Ironically, once you can just buy the blue checkmark, it becomes instantly worthless.
I know your post was tongue in cheek.
But my answer is: I don’t give a crap. I’m not on Twitter for the celebrities. I don’t follow any and certainly have nothing to say to them. The people I talk to are indie devs and reviewers in my bubbles.
So the “ignore the whole blue tick business” sounds like a perfect option for people who use it like me.
ShivaX
1753
I found an defender of Elon’s plan.
His statement is that people will pay it to avoid suffering reputational damages.
So… extortion. The “pro” column is : extortion.
So, I’m honestly not sure what Elon is selling that blue ticks somehow solve the spam issue. I don’t use twitter, so I’m trying to rationalize a few statements in context to figure out how it flows together (maybe it doesn’t, silly me!)
If a person filters twitter to only see blue tick posts, then since bots don’t get them, that “solves” spam. It also solves why you don’t buy a checkmark - now if you want to talk to devs and they have checkmarks to filter out the hellscape, you have to buy one to not live in the hellscape.
It seems like the hellscape is a desired feature of twitter that drives people to buy checkmarks.
I use it the same way. Twitter is a strange beast, and it’s a technical marvel that it functions half as well as it does for the various roles it tries to fill at scale. But its replacements don’t need to fill all of those roles. I would flock to any text broadcast platform that let me subscribe and occasionally reply with a decent UI, as long as the folks I wanted to hear from were there. Real identity verification isn’t even remotely important to me.
rho21
1757
I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this tweet is too narrow to contain.
antlers
1758
Since the when point of the blue checkmark was to avoid litigation from people suffering reputational damage from a mpostets, I don’t think the extortion can work that way. It’ll be like “people currently entitled to blue checkmarks continue to get them for free, random people have to pay for them, if you don’t have one you’re invisible to most”. That’s the only way it becomes a significant source of revenue.
I see people defend the whining from some celebrities about the 20$ fee, while they conveniently ignore that Twitter is the way they advertise their products (sometimes the product is themselves).
It’s totally fine if Stephen King doesn’t wanna pay, people enjoy his musing on different subjects. That’s fine. But if he ever wants to advertise one of his books or shows, then he has to pay actual advertisement rates.
He has 7 million followers? How much does Addidas have to pay for an ad? Keep in mind that ad will not be as high visibility as Stephen’s tweet, and won’t be directed specifically at an audience of fans. Will Stephen agree to pay 0.01$ per follower to share a link to a book or a trailer for one of his shows? (that’s 70 000$ please, thank you Stephen).
Menzo
1760
Stephen King doesn’t pay a single dollar to advertise anything, and never will. His publisher might, though.
Elon framing up his deal in real time.
I can’t even imagine how someone would think that a blue check is vanity-driven.
My buddy Brian – a biographer who’s done bios on George Lucas, Dr Seuss, Washington Irving, and yes, Jim Henson illustrates the issue:
"It’s wild to me how the blue tick is often purely framed as an ego thing. It’s to prevent people impersonating you. So people know it’s the ACTUAL person whose work they like. Creators shouldn’t have to pay a monthly fee to in case people pretend to be you for hate, scams, etc."twitter.com/elonmusk/statu…
Or, I dunno, you could just GTF Twitter and quit relying on a texting platform to communicate with people!
“It sure would be a shame if something were to happen to that reputation of yours, wouldn’t it.”
I’m not sure you’re grasping the issue here, dude. For a lot of content creators or reporters in media, Twitter presents them with an easy way to get out information in real time to people who care to follow you because they like interacting with the content you create. But also:
THAT’s the issue. It doesn’t matter if you’re not on Twitter anymore, or if you ever were. “Professor Smith only gave me a B- on the paper I turned in, so I’m going to spoof him on Twitter and use his photo from the university online directory as my avatar and then say some really fucked-up shit. And I’ll have a blue checkmark!” And now Professor Smith gets to spend valuable time having to assure students and his peers and his bosses that the dude who appears to be Professor Smith on Twitter isn’t him.
Can’t trust the blue checks because anyone can buy them. Can’t trust video because of deep fakes. Can’t trust audio because editing. Can’t trust face to face because that person used a 5 year old photo and FaceApp to look good so is it even them.
Trust nothing!
I still have not seen a shred of proof of this “anyone can buy a checkmark under any random person’s identity” stuff. All I see is that anyone will be able to buy into the verification process, where as now only very few people can, if they are already famous, or have it from long ago, or know someone at Twitter.
If my goal is recurring revenue from everyone to whom I grant a blue check, what are my incentives when it comes to deciding whether you deserve a blue check?
