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Comment by galkk | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree with this opinion by Tim Sweeney, and think that it’s a net benefit for all, but previously blue status owners.

” Twitter only verifying elites and friends of Twitter employees was wrong. Democratizing verification for $8 was good. Treating everyone the same is principled. What kind of company sells a product but gives it to elites for free? That's just weird thing to do.

I don’t want to be verified unless the verification process is opened up to everyone on equal terms. Right now it’s a system for doling our favors to friends of Twitter and for using revocation to punish people Twitter doesn’t like.”

https://mobile.twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/16426416438...

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Sweeny doesn't understand how Twitter works. Blue Checkmarks are not the product!

Tweets by people other people want to read are thr product! Twitter managed to convince hundreds, thousands of incredibly famous and notable people to produce content for Twitter _for free_

A quite unbelievable achievement. The world's top comedian's saying funny things for free every day. Industry titans giving their view on business every day, for free. Worlds greatest scientists, historians, geologists etc, just pumping out world class knowledge for free. Every. Single. Hour. Of. Every. Single. Day.

Blue Checkmarks help users navigate the sea of tweets to find the content they are looking for. Lehacy Blue Checkmarks help users consume the product. They are not the product.

The thing is there could easily be 1,000 people named Tim Sweeney in the US. The point of the blue checkmark is that the person tweeting is the famous Tim Sweeney. Not that they have a license that says they are Tim Sweeney.

It's literally only valuable if your name is valuable, and you are the famous person with that name.

The point of the blue checkmark, to both Twitter and their users, is to make the platform more valuable.

Previously it was used to give more confidence that someone is famous. That worked.

Now, it's changing purposes, but it makes as much if not more sense. You lose a bit of ability to tell who is famous, but in exchange you get more significant bot and spam prevention as well a less advertiser dependent revenue model.

> You lose a bit of ability to tell who is famous, but in exchange you get more significant bot and spam prevention as well a less advertiser dependent revenue model.

People who want to spam a cryptocurrency fraud will make a lot more than even a year's worth of Twitter Blue. Phone number verification is insufficient, you need to tie to a real world, unique identity to prevent spam.

And, Twitter has 450 million monthly active users (by some estimates - very hard to tell with how volatile the user base has been over the last few months). If you took an optimistic 1% conversion ratio for $100/yr subscriptions (typical freemium uptake metrics), that is $110 million dollars a quarter revenue.

Twitter used to get $1 bil in advertising revenue for quarter, which would still mean 90% of their revenue would come from advertising.

Unfortunately - estimates are that they have lost between 70 and 89% of their advertising revenue, the uptake for Twitter Blue is estimated to be well below 1%, and the leveraged buyout added a billion dollars of additional interest Twitter owes a year.

There's a general decline in advertising revenue, but some (such as myself) suspect the major brands looked at the volatility of Twitter and decided to target a disproportionate amount of their cuts there.

Phone number plus credit card is pretty strong, being two scarce resources combined.

They've only just begun to roll it out, are you assuming they will have 0 future growth only a few months into launching? Not only that, but the benefits of verifying have slowly ratcheted up, and with the algorithm now showing clear benefit I'd expect sharp growth.

Finally, why bring their revenue into this? That's a totally separate conversation. I'd be happy to have it, but not really related to whether this alternative verification scheme makes sense.

I brought revenue into it because you claimed that they got a new less advertiser-dependent revenue model. I argue that the mix of a healthy Twitter monetizing advertising and paid individual user accounts would still be 90% advertising.

Eh, I think you can tie the name to the bio for a blue check mark.

If some guy from Alabama is named Tim Sweeney it seems perfectly reasonable for them to be verified as Tim Sweeney, CEO of Alabama Woodworking Inc.

Like for India, how low in the cabinet do you allow a blue checkmark? Is it the same level as the US? By just making it about verification it solves the problem. If the persons Name + Bio isn't unique enough to identify them then they don't get a blue check.

That might work, although people are clumsy about looking up things online. But I doubt most people have distinct enough bios to qualify. Certainly not enough to have the majority of people able to pay $8/month.

You can change your bio. Twitter would either have to lock them at the time of verification, or have moderators approve every change.

I would pair it with a bio lock or something along those lines.

I mean its pretty ridiculous you can get verified and then change the description of who you are and has led to issues in the past where people change themselves to companies/celebrities and promote some crypto currency scams [1].

[1]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/an-8-mess-twi...

No, identity verification is good for everyone regardless of fame. Basically it means a John Smith can’t be Tim Sweeney. The likelihood of Tim Sweeney impersonating another Tim Sweeney is remote.

> The likelihood of Tim Sweeney impersonating another Tim Sweeney is remote.

For $100 you can legally become Tim Sweeney. Or Adele. Pretty much anything non-profane.

Alternatively, you have things backwards. The odds that any Tim Sweeney would want to specifically imitate Epic's Tim Sweeney is remote. However, once they can, it only takes one to cause chaos. He might not be their first choice to emulate, but they know that they can. Or someone can seek them out.

Imagine shorting NVIDIA and then having a Tim Sweeney tweet that Epic will require Radeon cards for the best graphics.

There are multiple people named Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Think of just offering them the option to create chaos either because they want to or because someone offers them a bribe.

Besides all that, I have no idea why identity verification is good for everyone. A lot of people would prefer to be pseudonymous.

So…for John Smith to impersonate Tim Sweeney on Twitter he needs to spend $100, go in front of a judge to petition a name change, change his name on everything else in his life, including all sorts of documents, policies, ids, passports, etc…creating a huge legal paper trail (that will cost a ton of money) then spend another $8 a month just to get a blue check to make snide comments on a social media platform? Seems like a fair amount of effort just to impersonate and troll IMO, probably not worth the effort.

Also, in the case of a Tim Sweeney impersonating another Tim Sweeney and wrecking havoc there are some big statistical hurdles to overcome. You need to be a Tim Sweeney, you need to be familiar with another famous Tim Sweeney, you need to want to wreck havoc in a way that only The Tim Sweeney can, and you need to be dumb enough to think you will get away with it. Seems remote.

> A lot of people would prefer to be pseudonymous. Ok. So don’t pay the $8/mo for identity verification on Twitter. Problem solved.

> You need to be a Tim Sweeney

No, you need to find a Tim Sweeney who is willing to help you out. If there's money involved, it's pretty doable. You can get the real influencers to tweet about your product for a not-insane sum. I imagine the cheapest person who shares a famous name isn't that expensive.

Meanwhile, you don't have to get away with it for long. Not that it it seems there is anything to "get away with". Does it violate any rules for a non-Epic CEO Tim Sweeney to talk about how much he hates NVIDIA's new cards?

You just added more statistical complexity to the scenario, so not only do you need to be willing to take on all that risk and effort to impersonate another person, but you also need to recruit someone with the same name who is willing to undertake the scheme with you?

>What kind of company sells a product but gives it to elites for free?

This is strange; the "elites"* in this case create the content. You want the "elites" on the platform otherwise your lurkers, who make up 90% of the DAU will have nothing to read.

The benefit is murky here; blue checks were a proxy for status, "democratizing" blue checks doesn't democratize status. No one is anymore inclined to follow me because I bought a blue check like Kim Kardashian.

* I use "elites" here to match the language, but I think calling Twitter bluechecks "elites" is most laughable, crybaby label perpetuated by a CEO who needs to be liked by everybody.

>You want the "elites" on the platform otherwise your lurkers, who make up 90% of the DAU will have nothing to read.

I don't think this is even true. I know the stats you're talking about on posters vs lurkers, but that's orthogonal to blue checks. I can't imagine there was a high percentage of blue checks that got one via being notable on Twitter itself.

Ex: Can you name anyone on tiktok you'd have considered notable before the app blew up? Yet it is the hottest social media platform out there. These people are largely replaceable.

>Can you name anyone on tiktok you'd have considered notable before the app blew up?

I don't think you are giving enough credit to TikTok here. TikTok was able to break into the space using algorithmic discovery; they didn't need to spend a ton on content and were able to surface content people want to watch.

That said, verification came out in 2009, three years after the launch of Twitter itself.

I'm giving all the credit to the tiktok platform by saying the addition of the "elites" wouldn't have made any difference. They can build up people organically. They don't have to pander to the traditional elites at all.

I might have been missing the point of your post though. I thought it was saying that you want the elites whereas I'm saying they don't really matter if you can make discoverability on your platform decent.

> What kind of company sells a product but gives it to elites for free?

The kind of company that makes money off the elites.

Sweeney is missing the point by a mile here. The verification check was not the "product", content and users are. Having it was also not a matter of money or prestige, it was a way of telling who were persons or organizations of public interest.

Now it has become meaningless. If anything, it is more expensive now, so who benefits from this? Not the masses, that's for sure.

I don’t understand why as a user I would want that everyone is treated the same. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me because the whole point of those verification badges was to mark the “famous” in their space. If anything the fix would have been to give this thing out to fewer, not more people.

Now it definitely has no utility at all any more.

Going forward it is more of a mark that you are human rather than a bot because the explosion in llms/spam.

The point of the verification badges was like swag at the oscars. It was perks for VIPs and that is what induced the celebrities to get on the platform originally.

If you just want Twitter to be a space for famous people, hack politicians and hack journalists, influencers, to hang out like a red carpet party with everybody else gawking at them... well yeah, you'd want to keep the old way.

That also means a citizen journalist with accurate information gets to shout into the void whereas a hack who called in a favor from a friend who works at Twitter gets a megaphone.

Do you like the system where normies get locked out of their Google accounts and have to come here or beg on Twitter for a googler to do them a solid? Not to mention that the checkmarked got to use the app with exclusive features and a better experience?

Why support a caste system? This way a NYT journalist is still marked as affiliated with the NYT, just with a different icon or exclusive perks.

Not sure why a bot would be verified nor do i think that there is much of value to tell humans and bots apart. Some of the most spammy or vile content comes from actual humans.

Since it costs $8 and requires a credit card it will be much harder (not impossible) to spin up many spammy bots. You could still have good bots.

Without paying for the checkmark the spammy bots/humans will have limited reach. Hopefully there will be less vile content in the future as a result. If not I'm sure they'll try something else.

>Now it definitely has no utility at all any more.

Which is good in the long run. The blue check is like the https padlock. People mistakenly think that it implies security, which it doesn't. Twitter has essentially become a CA within its domain. And gold = EV validation.

> The blue check is like the https padlock. People mistakenly think that it implies security, which it doesn't.

It sure does.

For instance, you cannot make a secure request to a domain that is using a different name from the one in the TLS certificate it is serving, e.g. a domain like "gobble.com" serving a certificate issued for "google.com", will be seen as insecure.

Same could have happened with the blue check. Now it is meaningless.

If they actually verified identity documents then it would make more sense. Looks like Stripe will do it for a one-time fee of $1.50, so surely Twitter could do it for $8 a month.

Charging a credit card doesn’t verify identity, but it does make creating spam accounts more expensive in bulk. It seems hard to explain that benefit to users, though, particularly at the price they’re charging for it.

> What kind of company sells a product but gives it to elites for free?

Lots of them? Fancy hotels comp rooms for influencers in exchange for posts about where they went. Nominees get $50k worth of swag at the Oscars. Cops get free coffee at a lot of places. Kids with big YouTube followings get free toys to "unbox". Elites get all sorts of free shit.

The things is, Twitter needs those "elites" (which include many non-elite journalists and government agencies) more than those elites need Twitter.

Those "elites" generated content for the website for free driving users to the website. And all in exchange for a verified status.

Sweeney seems to have missed the fact that Twitter still doesn't treat everyone the same. Checkmarks are still free for Twitter's "top 500 advertisers and for the 10,000 most-followed organizations that have been previously verified":

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/technology/elon-musk-ftc-...

I would also argue that having the same price in every country isn't treating everyone the same, since the value of $8 differs greatly from country to country. And that is something Sweeney should be well aware of, since he made a point of having regional pricing in the Epic Games Store.

You agree with Tim Sweeney on repeatedly using the word "verification" and him ignoring what the word actually means?

>What kind of company sells a product but gives it to elites for free?

So many companies do this. Clothing and sports companies are the first that spring to mind.

> Democratizing verification for $8 was good.

It's not "democratizing" verification, it's just selling it.

All it verifies is that you spend $96/year for a sticker.

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