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.
It's more like the peasants will get a useless blue checkmark and the Lords will get a tag, which eventually will have the same meaning as the checkmark today. Everything stays the same but everyone pays.
"There will be a secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure, which is already the case for politicians"
lmao such a populist move then. Make it sound like what was before a privilege for the few now is in reach for the working man, but actually there is now another type of privilege that it is unreachable unless you're a Very Important Person.
All the Musk fans, happy to see their messiah disrupt an institution, played like an absolute fiddle. This is hilarious.
> If one in five current blue ticks paid $20 a month that would raise just under $15 million a year for Twitter…Twitter’s current revenues (mostly from ads) are $5 billion a year. Musk’s apparent plan would generate about 30 hours’ worth of annual revenue.
> Absolutely no one should pay $8 or $20 a month to support Elton Murk's latest scam. Asking low-income Twitter users to pay $92 a year so their tweets don't get hidden and deprioritized alongside bots is not giving "power to the people."
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.
If one in five current blue ticks paid $20 a month that would raise just under $15 million a year for Twitter
Until suddenly there are yellow checkmarks available for $100/month, and red checkmarks available for $500/month, and enterprise-only green checkmarks for $5,000/month.
What percentage of "current" blue ticks convert is not material since the TAM is about to become every Twitter user.
And the offering is not just about verification, but other Blue features. Personally I have no interest in a blue check, but I'd happily pay $8/month to remove ads (unfortunately only half the ads will be removed in this iteration).
not that i think this is some brilliant revenue strategy but it does not strike me as a good take to automatically assume that the current blue check mark base is a strict superset of who will pay $8/month
> 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
It’s fascinating to glimpse these endless mental contortions about the immense significance of tweaks to a social media profile flag. I don’t think anyone cares except those same billionaires/VCs and journalists who both write this drivel (one of the links is on a16zcrypto.com which I guess is the ideological enemy base of “establishment journos”). Will anyone else be left on Twitter when their private war is done?
> It’s fascinating to glimpse these endless mental contortions about the immense significance of tweaks to a social media profile flag. I don’t think anyone cares except those same billionaires/VCs and journalists (...)
Would you say the same about GitHub stars? There's no end of people obsessing about those, completely oblivious to the fact that they're first and foremost bookmarks, and do not confer any particular sentiment for a starred repository. And yet, they're a popularity contest.
Journalists and VCs care about this because enough users care about this that it can be used to print money.
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.
You're seeing it more on HN because there's a huge (IMO growing) overlap between HN commenters and Twitter users. The comments on Big Tech articles look identical to entire slices of Twitter. Some of the talking heads on HN who comment a lot also have moderately large Twitter followings.
Despite being in tech and working adjacent to Big Tech, in my circles only HN and Twitter users are this up in arms about Twitter. They seem to be more concerned about this than even friends of mine who work at Twitter (who are more peeved by the current instability in the company than anything going on with the product.)
It's fun popcorn on HN right now but if this continues it'll get pretty tiring IMO.
Funny, I was just listening to Naval Ravikant talking about it being better to seek wealth than status, because the latter is a zero-sum game. hard to unsee that dynamic once it's pointed out.
Don't humans generally value relative wealth, which would also make it a zero sum game?
E.g., someone in poverty today isn't particularly comforted by knowing they have luxuries that former kings didn't have, like plumbing, because well-being is tied to relative scales
I considered that before posting, but what made me ultimately disagree is that well-being is not objective. It is very often completely subjective.
Consider that fact that at one point in the past you probably thought what you have now would make you happy. And maybe for a short time you were. But invariably that feeling of well-being wanes. You can say your new car is objectively better than your old one, yet after having it a few years it feels exactly like the previous vehicle from the standpoint about how much it contributes to your well-being. If well-being were an objective fact, you'd still feel happier with the new car. Most of the time, we have an innate ability to shift the goalposts, which keeps us continuously striving. To that extent, well-being is all subjective. I'm sure people in 200 years will wonder how we ever got along with our miserable existence without the creature comforts they take for granted.
>You can say your new car is objectively better than your old one, yet after having it a few years it feels exactly like the previous vehicle from the standpoint about how much it contributes to your well-being.
I agree with your point on human psychology, but survivorship bias is relevant here.
One way in which my new car is objectively better is that it has better safety features, which makes me less likely to die in a crash. My feelings about it may well normalize over time, but only if I survive long enough.
The correlation is not perfect, but lots of creature comforts actively make us live longer. In addition to the comfort of pooping indoors, indoor plumbing also makes it easier to wash your hands with warm water afterward, harder to trip and fall on the trip to the outhouse, both of which make you live longer. The people who die don't get to psychologically adjust to their premature deaths.
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.
>Based on what you said, it implies that well-being drops as a time-dependent function.
No, sorry, that was not my intent at all. My point was to get you out of thinking of well-being as a purely psychological phenomenon.
Dead people have no well-being at all. Many advances improve our well-being in an objective sense by keeping more of us alive longer. This is not a psychological effect.
And there is definitely survivorship bias. When you survey people about their psychological state, you only survey the ones who aren't too dead to respond.
>And there is definitely survivorship bias. When you survey people about their psychological state, you only survey the ones who aren't too dead to respond
What is the correlation to outcomes? Are you saying a negative outlook correlates to higher survivability so we are primed to view everything through a more negative lens?
That makes sense from an evolutionary psychology point of view, but doesn’t explain why we the well being wanes rather than just stays low from the onset.
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.
This is very astute, but I can't help wonder why people worry so much about their status on the bird website. Actually doing/making things in real life is pretty much guaranteed to have a much higher return in multiple dimensions (incl. status) than pretending like what happens there matters.
It doesn't have to be either/or: make something cool, throw out a link to it, repeat.
Except famous people now get a verified tag, rendering most of what you said moot. This is a bad idea, it will fail, and Musk will make like he never said it. If you don’t think so, just imagine yourself paying Facebook for a checkmark and see if that feels right.
1. Musk signed a binding agreement to buy Twitter.
2. And then he got cold feet when he decided he didn't like the deal he made and he spent six months desperately trying to not buy Twitter.
3. And then he finally understood that he would lose the court case and that he had to live up to the contract and so he bought Twitter at the originally agreed price.
4. And now Musk wants Twitter users to pay for his poor business decision and fund him out of his debt.
More mental gymnastics... I'm not even sure what point is being made by this move, other than devaluing the blue check to the point of meaninglessness. It's not even "utilitarian": if leveling the playing field was Musk's interest, he would have eliminated the blue check altogether.
There is no mechanism for anti-impersonation if all it takes to get a blue check is payment. Bot farms can also pay money for blue checks...
Almost everything is irrelevant to a hostile nation state, because by its very nature it can outspend your security if it cares badly enough. In the immortal words of James Mickens[0], "If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT."
Raising the costs has a general effect of cutting out people who do not care enough to pay - be it individuals, companies, or governments.
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 think this would do the complete opposite. Create two tiers of of users: Lords with the money to spend $8/month on getting a blue tick next to their name, and the peasants who don't cough up.
I can't wait to be disregarded just as a spam bot because I thought it's an embarrassing waste of money.
Can't it actually be the opposite? Like, sure I could pay $8/no (a coffee plus croissant) but it signals that I care so much about being heard on twitter that I'm willing to PAY for it... Only losers do so, so blue checkmarks a are that.
The old money (journalists of mainstream newspapers) can leave and take all the audiences with them. Their audience is there for the narrative and ideology, not because they are fond of Twitter.
Twitter does not have a "native" audience, because it claims to be a platform. If they engaged deeper with content producers (like substack does) they might have. It's a solely megaphone, hence useless without a voice behind them.
Old money reigns supreme because the "new" voices are not independent. They go on twitter so they can graduate to mainstream media (or to onlyfans)
> Old money reigns supreme because the "new" voices are not independent
Are you implying there are no legitimate discussions between non-checkmarked users today on Twitter? That there is only a leader(check-marked users) and follower dynamic?
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?
> It elicits shrieks because it’s more about leveling the playing field than making money.
If 1% of twitter accounts pay then that is $400M/yr which is a decent chunk of revenue for twitter. It is absolutely about making money.
All the government and official accounts along with CEOs, actors and other public personas will be almost forced to pay up. The existing blue check marks who don't pay up will probably be made up for 10x by wannabe youtube personalities that pay for it.
The "blue check establishment journos" are also almost all upper middle class liberals, there's not much of a morality story here other than PMCs and capitalists having a squabble.
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