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.

Before: F2P, every voice matters (you decide who is who) After: P2P, some voices matter more (we will decide who is who for you)

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.

>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

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.

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.

Is the blue checkmark supposed to help/protect the person tweeting or the people consuming the tweets?

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

His first tweet doesn't seem to relate to the rest. What does the checkmark have to do with Blue?

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.

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.

Why stop at open-sourcing “the algorithm” when you can open-source the business model too?

How do you declare what country you're in to get the pricing you "deserve"?

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.

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.

I'd like an option to see only tweets/replies from Twitter Blue holders.

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?

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.

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.

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 ...

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

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.

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.

All this malarkey reminds me why I would rather read HN than twitter.

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?

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.

The power of Stephen King.

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...

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.

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

Your own mastodon instance is $6/mo: https://masto.host/pricing/

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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".

On iOS, Apple will of course demand $2.40 of that $8.

I guess it's better than the 7% you gotta pay to get an Orange username on HN.

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...

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).

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

And Musk lied, like he's been lying for decades.

Paid users will get priority over unpaid users in replies as Elon explained.

One of the richest people on the planet as far as I can tell.

FTR: I never used twitter

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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?

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?

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

Finally a real change in Twitter app - this has been long overdue, the opaque verification process was such a mess

I’d prob pay $8/month for hacker news

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".

Reading this comment section make me SMH to how many smart people are actually into twitter

Weird. I thought they removed the sign-up gate, but it blocks me from reading the whole thread.

What if I already have the checkmark and cant afford to pay? Will they take it away?

What's so special about the verification icon? Does it provide any merits?

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.

Q. How much would you pay to continue to use and post on Twitter? A. (-_Q)

Twitter Blue is an existing, separate service from the verified checkmark.

I don't see where you can subscribe - interested in seeing the flow.

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).

Great idea that solves a lot of problems. Especially the blue bots.

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.

Preparing for the next 6 months of Musk threads. Wish me luck :)

> Very Important Person

Or just a person likely to be impersonated for various scams or other social attacks? How does anyone see a blue check as anything other than that?

He's really gotten in over his head on this one.

https://twitter.com/CMacCaba/status/1585914462951047168

> Musk has dumped $13bn of debt onto Twitter's company account, increasing the interest repayments from $51m to $1bn a year. Its entire gross income is c. $700m a year. Its net income is negative & it doesn't receive gov. subsidies that kept similarly loss-making Telsa alive

A longer thread informative thread here too: https://twitter.com/aidanpobrien/status/1587450510549852160

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.

Good riddance, the previous system was painfully toxic.

Unlimited conspiracy theories and Russian trolls - free

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.

"Half as many ads"

Like paying to watch ads on television.

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

Any free software projects working on a distributed Musk-free Twitter replacement? We could really use one RN.

With $8 each, you and your friends can pool your money, rent a server run whatever you want. Fuck twitter.

mass decision design discussion for a big business and design decision.

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.

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.

Why do people think that twitter is worth paying for?

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.

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.

Twitter is gonna crash and burn way sooner than I though.

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.

$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.

"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?

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

If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

Not really true. You can buy better versions of products and services.

not talking about checkmarks

twitter is propped up by the mainstream media, not the other way around. if mainstream journalists leave, twitter will be tumblr. for new twitterers, twitter is not a platform to stay on, but a bridge to graduate to somwhere else or build your audience and move it elsewhere (a book, podcast, youtube, articles in mainstream newspapers etc).

For example, one can say that Joe rogan used to have a 'home' on youtube, now on spotify. Who has a permanent home on twitter?

I think it would do both tbh.

The only reason things matter is because they lead to status. Skipping the matter is an efficient solution to gaining status.

Weird, I've never heard of people obsessing over GitHub stars. I guess if you're not actively contributing to open source projects, it's not something you care about.

Since you're disputing my comment and not the parent, I take it you agree that making people pay for verification is somehow "anti free speech", while promoting verified users when it was an opaque process was not? The comment I'm responding to is incoherent, in addition to being flamebait.

You couldn't previously buy a checkmark, now you can. This opens new methods of attacking the network.

This move perhaps limits spam as practiced today, but the attacks that will happen once the network changes will be different in ways that are difficult to predict.

If Elon can get enough publishers on board I'd gladly pay more than $8/mo. Maybe offer a tiered system. Or better yet, choose-your-own.

$8/mo: Choose 2

$12/mo: Choose 4

$15/mo: Choose 6

etc.

Then people vote with their dollars which sources are important to them.

Simplicity would be challenging. It wouldn't work if it devolves into something resembling tiered Cable TV packages.

Then don't get something nonessential such as the blue checkmark. You can still use Twitter.

They may not feel good about their creature comforts, but indoor plumbing is an objective luxury to a great extent.

It is objectively better to not have to go out in the cold to take a shit at night, even if you're "poor".

A person in poverty in a high-income welfare state does not have a great live, but they are still comforted by the fact that they are not in danger of dying of starvation.

How does adding a new subscription feature and changing verification checkmarks to "secondary tags" level the playing field? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587527711228149765

Reposting your comment doesn't make it any more true.

Twitter is currently free.

This proposed subscription prioritizes content based on who can/decides to pay $8 a month.

How exactly is this leveling the playing field?

You already said that. Leveling the playfield would be having no distinguishing marks at all.

The 2nd comment above pretty much debunks that IMO. If you're paying money and given more visibility to your comments vs. non-paying users, this does the exact opposite.

It levels a few people and covers the rest of the field with potholes.

> Who needs one that cannot afford $8/month? Does anyone really need it?

A lot of freelance writers, in my experience.

> It is not just verification though. Verification is just part of the subscription.

That's a fair point, but why not make verification free (or a one-off payment) and remove it from the subscription feature package?

Expensive for a person running 10,000 bots, irrelevant to a hostile nation doing the same.

So you've limited the success of bot farms only to the set of state actors. Yay, such a great improvement...

I think the expensive part comes mostly from the part that it is hard to make anonymous payment. Sending money is kind of a verification (unless dogecoin is accepted ;) ).

I still have no clue why bots would care to have it though, since there is obviously a very high percentage of people who don't.

I'm not sure this is the best application of a survivorship bias. I believe the point holds even when survivability is not a factor.

>My feelings about it may well normalize over time, but only if I survive long enough.

Based on what you said, it implies that well-being drops as a time-dependent function. Yet when we study psychological well-being, we see the opposite trend except at the very, very end of life when well-being dips. If your assumption were true, wouldn't well-being be expected to continually drop across one's life? (Unless, I suppose, the other assumption is that we bolster that through more consumption.)

I think this is change in how you initially framed the problem. If "better" can be objectively measured and "better" correlates to happiness, then I wouldn't expect it to normalize at all. The fact that it does change implies that subjective well-being doesn't actually hinge on how objectively better something is.

This is exactly right. It's the same as how some popular YouTubers hedge their bets by publishing in parallel to their own sites or to other video platforms, yet they keep letting YouTube dictate their business decisions because it's the only place they can make money.

Nope. That may be true for a thin slice of Twitter's most active and popular users, but not at all for the long tail of people posting in niche interest areas that keep people engaged. The scientists, engineers, artists, philosophers, OSINT researchers, etc who post interesting content and keep people returning to Twitter to engage with it.

Some of those get some reward from it in terms of added publicity, others in terms of building out their network, but a bunch even do it anonymously and seem to get no real world financial benefit from it other than sharing what they're working on and having discussions with other people interested in the same things.

Musk seems to fundamentally misunderstand not only how and why regular people use Twitter, but also how popular but non-celebrity people use it. He only sees it through his own lens, which is as a marketing tool, a way to move markets, and a place to shitpost freely. His changes make sense in that context only.

Bad actors who are trying to push some agenda to make money for example, are more likely to pay than ordinary lurkers who click the "retweet" button once in a while. Twitter is not that important, if it becomes pay-to-play, I'm out, sorry.

It'll just become the new version of Twitter's "super follow" - a thing that makes you stand out as a bit of a mark, and a target for ridicule.

And Fark and Something Awful are both dead.

> Way too much noise. I follow dev and engineering stuff

Now imagine the people you follow being deprioritized by the Twitter algorithm in favor of the LinkedIn-influencer types (you know they'll be first in line for the checkmarks)

Not in my experience. I follow plenty of blue tick accounts that aren't lords, merely notable within a niche.

That part of the thread pretty much proved that he hasn't thought out this whole scheme at all. He's spitballing in public on twitter

anywhere or nowhere else. do you think tweeting is really an essential part of Stephen King's professional or personal life? he could just stop.

he's a famous author. he's got a website, a publisher with an advertising budget, and other social media channels. his audience will follow him. he can post on facebook, his mailing list, his own website, or none of the above.

He's got a dedicated audience reading millions of his books.

Quite a lot of his twitter presence is reactions to the decline in America and America's politics. Musk would probably prefer King's voice quietened.

Some users (US users, or those willing to pay $8/mo for Twitter) are generating multiple times the average revenue per user. People in poorer countries are generating less than the average revenue per user.

On Facebook, for instance, US users bring in 5x the worldwide average revenue per user.

That is why it's only a reduction in ads. This deal reduces their revenue per user if they went ad free for those users.

I don't think that's the goal. I think the goal is to reasonably be able to know a checkmark isn't a bot.

I dont think twitter is anywhere near Netflix or even youtube premium in terms of what it provides. And I am saying it as someone who do actually uses twitter (unlike half of HN who claims to never use it).

That isn't how verification currently works and I can't imagine that is how Twitter would want it to work in the future. People change their display name all the time on Twitter and can even change their username. Plus Facebook has already shown that real name policies are hard and can cause user pushback and that was with a community that already is more lined up with our real life identities. Pseudonymous accounts are a huge part of Twitter.

That’s cool. I can set the bill name and address of my visa gift cards for online purchases. Sure hope they do this for $8/m.

But the people who would pay $8 dollars, regardless of finances, derive enough value from being bluechecked in the first place. Paying the money would fulfill would fulfill a higher rung of their hierarchy of needs than it would for most others.

> "wouldn't bother" should be "don't bother"

excellent point - I should use the active present tense. That is: "most people alive today don't bother with twitter, despite the fact that it's free."

Is it "free" in other meanings of the word - free of charge, free speech, free expression, freedom of religion, freedom to lie, freedom to intimidate? Time will tell.

>I disagree. Diverse input results in better conversations – less of an echo chamber, less black and white thinking, more visibility for other viewpoints, more empathy.

Is this your experience with Twitter?

If anything Twitter has shown that the current model is just mob rule

> Diverse input results in better conversations

But how many different people are necessary to give the diversity of thought on a particular topic? I bet it is not many, certainly fewer than 100, maybe 50, or on some topics even just 20.

Diverse as long as you mean minorities and not Republicans right?

I've tried multiple times and they're just bad imo.

> Yeah, there were ads in Newspapers and Magazines too that you paid money.

The publishers of those paid for the content, paid for editing, paid for the physical medium, paid for physical distribution.

Twitter is distributing short pieces of text, some images and video on a medium that is famously cheaper than everything that came before it, while not paying anything to the authors and has no editors.

Advertising is a great business to be in apparently, maybe he's diversifying from corporate clients.

Crypto to crypto Binance has no KYC option up to $10k per day or so.

It doesn't mean "less annoying" in a meaningful way when the baseline can change drastically and without warning.

They’re also 300% louder than whatever you’re watching.

And fancy custom iOS icons for sure.

(and on top of that, most of the organic content is now locked in time-limited stories, with a good chunk of them being reposts of TikTok influencers out there to definitely sell you something)

Go look at the list of EV sold in the US. Model X is in the Top 5.

By number of sales it's a wash between it and the S. Which are both low volume, high margin, luxury vehicles. Their high volume vehicles, the 3 and the Y drastically out-sell them naturally.

However the X and the S have very high margins in all configurations so they bring in an outsized amount of profit given their share of sales.

That said the margins on the Model 3/Y are nothing to snuff at and are superior to any other mass market vehicle.

> Might as well be trying to sell snake oil.

Look at LV 'hyperloop' [0], and people who paid upfront for FSD [1] and are issuing a class action lawsuit and re-think what you just said about 'might.' I think this isn't about Tesla or SpaceX or any specific company he is CEO of as they are all amazing feats of tech/engineering, it's about Elon's horrible PT Barnum type marketing that worked for a bit but has lost all of it's luster at this point.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040 1: jhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040

How much profit does YouTube make?

You're making the same point that you're replying to. The juiciest users pay, so the non-paying users are the penny pinchers that convert way less on ads, so the ad revenue is obviously very low compared to the revenue from the paid users.

Similar to how people self selected into iOS and android and to this day its way more effective to advertise to less price sensitive iOS users than Android users with cheap phones, though the effect was even larger in the early days.

YouTube is 13€ for ad-free and they're actually hosting videos (High bandwidth) AND share over 50% of this with the content creators.

$8 is a lot - relatively speaking.

These topical experts as you put it, make more than $8/month today from their engaged audiences. What Twitter should do is build better engagement tools for them and then monetize that at much more than $8/month.

You think Stephen King, who is worth $500m, is going to drop Twitter for $96/year. That tweet itself was him doing a good job of using that platform (twitter) and his audience to get some free exposure.

I think anyone can, because later he mentions:

> There will be a secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure, which is already the case for politicians

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587527711228149765

So, secondary tags are the new verification checkmarks and checkmarks are the new "Twitter+" status symbol.

Crypto people are generally not in favor of providing your government ID for things. "Pay $8 in crypto and also give us your identification documents" will not be popular.

Its comparable in sales to the Model S I think. Maybe even outsells it in some places. And sells more then many other cars in that category.

Because the base model is $120,000.

A model 3, the budget/everyman car is $40k, and the Model Y is almost $70k.

Yes? It's actually better for Twitter because they can get pocket most of the money.

Companies aren't voluntarily charging barely enough to cover costs - they're being forced to do it by competition. Normally, they'll charge you as much as they can get away with.

It would be news if Twitter, or anyone else for that matter, decided to voluntarily charge less for the sake of fairness to the users.

That's not it. Twitter is used for marketing by many (esp businesses but also individuals) so they will pay to better market themselves. The same way that LinkedIn charges money even thought they don't create anything besides the platform.

Brands don't post to be nice. They are posting ads for their business.

Apparently Twitter needs 20000 employees to let those users create the content; they need to get paid!

Much as Nitter / LibRedirect are essential for Twitter

This is probably fine though, it is the Elon way of doing business. Make fast decisions and try and whole heap of things. He then gets criticised for not delivering on the majority of them but still comes out ahead of orgs that take 6 months to make the decision in the first place.

Doesn't seem like too bad a method to me. Apart from in situations where you have a ton of data (e.g. Amazon) most product prices are pulled out of someone's arse anyway.

Of course they are going to raise the price to $20 before long

> As an aside, top talent definitely does NOT work at Elon’s companies.

This is just not true. There's tons of exceptional engineers working at various of Elon's companies. Would you really claim that SpaceX doesn't have world-class engineers?

If you can't stop the bots, might as well monetize them?

and now we have more of a paper trail to stop them

to be fair to musk he did say the $8 would be adjusted for local income

I'd expect those two to intersect for sure, but I imagine there are plenty of people with enough disposable cash that enjoy twitter but contribute very little. Or maybe I am just an extreme outlier :)

With this model you may be able to target ads to people willing to pay. I assume the "half-ads" slots will be more valuable.

I doubt $8 will be the only option. I’d bet $1000 that there will be a $16 (or whatever the ROI bar is) tier to be completely ad free.

$8 entry fee seems reasonable from a pyscological perspective. It sounds like the modern version of $9.99, since 3 numbers is taboo on the Twitter style internet and 8 sounds better than 9

They still are a strength, if you search for a public person by name the blue checkmark still works very well. But if it's commodity where scammers can buy them then the strength is gone.

You are just talking nonsense.

Its a luxury car, Audi is selling less e-Trons then Tesla is selling Model X in the US. The Model X this year sold almost as many vehicles as Ford Mach-E while costing 2x as much. If you compare the Model X to other cars in that price class the Model X is doing fine.

And of course they did a major revamp completely changing the architecture and have to deliver the car from 1 factory to whole world. The Model S had priority at first and the Model X was only slowly added to production again.

If you think Model X is a failure you don't understand the car industry. A car with that kind of margin is well worth doing even if it peaks at 40-50k a year globally.

> and is utterly unusable if you live anywhere with rain or snow

This is simply inaccurate.

I suspect the low numbers are related to production and supply chain issues. You still need to wait for months to buy one.

Also most Tesla customers would buy a Y these days.

I see many X in Norway, which has a lot of rain and snow. What are the issues you mention?

Are government subsidies bad? Why? Isn't Elon doing exactly what the government is intending which is to promote the development of technologies that are beneficial but not profitable/popular?

Hasn't this approach been proven successful with the current push towards solar and electric cars?

The article even says:

> The payoff for the public would come in the form of major pollution reductions, but only if solar panels and electric cars break through as viable mass-market products. For now, both remain niche products for mostly well-heeled customers.

Neither of these products are as niche today as they were in 2015 (when the article was written).

He purchased the company because his lawyers finally convinced him he was going to be forced to and that it was a poor choice to continue damaging the asset he was going to be owning.

The "content" here is just tweets. It may not be "content" in the way you are imagining, but it's still true that almost all twitter users are using the site to view tweets from a small number of people (call them content creators or influencers if you like) with large numbers of followers.

Agreed. If I like a writer I always find better ways than Twitter to follow them - Substack, etc

And even if they tweet something worthwhile it’s usually followed by 98% garbage replies with “LOL you’re so stupid” so I’m not wasting my time sifting through that trash heap.

It is useful for events with people on the ground to share info - the story of the guy in Pakistan tweeting about helicopters when Bin Laden was killed was pretty amazing to be honest.

But those types of writers tend to die out after the event.

I guess it depends on what kind of content you're looking for. One account I follow tweets what amounts to live reviews of video games (often obscure) with video clips and images. I think that's just as 'proper' as anything I've seen on pinterest or tiktok.

I actually get a lot of unique ML information and news from Twitter.

Well, the funny thing is that Twitter itself is THE content It kind serves as a continuation of bashorg for millenials and zoomers

Yeah, Twitter is not about "content". It's a service that lets users scream into the void

I’m an advertiser and I think you understate how ad platforms incentivize quality content (via quality scores that affect price) and overstate how this twitter blue proposal would do so.

Also you greatly simplify how current advertising works. It’s not anywhere as simple as you describe.

but there aren't N places on the page where ads are shown, there's one place: in the feed, at an unspecified frequency as you scroll. twitter doesn't have any ad surfaces to eliminate.

Yes and be just as anoying. I'm not sure that anyone would see a value of just seeing half the amount of ads on a page.

It is pulled out of his butt, the F150 sells 3/4 of a million a year (just the f150!) and makes on the low end a gross profit of $10k per sold. The model x sold about 7.5k cars in 2021, way down from the 20-30k it was selling each year.

OK let's say it sold $30k, and Tesla made a profit of $100k (more than the car sells for) for each car.

That's still less than 50% of the F150 yearly profit. LOL.

I replied to OP but the question was pointed to a broader audience. Many on HN have _very_ negative feelings for Elon.

He's a pretty crazy guy, but I can think of few people/companies who are doing things that could have as big of an impact as Tesla, Starlink, and SpaceX.

I understand how you could have doubts with Tesla, but that how could those feelings not dissolve when seeing those reusable boosters land on their own? How many other organizations could do such a thing?

Considering they used "shower thoughts" to devalue the idea before factoring in Elons incredible track record (by company/capitalist metrics, no personal judgement required), I feel that you are being very generous towards OP.

Oh, you mean like the articles in the newspapers that they regularly publish? What exactly do you think a journalist does, just post on Twitter?

Onlyfans may be an extreme example of it, but all such successful platforms – YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and the rest – are paying their popular users a lot of money to stay there.

Twitch, Patreon etc. etc.

Arguably also Netflix, Roblox and free-to-play mobile games run on this sort of scheme as well.

> > So you want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.

> I think it’s only Onlyfans that can get away with such a business model.

OnlyFans is not (by far) the only site that has a business model of “consumers purchase from producers and the site rakes in a share from that”, nor even the only one (again, by far) with that model where what is purchased is digital content.

Spotify?

I don’t think the price is what bugs him so much as the newly-diminished elite status of the blue check.

Exactly. That's why its so ridiculous.

Yeah, I guess, he should disappear right now and negotiate a deal before coming back to Twitter.

Exactly. Who's hurt more if it's hard to tell who the real celebrities are on Twitter? Whose press is worse when a celebrity is impersonated by some asshole on Twitter—Twitter's, or the celebrity's? Maybe initially the celebrity, but I'm gonna say it's Twitter in the medium-term. Who's gonna be hurt by "Twitter has an impersonation/fraud problem" headlines?

Whatever else the blue checks are, they're also a solution to a problem for Twitter, and those blue-checks and their activity are a huge part of why everyone else engages with the platform. If they make people pay, they better hope the adoption rate is incredibly high among existing blue checks (who cares about the unknowns who pony up for it, in addition) or they're gonna be in for a bad time.

Real celebrities will likely end up getting the check for free under any plan. Like it or not, that's how celebrity works.

The people who won't get it for free (who have blue checks currently) are entry-level journalists with a few hundred followers and cryptobros. Both of those classes of people should have to pay.

A lot of hustlebros and cryptobros do pay for checkmarks, they just don't pay Twitter.

I can imagine the exchange between Stephen King and his agent:

> "Stephen, I'm trying to market your books, but the publishers aren't seeing any engagement on Twitter".

> "Oh I left because I don't want to pay $20 / month to someone I disagree with politically."

> "Have you been hitting the bottle again?"

End of conversation. The value most of these celebrities get vastly exceeds $20 / month. The Twitter-celebrity relationship is symbiotic, nor parasitic.

> I don't know, I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that if we want to avoid the mess we're in now, we've got to start paying for things.

Maybe in your tech savvy circles.

Bots are probably a very big problem for a small subset of Twitter users, like Musk himself, who is positively swarmed with them. But the median Twitter user is unlikely to care about this problem to the tune of several dollars a month. I get a crypto spam message about once every other day. I wouldn't pay anything to take care of that problem, because it's just not big enough to care about.

I think it's more likely that the real goal of this "Twitter Blue" proposal is to start getting users to pay for bling. Which could work! It certainly works in gaming communities.

Certainly, services for current blue-checks can't be a big part of the plan here, because of:

(1) The Stephen King problem, which is the (correct) observation that people like King are adding far more value to Twitter than they extract from it, and are reasonably not inclined to ante anything up to Musk.

(2) There aren't enough of them to make a dent in Twitter's cash flows.

checkmarks mean prestige, exclusivity, and validation. public figures and journalists love prestige, they live for it. twitter just removed one thing that made it attractive to them. being able to buy it means it s useless for anything other than removing spam

that s a very odd way to remove spam . and personally i dont see twitter bots because i dont go searching for them. Musk is completely obsessed with the wrong problem

If you can create a new account, pay $8 for a checkmark and run a viral promotion (or scam), it's certainly profitable.

Before you couldn't trust non-checkmarks. Now you can't trust any account.

Stephen King needs a blue check because Twitter is terrible at deleting imposter accounts.

> Twitter needs the blue checks because they are, to a large degree, the reason non-blue-checks visit and engage with Twitter.

That may have been true at one time, but I'm not so sure it is any more.

Are you sure the popularity on twitter was the driving factor and not a lagging indicator of their podcast success?

I live in cold Switzerland and a family in my house with 3 little children has one of them. The car is always parked outside. They seem really happy with it and this was never mentioned as an issue.

Do the falcon doors really freeze up or just the handles (actually curious).

I have a Model 3 and the handles DO freeze over, though I normally pre-heat my car (EV FTW) and it normally isn't an issue.

> unlike the rest of the car

A touchscreen is objectively worse than traditional physical controls for operations that need to be performed while concentrating on driving.

Teslas are also not known for the quality of their manufacturing, although that's a different kind of design issue.

> But if it's only 10% less annoying, there's very little incentive to buy.

Right. But that $8 doesn't only buy you halving the ad load, but also all the other things like better reach and the "I'm a paying user, I'm better than you non-paying ones" checkmark. I mean, if it works on GitHub...

> And adblock is an option sitting in the wings.

Yes, but! Most people use Twitter through the app, and blocking ads there isn't as simple as having your tech-savvy friend install uBlock Origin in your browser. Adblocking in apps is, even for techies, something between extremely sophisticated and downright impossible.

I assumed he meant margin.

In terms of total profit, the Model Y will be the most profitable car next year, overtaking the F150.

Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting the fact that $8/mo is a ton of money in some areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such journalists, users etc.

Blue checks should never be pay to play. They weren't designed that way. The problem is the ambiguity of the blue check leads to arbitrage that it seems all parties are interested in cashing in on. If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. Elon's backtracking about price parity just illuminates the capitalist nature of the entire thing. Charge what we can, not what we should.

We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.

I can't find a reference off the top of my head but earlier this year I saw a journalist post their engagement data on Twitter and it was shockingly bad. If I recall correctly they had hundreds of thousands of views and hundreds of click-throughs to their website.

Conventional journalists don't get paid more based upon the number of views their articles get

Because Musk fanboys have a deep drive to provide rational explanations for the myriad of idiotic things he states

From a user perspective it's messy and confusing. What does "half as many" even mean? The experience is only different in degree, not in kind. There's less value, both real and perceived, in such a position.

It's hard to imagine that the conversation started from "half as many." My hunch is that it started as "no ads" and somehow backed down to "half" for one reason or another.

A couple reasons I can imagine are: - They could've justified No Ads at the rumored $20 price point. Cut the price in half? Add half the ads back. - They want to make room for a $20 SKU later and need to reserve some features for it, which could include getting rid of all ads. - They want to anchor at "half" so that "No Ads" sounds even better if they change their minds down the line.

Or some combination of all those.

He's owned Twitter for a few days. He threw out $20 and then adjusted it down to $8, seemingly based on feedback. Did he already know that $8 was the appropriate amount? Was there already some internal analysis done that he is just piggy-backing on? It certainly seems like Musk is making big changes literally moments after arriving on scene.

Perhaps he actually did - I think in part he's just playing it straight as an outsider, openly talking about the emperor being naked. That is, a lot of the serious business is just bullshit LARP people do, and if Musk can openly mock it and make money on the meme value of it all? That's a well-earned entertainer salary.

I guess it is possible he floated the $20 knowing someone very-famous would object and he could counter—either misreading the room badly, or else as a deliberate insult—with $8, which was what he wanted all along.

5d chess and all that.

Or he's impulsive and tweets dumb shit basically all the time. It might just be that.

It is not 5d chess, nor it is making excuses for him. It is a matter of critical thinking and evidence based research

I do not count reporting based on anonymous sources as evidence of anything, Elon never said, and no official at Twitter ever said the price as going to be $20, so I have no evidence to believe outside of Rumor from sources that have been showed to be negatively biased on the subject and widely inaccurate on the subject, so why should I trust their $20 figure?

I trust traditional news sources less than I do the government today, for which I would trust a Cartel bass more than the government.

As a big twitter user that badge already has quite the status symbol

> respond freely

You can already filter out non-verified mentions and replies. Presumably that's not going away, and will be used by far more people after this change. It very much is a barrier to entry.

> you can read and respond freely

Sure, but I hope as mainly a reader of Twitter this change comes along with a box I can check that says 'only show Tweets from people I follow and those who are verified'. Overnight, most of my bot issues are fixed. And, any people I don't want to hear from again are easily blocked.

Every commercial product and service is an example of that.

If these companies push humanity forward? Honestly, I'm a bit on the fence about that. Tesla was disruptive in a sense that it made car manufacturers massively accelerate their EV plans. But do I see any continued impact? Not really.

In terms of value, I think it's going to be more about avoiding anti-value—specifically, I expect that accounts lacking the checkmark will be seen as spam, scams, or bit players.

Here's what I expect to happen:

1) First, Twitter introduces paid verification. They cut back on their content moderation efforts on unverified accounts, but they exercise more control of spam and scams on verified accounts, including permabans (which are easier to enforce, due to better knowledge of the people behind the accounts—a credit card number, at the very least).

2) Next, they introduce an option to hide all non-verified tweets, other than from people you follow. People will use it because non-verified tweets have a much higher proportion of spam and scams.

3) At this point, they've successfully price discriminated between professional content creators (such as myself) and consumers / casual creators. I expect additional price discrimination to follow, such as charging for API access in order to target people using tools such as HootSuite to manage large fanbases.

All of this is predicated on people adopting #1, which is why it's important for Musk to find the right price point. It looks like he's just spraying out ideas, but I think he's doing price research.

> This is normal for a community. These statistics naturally fall in line with the Pareto Principle, and the concept of the vital few.

The Pareto Principle is just a rule-of-thumb, it's not an actual law of anything, and is just an expression of power law dynamics. It's true that power law dynamics are common in most online communities, but 97% of content being created by 25% of users is staggering, a much stronger power law than most other forums. This is a highly engaged, medium-sized community (though I realize the nature of the platform (followers, algorithmic priority, etc) means that there are multiple overlapping sets of communities rather than a single community, and that these communities often vehemently grief each other.)

> You are confusing posting on Twitter with using it. The vast majority are lurkers who still consume information and then regurgitate that information in real life on other platforms. The statistics you provided don't paint an accurate picture of the "usefulness" of Twitter in modern public discourse.

Only 23% [1] of Americans use Twitter. Compare that to 81% of Americans using Youtube and 69% of Americans using Facebook. Only 13% of US Adults [2] get their news from Twitter, while 31% from Facebook and 22% from Youtube. Americans are the largest users of Twitter, followed by the Japanese. It's main significance in the public discourse derives from the 69% of American journalists [2] that use Twitter as part of their job, and this is not "public" discourse as much as journalist discourse.

> Do you have a better popular example of a modern day forum?

I know very few people in my real life that actually use Twitter. The ones that do are mostly in subcultures with a large presence on Twitter. My family doesn't use Twitter, most Twitter employees I know don't use Twitter. My partner only uses Twitter because she networks with other artists on it but doesn't actually use it for news or politics. Most of my friends don't use Twitter. Most people in my network know of Twitter only through quoted reports in news articles.

I think, and unless you have statistics to show otherwise, that the idea of a "modern day forum" role for Twitter lies only in the minds of highly engaged Twitter users. I mean I'm a highly engaged user of HN and I would be quite sad if it went away and actively fight to maintain its culture. I've watched a lot of online communities rot over time so I understand what it's like to watch your community change. But I don't pretend that HN or other online communities I'm part of are somehow a vital resource for all of humanity. The only noteworthy thing about Twitter's community is the number of journalists and celebrities talking to each other on it. That's all.

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/05/10-facts-ab...

[2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/27/twitter-is-...

True. I for one thought it was pretty clear it was a simpleton comment you didn't think through.

I don’t think you could have misread this interaction more than you already have.

King responds saying Twitter should be paying him. I think that makes a lot of sense.

I don't think its that. I think it is literal to the effect of, twitter wouldn't have such a huge crowd to serve ads to without people like King who have tons of followers coming to the platform to get updates. An example, I don't have a twitter account, but I will surf Hector Martin's twitter for updates on Asahi Linux development. If it wasn't for Hector Martin's content, twitter would never be requested by my browser.

So it is essentially, charge the people who bring the users to twitter.

It's remarkable how quickly so many of those defending Musk are emphasising the 'lords' and 'peasants' language after he used that terminology in a tweet.

It's not original, it's not adding to the discussion, and it just sounds like sycophancy.

Blue checkmarks aren't status symbols. You could always have requested one in the past without paying a dime.

The entire point of these things were so that it was an indication that these people are who they say they are: experts and celebrities.

This absolute loon wants to charge the people who are the only reason that twitter even still exists.

Correct, which is odd that Elon responded to him, "How about 8?"

You don't think $8-20/month of book sales are generated by King's twitter presence?

Twitter offers him value, or he wouldn't be on it. Personally, I think they could charge $50/mo and most blue checks would pay it.

I think Elon has the right idea, you gotta dip their toes in the water, then jack up the price later.

Why would you presume good faith here?

If that becomes the norm then people will probably start caring a lot less about twitter posts in general.

How much will that cost Twitter?

I don't think it works that way?

When Oprah is seen dining at a restaurant, the restaurant gets more value from the PR than Oprah gets from the meal. That does not lead to the conclusion that she should go open a restaurant.

I think King is better served by continuing to write and live his life.

They wrote:

> It's a higher barrier to having a good experience, which I can't think of many successful examples of to be honest.

The way I read the poster is that they think being asked to pay more will create worse experience, which is implied to be stupid. Except it isn't, it's literally what's happening in every market all the time. Getting people to pay more for worse product is entirely normal, and the way it usually works is by removing the option to keep paying the same amount for the product they currently enjoy.

But very possibly the type of clownish take Musk is trying to monitize by charging for access to it.

Flawless has never been a word to describe Reddit.

Points of view that Elon likes, I imagine. Especially ones that can't get revenue elsewhere for peddling pro-virus points of view, for example.

Reddit the same site that deletes tons of comments and bans subreddits?

agreed, it seems like Twitter is fundamentally about broadcasting content made somewhere else, not making content.

Yes I do know who Steven King is. Even famous authors need to spend a lot of money on advertising when they publish a new book, and twitter certainly helps here.

Also, HN has a rule against asking people whether they've read the article. Asking people whether they know who some famous person is, is obnoxious in the same way.

Because I am not a heavy enough Twitter user for this to affect me at all, so I'm just curious to see if Musk's gamble works. He's gambling that the network effect is as important for Verified users as it is for non-Verified users, which is not a bet most other creator-based social media sites have made. Judging by the number/temperature of comments you've made about this topic over the last two days, I think you're a lot more emotionally invested in this topic than I am. I'm just here with popcorn.

All good. I definitely agree regarding Twitter and I would also not want to do business with Musk. Hence my incredulousness with the thought of any generosity, intellectual or otherwise, being thrown his way.

Twitter is basically a broadcast platform for people who matter "in the real world". It gives them an easy way to reach their audience on their own terms without any middlemen.

As a centralized platform, Twitter creates more value for those who follow than those who broadcast. Because the broadcasters are primarily known for something other than the "content" they create on the platform, they would find their audience anywhere. Followers, on the other hand, can conveniently follow many people on the same platform. Regardless of whether they are interested in global celebrities, local politicians, or professionals in a specific subfield, they can often find those people on Twitter.

Blogs used to be popular among many of the groups you can now find on Twitter. I guess Twitter replaced them, because the short message format forces you to focus on the essentials. Creating a new post is much faster, and you will reach many more people, because reading the post is not a significant time investment.

> Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT...

> Almost all made famous by YouTube.

I looked the top 50 in that list and maybe ~5 of them are what you describe. The rest are big music labels, TV channels, artists and other such independently popular figures, not very different from Twitter.

If you're famous, you'll almost certainly have a twitter account, although there are obviously exceptions. The same just doesn't seem to go for YouTube. Creating content on YT is a lot more time-consuming than creating it on Twitter, of course.

There's not enough "room" to produce interesting content solely on Twitter vs YouTube — you have to hiccup out your value in segmented tweet threads. Thus if Twitter does provide value to followers it is in referencing outside material. Elon is supposedly directing Twitter engineers to go full-steam on reviving Vine so we'll see if that can turn things around.

The idea that what matters most is having the most followers is very arbitrary and not relevant to many strategies for enjoying Twitter. In my experience, Twitter is best as a place to have conversations, and this is optimal at some number of followers below 10k. There are many accounts out there having an amazing time at small numbers, having curated a medium-sized following of people who are interested in talking with them about the things they want to talk about.

> Twitter has no real "content creators", YouTube does.

I don’t understand the logic. They can be both well known outside of Twitter and create content. Sure, that is not their source of income, but it is harder to monetise a Twitter account, so that’s more or less by design. From the point of view of random people there is not really any functional difference.

In a way Twitter fills the space of being a proliferator of existing content, in a more concise form. In this way people don’t have to choose “do I create on platform X or Y” and instead they create on platform X and feel empowered to share on platform Y because it fills a different use case.

Nice observation. It's more like a direct marketing channel than an actual consumable. The most successful users are directing users to YouTube, e-commerce, voting booths or news sites to actually convert.

If I were YouTube right now, I'd be evaluating the opportunity to eat Twitter's lunch as it'll get distracted by a randomizing new owner. The YouTube posts product really isn't relevant in the current YouTube app, but as a separate experience focused on posts, it might have some value for non-creators on the platform. Bad as it is, YouTube has more of its act together than Twitter when it comes to designing and enforcing content moderation policies at scale.