!
by bambax on 11/1/22, 6:39 PM
Matt Levine:
> Musk wants to start charging people to have a little blue check mark next to their names on Twitter. I wrote yesterday about reports that the price will be $19.99 per month, but that seems not to be a final decision, and other numbers have been suggested. Also last night Musk was personally negotiating the price with Stephen King. “$20 a month to keep my blue check?” tweeted King. “[No], they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.” Musk replied: “We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?” I absolutely love that, in between his busy schedule of reading printouts of 50 pages of code per Twitter employee to decide who to fire, Musk is personally going to negotiate commercial terms with each of Twitter’s hundreds of thousands of verified users. I have a blue check, I’m gonna tweet “I’ll pay $7.69” and see what he says.
by abhaynayar on 11/4/22, 1:40 PM
So there will be a separate indicator for famous personalities according to this thread. This makes a lot more sense then.
The verification badge will only be used to know whether someone is human verified against an ID. And the other indicator will tell whether they’re a celebrity.
This way we will still have a way to know whether it’s a celebrity, and it will also solve the bot problem.
by lossolo on 11/1/22, 10:30 PM
When Twitter Elite? Only for 100$ a month your replies will have priority over Twitter Blue users and then Twitter Whale - contact us for pricing, you will have priority over Twitter Elite users, then me and my friends millionaires can all buy Twitter Whale and Elite, before you get to see replies from a common person (the ones that can't pay) you will already lose your attention anyway, so we the wealthy will shape the reality.
by atYevP on 11/1/22, 9:28 PM
They keep solving weird problems in weird ways. My $0.02 ->
They should have:
1. Created a new “VIP status symbol” icon (diamond?) for people who care / need / want the prestige (charge for it or don't) - I'd almost fork the existing checks over to it for simplicity.
2. Kept blue check for actual identity verification (this is a real human).
3. Added features people care about (editing / etc…) to Blue and charge for them.
Tying the verification to features is...just odd. #sigh
by AtNightWeCode on 11/1/22, 9:33 PM
I have zero doubt that EM will bring Twitter to a better place. I mean, this is the platform where basic image upload was broken for 10+ years. How can that not be the top task in the backlog? I can answer that right away. Tech people focus on tech.
I think cost might be a problem with Blue. I mean, I collect domain names for fun. I don't think Twitter can provide the right tools to guard against false blue account claims.
by MopMop on 11/1/22, 7:38 PM
Freedom of Speech is not free if you have to pay a monthly fee to express your opinion. We can already see them lining up to part with their salaries.
by sneak on 11/1/22, 9:32 PM
I hope this means I can use a disposable prepaid card and not give a phone number during signup.
They were using phone numbers for antispam; hopefully $8 will serve the same purpose.
Twitter’s had employees that sold user PII to murderous foreign governments. It is not safe to have PII associated with a sufficiently controversial Twitter account. Maybe they can accept crypto payments for this during signup.
by arctics on 11/1/22, 9:57 PM
Before: F2P, every voice matters (you decide who is who) After: P2P, some voices matter more (we will decide who is who for you)
by mikestaub on 11/3/22, 3:27 PM
Elon should not couple revenue generation with identity verification. Their should be a "Twitter Green" that lets users link a credit card to charge a one-time $1 fee. Twitter blue should allow power-users to customize their feed algorithm and be $20 per month.
by Havoc on 11/1/22, 10:45 PM
>half as many ads
I bet they can sell this twice. Once here and once to advertisers that want to advertise to the more exclusive crowd
by nothatscool on 11/1/22, 10:32 PM
I think changing the verification badge into something actually useful instead of a status symbol is a good thing. If there is a great exodus of Twitter influencers and it starts to affect traffic, then twitter can just add some kind of notability mark to high profile accounts.
Edit: They already plan to add a tag for public figures.
by chatterhead on 11/1/22, 9:07 PM
This is off.
Should be: $1.99 for every user with optional $7.99 upgrade to validated ID/Blue checkmark. No ads. Way fewer bots.
Focus completely on functional/feature engineering and dismantle advertising system.
Branch out into VOIP/Email services. Total communications platform instead of "social media" should be his direction.
by tqi on 11/1/22, 11:13 PM
Is the blue checkmark supposed to help/protect the person tweeting or the people consuming the tweets?
by notatoad on 11/1/22, 6:24 PM
I’m confused. Does $8 get you a blue check or no?
If it does, $8/mo for a blue check and reply priority seems like a pretty good deal for all those people impersonating Elon musk to run crypto scams
by rideontime on 11/1/22, 5:47 PM
His first tweet doesn't seem to relate to the rest. What does the checkmark have to do with Blue?
by entropicgravity on 11/1/22, 9:39 PM
Yeah this is reasonable. For those who want or need it $100/yr is affordable but more than most would pay just to have it but don't need it. Off course it's mostly a mechanism to strengthen the bottom line but if it's value for money then go ahead.
by lern_too_spel on 11/2/22, 3:48 AM
He's just rearranging deck chairs on the fail whale. There is no way the investors are going to make back their money. Just sell it to Microsoft or take it public again, take the write down, and try to find something that you can fix.
by plaidfuji on 11/1/22, 10:18 PM
Why stop at open-sourcing “the algorithm” when you can open-source the business model too?
by supernova87a on 11/1/22, 6:35 PM
How do you declare what country you're in to get the pricing you "deserve"?
by PaulWaldman on 11/1/22, 9:47 PM
What if, instead of a flat fee, blue checks were charged based on their number of followers or the level of engagement with their followers (how ever you'd quantify that)?
This would align the value and goals for both Twitter and blue checks.
by booleandilemma on 11/1/22, 8:34 PM
It would have been great if, after taking Twitter private, Musk just immediately shut it down.
Would it have made any financial sense? Of course not. Would it have been the ultimate post-modern, trollish, liberating move imaginable? Absolutely.
by dgudkov on 11/1/22, 7:46 PM
I'd like an option to see only tweets/replies from Twitter Blue holders.
by yalogin on 11/1/22, 11:47 PM
I don't get it. Charging for a blue check mark was not his main goal. It was to boot out all bots. Is that still the case? Is he saying that once the bots are eliminated, we are allowed to stay anonymous still?
by tppiotrowski on 11/1/22, 11:15 PM
Twitter should have SaaS pricing:
Up to 1000 followers = free tier
1000 - 100,000 followers = $8/month
100,000+ followers = Call us
Edit: The fact that Truth Social was bankrolled to the tune of millions of dollars should illustrate the value of being able to tweet to the masses.
by nemo44x on 11/1/22, 11:03 PM
Makes sense, if you want to read it’s free. If you want to post, then pay a bit and be verified.
Just killed the spammers and bots.
This is less about making huge profits and more about making it not worth it to pay money to spam and get banned.
by rsync on 11/1/22, 10:17 PM
How much can I pay for the ability to follow a twitter link and easily see who is replying to whom and where I am in the discussion thread ?
It's a tough engineering problem but surely someone could solve it ...
by randomopining on 11/1/22, 9:48 PM
Elon’s Vision:
1. Charge $8/mon and a bunch of people will pay 2. Fire a bunch of engineers 3. Twitter looks way better on paper 4. Flip the company in 18 months when rates go down and market is better esp tech
by Invictus0 on 11/1/22, 11:47 PM
The result of this is that all users of consequence on Twitter are forced to reevaluate the value they receive from the platform. I imagine a lot of them will use the moment to abandon ship.
by empressplay on 11/1/22, 10:20 PM
My suspicion is that the name on the payment method will be the verification, eg f you use a credit card named John Smith, your 'full name' will be uneditable and reflect that.
by fnordpiglet on 11/1/22, 9:46 PM
All this malarkey reminds me why I would rather read HN than twitter.
by rongopo on 11/1/22, 10:52 PM
Income from those that post, from those than read, and from adverts? This is a scam, comparable or superior than academic editorials. I predict it will last less than 5 years.
by fullshark on 11/1/22, 9:27 PM
Elon's vision seems not very different from the one any private equity firm doing a LBO would have: Maximize revenue and cut costs however you can to pay down debt.
by smeagull on 11/2/22, 12:09 AM
This is an incentive for bad actors, which makes Twitter a worse platform. I suspect the blue checkmark will become a signifier of a scam account if this goes forward.
by mesozoic on 11/2/22, 6:27 PM
I think they should charge people based on the number of followers they have. That's where value comes from and they should look to collect it.
by rongopo on 11/1/22, 10:50 PM
I stopped twitter during my long covid, and now I do not miss it. I just enter to post updates and keep some followers. I lost sense of why more could be needed!
by r2222 on 11/2/22, 6:14 AM
Is the bot spam a problem to any average Twitter user like Elon claims, or just him (one of the most followed account in the app) and maybe couple others?
by bloomingeek on 11/2/22, 2:09 AM
Perhaps Elon's plan is to completely ruin and thus bankrupt Twitter. Then use it as the biggest business write-off in history? Can it work that way?
by mypastself on 11/1/22, 6:32 PM
This might be my ignorance of macroeconomics speaking, but doesn’t the Purchasing Power Parity reference imply that the price should be the same worldwide?
by memish on 11/1/22, 8:47 PM
A lot of people aren't groking what this means, even on tech and startup savvy HN. Naval and Balaji said it well:
Charging for the blue check moves it from a status symbol to a utilitarian one.
It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money.
https://twitter.com/naval/status/1587523978456748033
The blue checks wanted to abolish billionaires, in the name of equality.
The billionaire will end up abolishing the blue checks, in the name of equality.
roughly speaking: blue checks are about status and tech billionaires about startups. It's old money vs new money.
Old money wanted to kill new money. New money is wiping out the status of old money.
The blue check actually arose as an anti- impersonation tool. Twitter was forced to implement it after complaints.
But people who are impersonated tend to be "important". So it became a status symbol. Especially for writers.
The one form of equality a journalist will always resist is the idea that everyone is now equal to a journalist.
But that's what universal verification does. Everyone who needs one can pay for a blue check. Bots get taxed. Twitter makes money. Establishment journos hardest hit.
Further reading
1) @sriramk on social networks as games: https://a16zcrypto.com/social-network-status-traps-web2-lear...
2) @eugenewei on status as a service: https://eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1587545600064507904
by sduta878 on 11/2/22, 4:10 AM
Finally a real change in Twitter app - this has been long overdue, the opaque verification process was such a mess
by takanori on 11/2/22, 2:06 AM
I’d prob pay $8/month for hacker news
by rconti on 11/1/22, 9:46 PM
I wonder how big the exodus from Twitter has been-- (seems noteworthy from what I've seen)-- and whether it will be covered by journalists? They seem to have already decided that Twitter = news, ignoring the fact that most people don't use Twitter at all.
If (say) 5% of people leave Twitter, will journalists notice? Of course not, they'll just keep pretending like "people on twitter" == "people".
by davidguetta on 11/2/22, 3:40 PM
Reading this comment section make me SMH to how many smart people are actually into twitter
by __derek__ on 11/1/22, 6:34 PM
Weird. I thought they removed the sign-up gate, but it blocks me from reading the whole thread.
by tough on 11/1/22, 8:35 PM
What if I already have the checkmark and cant afford to pay? Will they take it away?
by elorant on 11/1/22, 8:36 PM
What's so special about the verification icon? Does it provide any merits?
by magnusss on 11/2/22, 3:24 AM
What I love most is that the new CEO of Twitter is front and center making a major product and pricing announcement to the entire customer base within 4 days of buying the company. That’s awesome execution, baby! Not to mention the best type of product marketing imaginable.
by NomDePlum on 11/1/22, 11:11 PM
Q. How much would you pay to continue to use and post on Twitter? A. (-_Q)
by kylecazar on 11/1/22, 10:16 PM
Twitter Blue is an existing, separate service from the verified checkmark.
by aantix on 11/1/22, 6:39 PM
I don't see where you can subscribe - interested in seeing the flow.
by biohacker85 on 11/2/22, 6:13 AM
I wonder what percentage of comments are motivated by a previous perception of Elon. "Blue checkmarks for $8/month is a bad idea..." (because user dislikes Elon), or "This is Genius! He's already fixing twitter! (user is a fan).
by jaimex2 on 11/2/22, 1:09 AM
Great idea that solves a lot of problems. Especially the blue bots.
by Overtonwindow on 11/1/22, 6:20 PM
That’s a reasonable price. There is a need for some people to be verified to avoid impersonation. The vast majority of us do not need to be verified. Also, just because a person is verified does not mean they are credible, regardless of what their job is.
by cr4nberry on 11/2/22, 1:13 AM
Preparing for the next 6 months of Musk threads. Wish me luck :)
by type-r on 11/1/22, 9:41 PM
interesting approach to have it be PPP adjusted. i wonder how they'll prevent people from high income countries faking they're in a lower income one.
by whywhywhywhy on 11/1/22, 9:45 PM
Good riddance, the previous system was painfully toxic.
by ljw1001 on 11/1/22, 7:19 PM
Unlimited conspiracy theories and Russian trolls - free
by Aleksdev on 11/2/22, 1:35 AM
To be honest I think Twitter is better without any check marks. I remember reading somewhere that check marks were awarded to some user based on their connections to certain employees at Twitter.
by yazzku on 11/2/22, 12:57 AM
"Half as many ads"
Like paying to watch ads on television.
by hunglee2 on 11/1/22, 6:25 PM
The good news is that this should definitely reduce the volume of bot / troll accounts, by making it prohibitively expensive to run. That will mean a reduction of disinformation on aggregate - as what other purpose would there be to run a bot network?
The bad news is that it recreates the lords vs servants dynamic that Musk is claiming to want to get rid of. $8 is not much for everyone reading on HN, but guess what, we are very much the in the globally privileged 1%. He later adds something about purchasing power equivalent, but localised pricing suddenly makes this into a much bigger technical challenge
by bjourne on 11/1/22, 9:28 PM
Any free software projects working on a distributed Musk-free Twitter replacement? We could really use one RN.
by MonkeyMalarky on 11/1/22, 9:16 PM
With $8 each, you and your friends can pool your money, rent a server run whatever you want. Fuck twitter.
by anon115 on 11/1/22, 10:33 PM
mass decision design discussion for a big business and design decision.
by fleddr on 11/1/22, 11:43 PM
I like this change, for it is radical. It's very hard to predict the outcome of it, so I'm above all interested in it as a social experiment.
For quite a few "check marks" it will feel as a massive downgrade. Not only are they no longer special, they even have to start paying to be less special.
Yet for many, they have nowhere to go. Their current status (followers) is often unique to Twitter and not easily replicated elsewhere. Many came to power by years of unhinged "hot takes", the check-mark, and algorithmic boosting. This tactic doesn't really work on any other social network, not by posting small and ridiculous pieces of text.
Some dare to even flip it and claim they should not be paying, they should get paid, for they are "creators". I consider that to be quite generous. Sure enough they generate activity/traffic, but that's not the same thing as creating.
On Youtube, you can find videos of incredible production value. Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saWNMPL5ygk
Now, that's a creator. Tweeting "Biden sucks" creates outrage, but is not a creation. Stephen King is a creator as a novel writer, but his tweets specifically are not creations of any value on their own.
The way I draw this line is simple: can the creation stand on its own and widely be perceived as having value? For the video I linked to, clearly yes. For a tweet, when you disassociate it from who said it...nah.
With "value", I mean value to us. Clearly a rage tweet generating a lot of traffic and ad impressions has value to Twitter, but in my book that doesn't make you a creator that needs to get paid.
Musk has hinted though that he wants to onboard long form content and native video, so that could change things.
Finally, other than this leveling of status, I hope obscene algorithmic boosting is also looked at. One is often puzzled to see a random idiot having hundreds of thousands followers whilst producing nothing but mediocre garbage. The ultimate example has to be this:
https://twitter.com/nytimes
No, I have nothing against that newspaper nor do I find them idiots. That account has over 50m followers yet near-zero engagement.
by paxys on 11/1/22, 8:36 PM
It's funny how quickly the conversation has jumped from "Twitter will be a bastion of free speech" to "$8/mo is a fair price to pay for prioritizing your speech over others". Power to the people indeed.
by seydor on 11/1/22, 5:53 PM
Why do people think that twitter is worth paying for?
by jfranche on 11/2/22, 5:30 AM
Elon on Twitter recently has reminded me of the headache I got from Trump on Twitter. Non stop. Every day. I know it’s my choice, but I’m worn out by it.
by thebeastie on 11/1/22, 6:31 PM
Bypass paywalls would be kind of a big deal imo. It could eventually shape how we use the internet and move away from ad based revenue.
by wnevets on 11/1/22, 8:30 PM
Twitter is gonna crash and burn way sooner than I though.
by marktangotango on 11/1/22, 6:33 PM
I really wish twitter didn't exist. The utility I see in it is limited. For example, I don't have an account, but I do view tweets from time to time. The tweets I generally view are related to some real time event I'm interested in (ie news). I find the fact that even then, there is usually an endless stream of mostly banal, vapid responses to be very off putting.
Not only do I find the content vastly uninteresting, the way the content on twitter is reported by mainstream media is exhausting. I could really care less about the stream of conscious tweeting of celebrities and politicians. It's not "news worthy" in my estimation.
But clearly a lot of people find it useful, I am completely mystified how this could be.
by alberth on 11/1/22, 10:25 PM
$20 vs $8
This is Elon tactics 101.
You anchor people high with leaking outlandish (incorrect) pricing, that way when you officially announce the (always intended) pricing - it seems like a deal.
by hendersoon on 11/1/22, 8:00 PM
"Half as many ads"? They want us to pay and still show ads?
I have an alternative suggestion. How about I don't pay Twitter one red cent and continue to block their ads?
by smittywerben on 11/1/22, 10:55 PM
My replies to Tweets aren't even in the always-dead bin at the bottom. The bin where you have to click to "Show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content".
Literally it has penis pics, OnlyFans referrals, and an occasional sliver of humanity which has me question what they did to be flagged as always dead. But not my replies.
My replies only appear on my profile under the Tweets and replies tab.
In some cases, I would rather be in the click for more 'penis bin' than be shadowbanned.
People should Tweet directly at the person instead of hogging the reply space with OT insults.
edits: wording