> enough to be willing to pay $8 a month
you realize $8 a month is nothing to the majority of adults who would be in the "knowledge worker" category? a month? a couple of coffees is $10 and that's a day.
you realize $8 a month is nothing to the majority of adults who would be in the "knowledge worker" category? a month? a couple of coffees is $10 and that's a day.
$8 a month is pretty much the monthly cost of a cellphone plan across Europe. One could also get Spotify, or Netflix, at the same price point.
Comparatively speaking, paying $8 to have unlimited access to generally low quality content, at the same price point where other platforms offer actual good content, is a waste.
You get a decent VPS for 8€/month, that has more computing power and bandwidth and storage that one person can use per month compared to what they would use on their systems for just streaming some videos and getting some messages.
Sure I don't calculate here the cost for development and maintenance, but this cost is mostly constant with numbers of active users.
Or I can pay Elon for delivering tweets that he got some rando to write for free. The latest content is a right - wing conspiracy that nuclear weapons do not exist, and thay video footage of nuclear ezplosions is staged.
I thought the $8 for Elon was for publishers, not consumers?
I used to pay for a Twitter client, I now pay for a Mastodon client, I contribute to the upkeep of my local friendly Mastodon instance. In all it's in the ballpark of 8EUR/month. There's no world where I would _pay for attention on Twitter_, though.
I am somewhat surprised they didn't just charge for client API access/other bits and pieces (that is, charge the user, not the person who makes the client), and nuke the pay-for-attention/pay-for-flair feature before launch as an obviously terrible idea. I think more people would pay for that. Not many people, but more people, and it would be far less corrosive on the user experience as a whole.
I agree.
The Twitter tick had some cool when it was a mark of authenticity. Now it's a bit cringe.
The embarrassment factor might work better for Twitter if they offer an option similar to what LinkedIn does for paying users: Give the user the option to disable the blue tick on their account so other people don't know they are paying, while still having access to useful paid account features.
Like you I'd be more willing to pay a small amount for API access and useful features if I can do so quietly, without broadcasting the fact.
That the "heavy user" threshold is 3 posts a week is surprising to me, and seems like a bad threshold I'm sure that actual Twitter data is likely more accurate and shows different numbers, but it's not really about the usage I guess, it's about the promise of more followers and engagement. But demonstrably this is not the case, and many persons who did buy the Blue Check complained they didn't see the increase in activity it was advertised that the Blue Check would give. The signal behind what a Blue Check means has been quite noisy for a very long time, even before Musk's take over, and the decisions post-Musk on what a Blue Check really means/does is very confusing and unclear.
Why would I pay $8 a month to maybe get some followers by being promoted when I could just spend a few hundred USD once and just buy followers from some follower farm, which is arguably a better signal of "hey, this person is worth following?" as opposed to the Blue Check? It doesn't matter if it's just a "couple of coffees", why pay for something that arguably provides 0 benefit for me?
Twitter should not have tried to sell identify validation as a major marketable service; they already try to validate your identity even without it, and it doesn't seem to benefit anyone, not even Twitter.
Game companies figured out how to monetize useless things with cosmetics and such, and if Twitter wanted to monetize heavily, they should have just done that. Fancier reactions, more edits and stupid stuff for the changeable usernames, etc. The idea that they can somehow sell the user attention is a folly; yes, they gate and can control the feeds, but the users always have the option of just not following or even just not looking. It's a resource Twitter _never_ really had control over; they might as well have been selling ocean wranglers, offering that someone will beat the tide with whips for you if the ocean pisses you off for some reason; it's about the same effectualness, and equally useless service.
Please cut that. Everyone wants 'a couple of coffees' and it adds up even for SV techbros.
I convinced myself I "needed the time out of the office" yeah cool, go for a walk you dork and make coffee in the kitchen like the person with bills that you are (is what I now tell myself)
That too, but that wasn't the point :)
(Long ago I suggested that Twitter should have allowed people to contribute towards premium accounts for other people, a bit like Reddit Gold. Since a large part of the value derives not from your own posting but other people's.)
This is a very US-centric take and almost insulting for people living in certain other areas of the world. In my country (central Europe, as is easy to guess), an experienced teacher (definitely a "knowledge worker" in my book) may earn about $10k per year. Not sure how much a beginner one gets, but surely less. $8 per month is a lot then.
If everyone felt entitled to charge $8 for not much in return that can add up and mean real money even to US-centric people, once they're paying it to 50 different services every month that deliver (and ask) for "nothing".
And the value of a blue check is less than that.
Wow.