Twitter launches $8 monthly subscription with blue checkmark | Hacker News Reader

Twitter launches $8 monthly subscription with blue checkmark

reuters.com

30 pointsmfiguiere24 comments

This seems like a really bad product idea. Blue checkmarks were an important safety for users to know which accounts were legitimate. And now they are taking away the ID verification part of the system?

I am probably not the only one that looked at a blue check mark and did not think legitimate or trustworthy. My view of blue check mark is someone that spends too much time on twitter.

Anybody with a blog claiming to be a journalist could get verified, I saw plenty of verified accounts that were nobody scammers.

Some of these might also have been hacked blue checkmark accounts resold/reused. Which also was one of the issue with this status symbol, as far as I know the "verification" was a one time event per account.

I’d be curious to see a couple examples.

now they just need to be a nobody scammer who has $8/mo

I think the point is that it’s hard to scale this. I’ve worked in the fraud space for awhile and a big problem is sophisticated actors that scale their operation and cause a lot of damage. If you can make it more expensive to scale, you can change the economics. For example, if it cost 1 cent to send an email, you would probably solve a big chunk of the spam problem.

I believe one of the things that necessitated the verification was lawsuits from famous people being impersonated on Twitter. Now that you have to pay to be verified, seems like they might be open to that liability again.

Tony La Russa.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/us/twitter-verification-e...

There's still a lot of confusion about what exactly this service entails. The Reuters article itself says, "It was not immediately clear how or if Twitter planned to verify the identity of the user beyond charging a fee." From the little I read of Musk's tweets, he isn't making clear if existing ticks will need payment to remain; whether ID verification will be the same as before; whether ticks received in his system are only active as long as you pay the monthly fee; etc.

I think the key product direction here is that he wants to prioritize responses for paid customers, so he's going for some kind of "pay to play" model. It's not about the blue check really as much as seeing if enough people believe in getting "prominence" on the system.

Ofc, it's BS that he talks of the old system as "lords vs peasants," when "pay to play" is pretty much exactly "lords (with money) over peasants." :) He just means, "power to money" when he says "power to people," which ofc runs 100% parallel with his libertarian ideologies so it's not a surprise that this coming from him.

It won't change the Twitter that people use to connect with their specialized circles - like, if I follow a bunch of bicycling enthusiasts, or DnD players, or economics professors, etc. But if you are following some trending topic, like #Free<name of country> or whatever, you'll now see more tweets from paid accounts.

Is that worse/better? I have no idea!

There is a stage interview between Elon M. and R. Baron where the gist hinted at is the x.com plan from 22 years ago. The puzzle pieces that go well together in one triangle are Starlink, Twitter, SpaceX. Users will have the capability to set their Twitter comfy setting as they do for music, for example.

I guess a better way to value the pieces in Telsa is to give each organ a different name like Neuralink. The Optimus bot has so much potential. It will revolutionize how the mess is made tidy after conventional arms conflict in small corners of the world where petsize animals were used to de-mine operations.

Why is reuters even reporting on this? Why is this even considered newsworthy?

Because twitter used to be the special domain of journalists. And while they can do the same sh*t now as before, it’s like they feel they lost status.

So they do what they do: write about it.

Being intentionally obtuse is transparent

I'm a fan of Elon and am optimistic on Twitter's future, but this is not compelling whatsoever. The fact that I pay $8 a month and still see ads is enough to make this a non-starter.

Move fast and break things. I'm very interested to learn whether this approach will turn out well or not.

More like "move things and break fast", I think.

In this case it's more like "warp fast and breach the core".

Whatever happens I feel like it'll be a big learning experience. I really have no idea what to expect - maybe Twitter does great and Elon's selling at profit in 3-5 years, maybe Twitter spins apart and breaks down horribly within a year, maybe the service works about the same but with some new features. I just really have no idea how to even assign likelihood between those three possibilities, I kind of think the last is most likely, but no idea. This is like running an experiment when you have no idea what the outcome will be. It's exciting!

As someone who really enjoyed using Twitter to connect with other experts in my field, I’m pretty depressed about it. Somehow Twitter caught lightning in a bottle and became a very useful and important service. Want to try to improve it? No problem: try to improve it! But this isn’t so much an experiment as a child pulling the legs off a bug to see what happens. I can’t see any way the network survives if these plans all go wrong.

I use Twitter daily. A lot. I can understand feeling bad if it falls apart - we will have lost something. I don't understand feeling bad now though, when it hasn't yet fallen apart.

Maybe it'll be okay, maybe it won't, but no company lasts forever. If Twitter dies something else will come along.

There’s an $8/mo plan now, that isn’t required, and a company that was long struggling cut workers.

So what? I fail to see how this so far changes much of how Twitter behaves. This feels like hysteria; what am I missing?

If Twitter remains useful for people who don’t subscribe to the $8 plan then it might be fine. But I recently saw an interview with Musk where he said those users’ tweets would be pushed “way down” in the priority queue, which is an important vote against. Note that even though this came straight from the new owner, one has to keep in mind that Elon Musk says all sorts of random nonsense: so maybe it’s just more bluff and he’ll keep everything stable for those users. On the other hand I think it’s enough of a warning that I’ve started using Mastodon, which turns out to be suddenly full of (infosec) experts and is actually a lot of fun — like Twitter back in 2013.

I don't see this option - maybe because I'm still on $2.99 with not blue checkmark and no option to upgrade.

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