That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal. So every user paying $X/mo to solidify their place in the graph makes some conceptual sense.

In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. A tiny percentage of users are creators while the vast majority are consumers. If you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value.

An average user (part of the 99.9%) isn't going to care about any status or badges – they are only there to look at memes.

Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line, and (2) the platform needs them as much as they need platform.

So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.

> In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook.

There is a very big difference between Twitter and YouTube, and it's obvious once you know it.

Look at the most popular people on twitter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitte...

All celebrities outside of twitter.

Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT...

Almost all made famous by YouTube.

Twitter has no real "content creators", YouTube does.

> Then look at YouTube: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouT...

> Almost all made famous by YouTube.

I looked the top 50 in that list and maybe ~5 of them are what you describe. The rest are big music labels, TV channels, artists and other such independently popular figures, not very different from Twitter.

PewDiePie, MrBeast, Kids Diana Show, Like Nastya, Vlad and Niki in top 10.

Great trolling.

Unclear why this is getting downvoted, it is accurate statement. Only 20 of the top 50 channels are not brands. Of those 20 if you exclude music channels like BTS, Blackpink, Justin Bieber, etc. you're only left with 10 channels.

Justin Bieber came to prominence via YouTube.

Wait, didn’t Justin Bieber get his start on YouTube?

And if you exclude people like that, it turns out nobody becomes famous on YouTube.

Well yeah. If you exclude people like him who got famous on YouTube, then it, indeed, will turn out that nobody becomes famous on YouTube. I have zero idea what your point is trying to illustrate.

What's so special about Justin Bieber that disqualifies him from counting as someone who became famous on YouTube?

I think the point still stands. 6 of the top 10 on Youtube got their large followings being making content for Youtube. 0% of the top 50 on Twitter are primarily known for their tweets.

> 0% of the top 50 on Twitter are primarily known for their tweets.

Why limit yourself to the top 50? 0% of all Twitter users are primarily known for their tweets. Tweets are, by design, unsuitable for publishing content. They're useful for advertising content you publish somewhere else.

I know for (indie) games, twitter is a lagging indicator. That means you don't get famous through twitter, but twitter is a lagging indicator of the success on Steam. I can look up the source of this statement if you're interested.

I don't really see the relevance? We can rephrase your comment as "if people like your game, sometimes they follow your Twitter account".

That's just an example of using Twitter to advertise your other content.

Marketing wise the difference is huge. Say you release a new game, and want to know which marketing channels to focus on. As it turns out, Twitter will not give you much new customers that haven't come into contact with your game before.

I agree with you that once you have those followers, you can leverage that with other content. But building up your audience mainly needs to happen through other channels.

Thanks for clarifying, this is an insightful interpretation.

foone is

Yeah, the only analog bouncing around my brain are accounts like that one, and, say, SwiftOnSecurity. There are people who are really big within a particular niche, and become a "sun" within a solar system. I'm blocked from both of those accounts, but I don't know why. (It's odd, because I usually avoid strong comments of ANY kind). The net effect on this sort of behavior on traffic patterns at Twitter works out quite a bit differently than on YouTube. You probably wouldn't block people on YouTube for the same comment you see on Twitter, and when you do it on Twitter, you're hard-limiting your audience.

> 0% of all Twitter users are primarily known for their tweets.

This is false.

Anecdotal but Lil Nas X was very well known on twitter before he got popular. I recognized his handle from screenshots and made the connection only after Old Town Road came out.

Justin Bieber literally got his start from YouTube. BTS and Black pink would also not be as popular as they are without YouTube.

The original comment was a bit miseleading, but you have to admit that there is no equivalent to Pewdiepie on Twitter.

> BTS and Black pink

They would still be popular though.

YouTube hasn't even been that popular in South Korea until recently.

BTS was popular in SK way before they got big on YouTube. But their massive explosion of popularity in the west (and outside of SK in general) happened perfectly in sync with them getting big on YouTube.

You might be right, but in general, most famous channels on youtube are famous bcs of youtube.

It's VERY different in the way that Twitter is dominated by the US. YouTube, while heavily favoring India and to some extend the US, is much more mix in regards to country of origin.

I agree with the observation that Twitter is for people who are already famous, especially those made famous by US media. YouTube seems to at least allow for creators to build their own following and more importantly: Make money off their work.

There's not enough "room" to produce interesting content solely on Twitter vs YouTube — you have to hiccup out your value in segmented tweet threads. Thus if Twitter does provide value to followers it is in referencing outside material. Elon is supposedly directing Twitter engineers to go full-steam on reviving Vine so we'll see if that can turn things around.

The vine crowd has long moved to Tiktok; even IG and YT couldn’t steal mindshare from them. Vine has no chance, given that they’re starting with a 6yr old product

I don't know much about Vine, but anecdotally I have ended up spending way too much time on YouTube reels, and have also now been drawn into the equivalent on Facebook, whatever that's called, and I barely use FB. So I don't think the super short form video market is a winner takes all one by any means.

On the contrary there's plenty of room for genuine innovation in this space. For example FB short form videos don't have a dislike button, so I have no way to guide the algorithm, and YouTube reels seems to zero in on some local maximum (in my case, game of thrones and golf videos). There's so much room for improvement in this space.

> Vine has no chance, given that they’re starting with a 6yr old product

Unless the US government decides to ban TikTok which is a not so crazy possibility.

> There’s not enough “room” to produce interesting content solely on Twitter

While I think that Musk’s plan is going to backfire, it is worth noting that he tries to address this in a narrow respect, in that paid users under the new plan would be able to distribute longer video/audio content with tweets.

Yeah, if you got famous exclusively on Twitter it's because you're a demagogue, not a content creator.

Can you name the MrBeast or PewDiePie of twitter?

Yes his name is @dril and he is more powerful than 100 of your Misters Beast or Pewdies Pie

@dril seems to come close (I didn't know him, probably because he only has 1.7M followers).

On twitter he's only at place 5,391 (https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/dril).

MrBeast and PewDiePie are both millionaires ($40M-$100M) thanks to YouTube, and each have 111M followers, that's around 65x @dril.

Can you state exactly what you mean with @dril == 100 * Mister Beast?

your problem is, that youre perfect, and everyone is jealous of your good posts, and that makes you rightfully upset.

(removes diaper,. revealing two sub-diapers ) Shall we continue?

Ah damn you're right I was off by an order of magnitude - @dril is one thousand times those guys. Good catch.

I cannot

Elon Musk.

Sure he's successful in the real world but having money doesn't make you a celebrity. I wouldn't recognize most of the Forbes list if I passed them in the street. He's actual famous, instead of Wikipedia famous, because of how he's engaged his supporters through Twitter. The chance to interact with him or have him like your meme is the content.

He was President of the United States for a minute there, strange though it is to think about.

Ah, you say, but Donald Trump was famous before Twitter!

He was, yes. But he wasn't President.

If you're famous, you'll almost certainly have a twitter account, although there are obviously exceptions. The same just doesn't seem to go for YouTube. Creating content on YT is a lot more time-consuming than creating it on Twitter, of course.

This is why YouTube is a platform with value and Twitter isn't.

That's silly. While you can't directly monetize your Twitter account, it can expand or straight up create your reach which you can use as a funnel to whatever monetizable content you have. That probably makes it less valuable for Twitter Inc., but it sure is valuable for Twitter users.

As a recent example, think of Pieter Levels (@levelsio). You think he would've gotten $10k first day sales on his avatar AI project without his Twitter account's reach?

You can absolutely monetize your Twitter account directly.

Sponsored Spaces

Ticketed Spaces

Super Follows

Paid Newsletters

Tips

Twitter has made it INCREDIBLY difficult to find these products they've built, the insane thing is that they appear in one app but not others!

Marketing on Twitter is far more valuable than other platforms.

Some dude just paid $44B for Twitter. Presumably that means it has value.

While true, that dude also tried super hard not to pay $44B for it.

> Some dude just paid $44B for Twitter. v

Yeah, but that did a hasty negotiation that resulted in a no-due-diligence contract at that figure, tried very hard to escape the deal, including openly repudiating it and being sued to be forced to consummate it, and only relented and agreed to close on it in the face of court action to force him to which might have imposed additional costs as well.

So, while it is probably worth something, we can say that it is pretty clearly not worth $44B in the clear light of day, even to Musk.

One of them sold recently and we can put a pretty solid number on its value.

In a way Twitter fills the space of being a proliferator of existing content, in a more concise form. In this way people don’t have to choose “do I create on platform X or Y” and instead they create on platform X and feel empowered to share on platform Y because it fills a different use case.

Twitter is basically a broadcast platform for people who matter "in the real world". It gives them an easy way to reach their audience on their own terms without any middlemen.

As a centralized platform, Twitter creates more value for those who follow than those who broadcast. Because the broadcasters are primarily known for something other than the "content" they create on the platform, they would find their audience anywhere. Followers, on the other hand, can conveniently follow many people on the same platform. Regardless of whether they are interested in global celebrities, local politicians, or professionals in a specific subfield, they can often find those people on Twitter.

Blogs used to be popular among many of the groups you can now find on Twitter. I guess Twitter replaced them, because the short message format forces you to focus on the essentials. Creating a new post is much faster, and you will reach many more people, because reading the post is not a significant time investment.

> on their own terms without any middlemen.

Twitter is the middle-man.

Technically true, but I think the comment you're replying to was thinking of the era when celebrities had to go on late night shows in order for people to hear what they had to say. Like literally, the middle man had limited airtime and got to pick and choose who was allowed to be broadcast.

If you had some opinions on the latest whatever, if no television station felt like interviewing you, you just told it to your friends or whatever like everybody else. No matter how famous you were.

Twitter replaced blogs because blogs were not discoverable or aggregated. Twitter accounts are.

Twitter was born out of the short "status updates" fad at the time, on both Myspace and eventually Facebook.

Those were born out of MSN Messenger and other IM programs at the time that had customizable social profiles of sorts - including an updatable Status that was shown as a subtitle in your contacts' respective friends lists.

I remember the general sentiment of Twitter when it started was that the short character count (120 characters or whatever it started with) was a fun novelty, nothing more. It wasn't seen as a "social network".

Twitter gets its name in part from the saying "A little birdie told me ..." intersected with the fact that your phone twitches (vibrates) when you receive an update. It mimicked the other popular app names at the time that often omitted a vowel, such as 'flickr'. The original site was thus called twttr.com. The whole point was to be short, concise, non-serious communication. "Yo" tried to take this to the extreme several years later and ultimately failed (or pivoted, not sure which).

When Twitter started gaining traction, it was clear that more involved discourse was nearly impossible with the shorter character count, thus the limit was bumped up to what it is now (240 or 280 or something). The initial response was, understandably, negative. People predicted at the time that this would devolve the platform into another battlegrounds for shouting matches and arguing just as Facebook had. In hindsight, they were mostly correct.

Threads were also added to improve cohesion within lengthy conversations, and those features alone are now what form the core of Twitter's major feature set.

It's worth noting that Twitter hasn't changed much, which is pretty widely regarded as a feature in itself and can earn long term retention even with on-the-fence users (see: Steam).

However, this is mostly just my recollection of events.

> Twitter is basically a broadcast platform for people who matter "in the real world".

Absolutely true, but it doesn't PRESENT itself that way. It PURPORTS to be an egalitarian platform. The truth is that the specific way Twitter's network effects work, you simply don't matter unless you're a celeb (either in Hollywood, or in some particular niche) or a journo. Celebrities I can understand. I don't know why Twitter is so bent around journalists, but it is, and it's obvious. To me, it goes back to the insinuation that the platform has been specifically engineered to influence national public opinion, but I suppose it might be just a "lucky" side effect. In any case, just being a random person on the platform can sometimes be pretty frustrating, because all the engagement is eaten up by people with hundreds of thousands of followers.

Nice observation. It's more like a direct marketing channel than an actual consumable. The most successful users are directing users to YouTube, e-commerce, voting booths or news sites to actually convert.

The idea that what matters most is having the most followers is very arbitrary and not relevant to many strategies for enjoying Twitter. In my experience, Twitter is best as a place to have conversations, and this is optimal at some number of followers below 10k. There are many accounts out there having an amazing time at small numbers, having curated a medium-sized following of people who are interested in talking with them about the things they want to talk about.

Yup, that’s how I use Twitter.

It’s how I found my tribe and became part of a small specialist community 14 years ago

If I were YouTube right now, I'd be evaluating the opportunity to eat Twitter's lunch as it'll get distracted by a randomizing new owner. The YouTube posts product really isn't relevant in the current YouTube app, but as a separate experience focused on posts, it might have some value for non-creators on the platform. Bad as it is, YouTube has more of its act together than Twitter when it comes to designing and enforcing content moderation policies at scale.

Today while selecting a handle I was wondering why YT is doing this. There is no real added value except for using a standardized symbol used in social networks.

In my eyes YT is no social network, even though many claim it is.

The comment section, where the discussion and interaction takes place, is like SMS is to WhatsApp, in the sense that it has no surface to enrich dialogue. For example, you can't add images in replies to a comment, comments can't be embedded in websites.

I don't see how they can expand to a multimedia platform, which is what Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are. They're just a video platform and lack everything else which could move it towards a multimedia platform.

> Twitter has no real "content creators", YouTube does.

I don’t understand the logic. They can be both well known outside of Twitter and create content. Sure, that is not their source of income, but it is harder to monetise a Twitter account, so that’s more or less by design. From the point of view of random people there is not really any functional difference.

I always felt Twitter as "old man yells at cloud" kind of communication. I've never seen proper "content" created (like pinterest, tik tok, etc). Most of the "content" I see are the asinine multi-post threads and text-pictures notices from angry people/companies.

The "content" here is just tweets. It may not be "content" in the way you are imagining, but it's still true that almost all twitter users are using the site to view tweets from a small number of people (call them content creators or influencers if you like) with large numbers of followers.

Sure, but that small number of people are already famous outside of twitter. YouTube and TikTok creates new celebrities, twitter doesn't.

I’d argue this isn’t true in sports journalism. A news tweet from Woj, Schefter, Rappoport, or Shams has far more reach than the same content in a random ESPN article or sportscenter segment. Without twitter, a whole world of addicted sports fans would have no idea who those guys are.

You haven't been paying attention closely enough. Plenty of people get big on Twitter, and then parlay that into success in other spheres too.

Red Scare and Chapo Trap House are niche media brands, but their hosts are new celebrities who got famous primarily through Twitter.

Are you sure the popularity on twitter was the driving factor and not a lagging indicator of their podcast success?

> Sure, but that small number of people are already famous outside of twitter.

That’s not entirely true, but for many of the ones that aren’t, blue checks and verification are often very much not in their interests.

I actually get a lot of unique ML information and news from Twitter.

I guess it depends on what kind of content you're looking for. One account I follow tweets what amounts to live reviews of video games (often obscure) with video clips and images. I think that's just as 'proper' as anything I've seen on pinterest or tiktok.

Agreed. If I like a writer I always find better ways than Twitter to follow them - Substack, etc

And even if they tweet something worthwhile it’s usually followed by 98% garbage replies with “LOL you’re so stupid” so I’m not wasting my time sifting through that trash heap.

It is useful for events with people on the ground to share info - the story of the guy in Pakistan tweeting about helicopters when Bin Laden was killed was pretty amazing to be honest.

But those types of writers tend to die out after the event.

Yeah, Twitter is not about "content". It's a service that lets users scream into the void

Well, the funny thing is that Twitter itself is THE content It kind serves as a continuation of bashorg for millenials and zoomers

Stephen King’s tweet on that topic, to summarize:

“ $20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

https://twitter.com/stephenking/status/1587042605627490304?s...

He is bluffing.

Are you saying he won’t leave or that he will accept paying money to Elon Musk for his checkmark?

He won't leave.

Not sure if he cares about the blue checkmark enough to pay, but he is rich enough not to care. His net worth is half a billion.

I don't think anybody believes he cares about the money. Seems like it's a matter of principles for him.

His publicist will care, and they probably charge him way, way more per month than $20.

SK will hem and haw but 6 months from now his team will quietly reinstate the account.

Totally right.

And Musk's answer was to offer $8/m

King wasn't talking about paying anything

He's trying to anchor it and make the situation look better so it's "more reasonable."

Realistically.. is it worth more than 4$ a month? Probably not. Why would you pay 8 for that?

The idea that someone who is addicted to Twitter and worth $500M would leave because they lose their special Blue Check over $20 is hilarious.

He's just butt hurt because someone he doesn't like bought it and is making the blue check status symbol available to the proles. Now any schlub with $8 can have the once exclusive symbol.

Anywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience. That's what's so funny about this particular example. There are indeed Twitter celebrities who depend on Twitter for their audience, but King isn't one of them: he's pumping more credibility into Twitter than he's extracting from it, and the platform (and all the Twitter celebrity remora attached to it) depend on people like him to keep doing it.

He's right: Twitter should be paying him. That's not true of all blue-checks, but it's true of many of the most popular of them.

I think it is true of most. If your identity is worth verifying by Twitter, it is apparently worth something to Twitter. If you wanted to prove that your twitter account was you, you wouldn't need their permission, right? Surely you could sign a file on your Twitter account with your PGP key or whatever.

This has always been the bullshit story Twitter tells itself about the blue check. In reality, the value of the check has practically nothing to do with verifying identities, and everything to do with conferring status on people "notable" enough to qualify. The energy source for that status is, in fact, people like King, Swift, LeBron, Obama (and Trump), J. Lo and Jimmy Fallon; Twitter trades off the idea that the check puts its users in the same status tier as those celebrities.

How you know this is, there's a huge population of well-followed Twitter accounts without blue checks, and identity verification controversies virtually never occur. If you found a non-checked 50k-follower account tomorrow and tried to spoof them with a fake account, you'd get shouted down quickly enough that it wouldn't be worth the effort.

My point, again, is that the "verification" part of this is horseshit. It's not the value. It's not why anyone cares about the checks. The checks are endorsements of popularity and importance, and that's all they are.

Diluting that value (to zero, as seems to be the Twitter Blue plan) probably won't chase many celebs off the platform. Why would they care? Twitter isn't doing them any real favors; it's rather the opposite. But it'll lay bare the real dynamics of those stupid blue checkmarks. That might be a positive development for Twitter! But it's not going to make blue checks the next Bored Apes.

(Again: who knows? Maybe a critical mass of Twitter randos will pay for Twitter bling. Weirder things have happened; see apes, above.)

To be fair, it was specifically introduced because of how impersonation of well known people was becoming a problem. Twitter was sued by Tony La Russa because of an impersonation and had a bunch of celebrities complaining about it. [0]

That it has also taken on a status aspect does not take away from its original intent and ongoing usefulness as a verification mechanism. That's especially true for celebrities, politicians, organisations, and journalists.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/06/facing-lawsuits-and-compla...

This is all accurate in my experience but I’d add an additional dynamic that I’ve noticed in a lot of accounts I follow- people who are somewhat popular but not huge celebrities who do have blue checks who since the announcement was made seem to be upset that their coveted blue check is going to be indistinguishable from one someone who didn’t “earn” it who is just paying for it. It’s somewhat like rewarding some kids in the class with a gold star then deciding later everyone gets one. Case in point: https://twitter.com/garyblack00/status/1587332152072568832

The other group are those who have decent followings who have wanted a blue check and have used the imposters argument as a reason for deserving one to protect their followers. In reality it’s a thinly veiled attempt to get what they believe is a symbol conferring status.

The whole thing is pretty pathetic and funny to watch and reminds me of the sneetches.

Instead it should be $1/month to be allowed to post replies to blue-check tweets! (But leave quote-tweeting alone).

The Elon Musk dunk tank?

>> Anywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience.

Is that really true? Suppose King goes to a new social platform. Sure, I might install that app, but without a critical mass or others on that platform, what are the chances I actually check that app frequently?

Yes, this is really true. People on HN will see less of Stephen King, to the extent that they're not part of his audience (maybe HN is more of an Ari Aster crowd). But that doesn't matter: people aren't spending hundreds of millions of dollars on 2019 movies based on books he wrote in the 1980s because he's driving lots of Twitter engagement.

This whole discussion about King's relevance is super weird. I think it's just Internet poisoning (it happens to all of us). The fact is: Stephen King is probably more culturally relevant than Twitter. That a lot of people on this thread wouldn't even entertain this thought is a cognitive bias that comes from being very online. Most people aren't very online, and even among the very online, Twitter's relevance has been waning for many years.

Most people don't use Twitter at all! But it's actually possible that a significant fraction of the American public --- maybe even most of it! --- has seen or is deeply familiar with a Stephen King film. The #1 film in the IMDB Top 250 is a Stephen King film!

I agree with you to an extent, but I will note that while most Americans don't directly use Twitter, I think a much much larger fraction are exposed to it. It's hard to escape when every news outlet and gossip farm cites it constantly and you have to factor that in when discussing its relevance.

I simultaneously don't think I personally know a single person that uses Twitter regularly and yet I equally don't think I know a single person that doesn't know what it is and sees second hand content from it regularly.

I left Twitter a few years ago, and other than stories about Twitter itself I can’t think of the last time I saw Twitter content.

I’m a middle aged tech dude and I see more tik tok content! And I don’t have any tik tok presence.

I think it’s really easy to over-estimate twitters impact. I virtually never see anything from it.

This is so true. Virtually all content in my feed is absolute shit and Twitter unlike Facebook and tiktok is terrible at driving engagement. Everything that’s suggested is crap. Probably just the nature of the platform and its content. I visit the site pretty frequently as a way to gauge stock market sentiment and for that it’s pretty decent but make no mistake the site overall is a bubble of a small sect of society who think they and the site are far more important than they are.

I don’t know a single person in real life who uses the site at all.

If he says something note worthy on another service won't news services and maybe even other twitter users report on it?

While this is true, I think twitter still greatly increases his outreach. It's the only reason most of us are hearing about him. Otherwise, I would definitely not be reading his blog. While I'm sure he would have a dedicated audience, it's not twitter. Not only that, but the more people start personal blogs the less viewers the harder it is to compete for views. For Stephen King, a generational talent, it may not matter-- but there is a calculation to be made for a lot of celebrities. It's kind of like what happened to Netflix; if every celebrity tries to start their own personal blog fans aren't gonna go check all their favorite actors, musicians, writers, developers, socialites, and youtubers blogs'.

Twitter is not greatly increasing Stephen King's reach.

Stephen King just reached me for the first time in decades.

Gross!

Anecdotally this isn't true. The only time I have heard anything about Stephen King in the past few years has been in relation to a tweet he has made.

I think this is true for many significant accounts on the platform: I'm not going to read their blog or watch their Youtube video, but I'll probably see someone resharing a tweet they have made, whether on Reddit, HN, a news website etc.

Which is where I see the huge value in Twitter: a mainstream platform designed to present content in bite-sizes, appropriate for discussion or resharing. Twitter is a reach multiplier for many accounts for this reason.

People who have not heard of King before Twitter and only hear of him from Twitter are not going to be the people buying his books.

So even if there were significant amount of people like you, he is not gaining anything from people seeing his Twitter. On the other hand, I have relatives who created Twitter accounts only to follow authors they like - the number of curated lists of notable literary figures is a testament to that fact.

I'm not saying Twitter is worthless to writers - readers talking about the books certainly helps sales, but that occurs regardless of whether the author themselves are on Twitter or not, and Twitter is certainly not the main platform people use to discuss books.

Outreach isn't reach. It's different for people to know you versus people actually following what you have to say every day.

Yeah, he should try Mastodon! Or Truth Social.

Who is Stephen King anyway? An author, turns out from his Wikipedia page.

Gosh I must be getting old because I actually know who this cranky boomer is.

He can't leave, you're being silly.

Trump had 88.9mm followers on twitter. He has 3.9mm followers on Truth.

Trump will have people listen to him no matter where he’s writing, but one of these platforms is certainly a downgrade in terms of audience than the other.

And yet Musk was in his replies, haggling.

He wasn't haggling. He was mocking the blue check status symbol in King's face and audience.

$8 makes it cheaper than a Netflix subscription for something that previously exclusive and had no dollar value attached to it. It was literally unbuyable.

We're not really discussing reality if you believe that Stephen King gets status from the blue check rather than it working the other way around. There are people that do (sadly, pathetically) extract status from blue checkmarks, but they're only able to do that because people like Stephen King play ball with this system. The "blue checkmark status" could literally be phrased as "people as high-status as Stephen King and those like him".

Obviously, substitute Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Selena Gomez, and LeBron in as appropriate to your particular interests.

Without people like Stephen King sharing their halo, the blue checkmark will soon be the mark of tryhards

To some degree it already is, for people who have the checkmark you haven't heard of outside of Twitter.

It's a well worn meme to mock people throwing a fit over not getting a checkmark.

When some dipshit pundit throws that hissy fit, the meme is dead on.

When Twitter annoys people like Stephen King, it's exactly backwards.

The elite have always used myriad silly ways to distance themselves from the unwashed masses throughout history. Stephen King isn't different in this respect.

The silly way Stephen King distances himself from the unwashed masses is the 400 million copies of his books that he's sold to them, and the various movies and TV properties built on his IP. Again: you're not talking about reality if you think people like King care about blue-check status more than Twitter cares about keeping them happy. You can wishcast that away any way you please, but that's all you're doing. Twitter needs Taylor Swift on the platform talking about Midnights. Twitter could kick Swift off the platform and do nothing at all to her popularity.

What's pretty clearly happening in these conversations is that Twitter-believers are conflating blue-check remora users who have no public profile outside of Twitter with actual celebrities. King is right, and Musk knows it: if he's smart, Musk will in fact find ways to kick things back to King, Swift, and LeBron to keep them happy. He needs them, and they don't need him at all.

Not sure King is the best example here.

The only reason anyone knows he’s still alive is because he’s been doing sad political attention seeking stuff on Twitter. More like the people in your other category.

No. His last major film, from 2019, had the second-highest opening weekend of any horror film in history. His work might not be relevant to you (it's not especially relevant to me), but we're back in motivated unreality when we start talking about him being culturally irrelevant, or that "nobody knows he's still alive".

Are you referring to the second It movie? That was based on a book from 1986. Nearly 40 years ago.

Yes. It's a movie from 2019. Stephen King appears in it. I agree: his cultural impact in American is significant enough that books he wrote nearly 40 years ago are the bases for moves that set opening records today. It's pretty nuts!

We were talking about Twitter.

Twitter needs LeBron James and Taylor Swift and the latest Kpop stars.

It has a sort of symbiotic relationship with world leaders and journalists.

But it does not really need people like James Woods and Kevin Sorbo (to pick two from the other end of the political spectrum). Same goes for 90s grunge bands or 80s hair bands. I fully expect those guys to pay to try to stay relevant. And I would put famous authors from the 70s and 80s in the same category.

Laughing out loud at the attempt to compare Kevin Sorbo and James Woods to Stephen King. Kevin Sorbo really does need Twitter!

He's quite active. https://stephenking.com/works/all/ then sort newest to oldest.

Except of the social networks I browse, stephenking.com is not one of them. So really no I wouldn't hear of him. I'm sure his die hard fans will though.

>So really no I wouldn't hear of him

I guess if you never step foot into a library, bookstore, movie theatre, etc. Sure.

King does not sell books because of his presence on a social network. He sold 350 million copies of his books before Twitter was even invented.

"die hard fans" the only ones to hear of King? Big lol.

He wrote his best works before most of his readers were online at all.

He’s highly culturally relevant, but not because of anything he’s done lately.

This is just special pleading. You need to do better than "I don't care about his recent work".

You misread what I'm saying. Obviously I would hear his name but I would not be checking what he's posting about online. Which is clearly the situation for a giant writer like King.

Is Elon going to also ban links to stephenking.com if he doesn't pay $8?

I was assuming you might have Prime, Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, or go to the bookstore or library or movies.

None of those things include what stephen kings is thinking about today.

In fact, if you visit his IMDB page: <https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000175/>, you'll see that right at this moment, the population of a medium sized city is employed producing content based on his writing.

“We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?”

If you can see mocking in those 3 sentences then I can metaphorically see you popping up and down on elons lap.

> [...] had no dollar value attached to it. It was literally unbuyable.

$44 billion seem to be the going rate.

Stephen King is addicted to Twitter? He's posted an average of 2-3 tweets per day — I wouldn't call that addicted.

That is quite a lot.

It's quite a lot, but I wouldn't put it in the realms of addiction. It seems to be quite typical compared to even the personal (i.e. non famous) people I'm following; the higher profile accounts I follow tweet multiples of tens per day.

Not for someone who's fulltime job is writing and reading fiction.

Writing 3 lines of text a day is a lot for a professional writer?

It's really not

I would.

King writes 300-500 page novels at an age when most people are retired. 240 characters here and there is not evidence of much effort for him.

whoops! I misread, and didn't see the reference to King. I had thought it was a personal reference. Thank you!

I mean we could ask Stephen King I guess, he knows something about the topic.

> Now any schlub with $8 can have the once exclusive symbol.

And as a consequence, it is not worth the $8. King's analysis is correct.

As if King cant pay 20 dollars.

Everyone seems to either be assuming King somehow cares about paying $$ instead of making a political statement and/or Elon was making a serious earnest reply to King, instead of being his usual needling shitposter self. Neither of which both of their histories supports.

Stephen King will quit Twitter just as credibly as Jay-z “retired” from rapping.... like Elon Musk gives a shit about convincing a person worth $500M+ that $20 vs $8/m is too much to ask.

I'm sure there's politics involved in the fact that King is the first person we're seeing in this public argument with Musk, but the dynamic he's talking about is apolitical and pretty obvious. For true celebrities, of which King is obviously one, Twitter needs them more than they need Twitter. Twitter should pay them to use the platform. Nobody has ever bought a copy of Carrie because they saw the blue checkmark next to Stephen King's name.

Indeed I agree.

Musk hasn't addressed how he will compensate or at least incentize creators yet. Having a mainline stream of subscriptions certainly provides more avenues for such a thing.

So personally I think the compensation or promotional quid pro quo deals are a very different animal than checkmarks. Unless it means multiple tiers of checkmarks.

Stephen King does not live from tweeting.

As if Elon needs 20 dollars.

He needs something, because he's tied tens of billions of dollars of his own money in an LBO that left him in control of a company with about a billion dollars a year of debt service cost.

That's a mere 10 million blue checkmarks he needs to sell.

According to The Guardian, there are about 400,000 verified users on Twitter, as of 2021. That equates to less than 1% of Twitter accounts.

Assuming a 100% conversion rate and that number is accurate, 3.2 million a month or $38 a million a year.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/31/elon-musk...

Lol. Elon has made possibly the worst lbo deal in the last decade. He needs to juice this deal like crazy to not lose a ton of money.

Just the notoriety of convincing Steven king to pay for a blue checkmark is worth outsized dollars to him and nothing to King.

Stephen King would pay $8, Elon Musk would earn $8 x the number of users that paid.

Stephen King would not pay. He doesn't need Twitter. He can spend that time writing another book convert to a substack or something.

I was replying to the parent about who needs who more

I don't need Twitter, since I rarely post on the social, I don't use it for work, and it kind of annoys me too, and if it disappeared I would forget about its existence in two weeks, like I forget about my favorite podcast three days after they started their 3-week summer vacation. I don't need to go to the gym, but I have been going for about 30 years. If they forced me to spend an extra $8 a month, maybe I would move to another gym where I pay less, but how ridiculous would my statement be, "I don't need the gym, bye"?

Stephen King doesn't need Twitter to publicize his work, and he doesn't even need to work, since he seems to be quite well off. But most celebrities -- "most" is vague, I know -- live to be the center of attention, to be heard, to be considered. And a few years ago the platform was Facebook, then Twitter, after Trump's election, became more and more the place to be if you want to participate in the "discourse." King needs Twitter now or another platform now or in the future because, apparently, he needs to be heard, to be part of the conversation, to have his old man criticisms heard. But now that platform is Twitter.

On a similar note I feel like Elon is the Ultimate Tweeter in the sense of validation (and amount of validation) he seems to get from posting. I've been wondering if it colored his perception of how the average person interacts with Twitter.

> As if Elon needs 20 dollars.

When you pay 40 billion for something you expect a return on investment

As if that were ever the point.

It's like charging actors to act, or charging writers to write.

Without people like King, twitter has no chance of surviving long-term. It does nothing special. It was simply in the right place at the right time.

> they should pay me

...why?

As someone who doesn't use Twitter, remarks like this have left me very confused. Clearly these people found Twitter valuable before. Does not having the checkmark make it less valuable? Is there an alternative service that provides similar value?

The blue checkmark is a service. Now they want money to continue that service. If you don't want it, don't pay for it. Leaving over concerns about Elon's vision for the platform makes sense, but I really don't get leaving over the checkmark subscription.

It seems rather symbiotic to me. twitter has nothing to offer without people of note. People of note use it to become more popular. I think generally people of note don't need twitter to be successful but twitter needs them

> ...why?

Because the content on Twitter is generated by a relatively small number of users. A lot never tweet, quote tweet or retweet but it goes beyond that number once you weight it by audience. A small number of people have a large amount of reach and thus are responsible for a good chunk of the content.

That content is why the users are on Twitter and it is those users who are advertised to that pay for Twitter to exist. That's what Stephen King means.

Now you can turn this around and say that those power users are only there because the audience is and that they get value for being there but platforms need users and users follow creators more than the platform as a general rule.

Maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding of what compels people to use Twitter. I thought the few people in question use Twitter as a convenient tool to communicate with wide audiences (i.e. marketing) and the rest are mostly especially dedicated followers who want to be marketed to. Are there actually people who primarily use Twitter for "content"? Are the blue checkmark people (i.e. celebrities) even the ones generating that content?

The content for billboards is also "generated by a relatively small number of users", but those users still have to pay to use them.

I’m a research scientist and mostly use it to keep up with people working in similar fields.

There’s certainly some marketing (“Check out our new paper”, “My lab is hiring”, etc), but it’s not particularly top-down; everybody does it to some extent. It’s also mixed in with actual scientific discussion, lab “hacks”, and some silly banter/blowing off steam. All in all, it’s been pretty helpful for me careerwise. I think I’ve gotten more useful advice about grant writing and papers to read than many more formal mentorship arrangements.

There are a few “blue checks”, but they’re mostly a) early adopters or b) people with some kind of public presence. As far as I can tell, neither I nor most others care about the checkmark per se. I talked about my research (twice!) with John Carmack and it was cool to know that it was really the Doom Guy, but I think I probably would have engaged with anybody equally curious about my work.

I'm in a few niche Twitter interest bubbles but none of us are "blue checks". If you're on Twitter for your small niche circle this is a lot of hubbub over little.

I wish I could remember where I saw this to credit (and not paraphrase), but I saw a tweet which said, basically: "Twitter somehow got Stephen King, Taylor Swift and thousands of others to produce content for them for free. And now they want to lose them over $20/month?"

> Twitter somehow got Stephen King, Taylor Swift and thousands of others to produce content for them for free

That's true, but for very small values of "produce content". After all, being rude or posting hot-takes in 140 characters has limited utility outside of your cohort of fans/friends.

Posting tweets may be lame, but it is also the entire value of Twitter!

>> they should pay me

> ...why?

Steven King is currently worth ~500MM USD. That money solely came from selling his words. So, we know they have a great deal of market value.

That's why.

Twitter may lose one Stephen King, but presumably now anybody with the same name can get the blue check. All those $8 per month will add up.

So Twitter's monetization system is basically going to work the same way domains do with squatters?

Reminds me of all the people who swear up and down they're moving to Canada or Europe after the latest disappointment in the voting booth.

They never do. Musk may or may not charge his $20, but King will pay it if he does, he's bluffing.

Tho, big difference is that moving to Canada is huge effort and risk. Many people doing that would be mass migration and Canada would try to stop it.

Meanwhile, platform dying cause people left is something that happened many times already. Usually they don't leave with one bang and they won't here. It happens over months slowly.

I nearly missed Elon's follow up tweet on the $8/month:

"This will also give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587505731611262976

So I guess they are actually planning to pay Stephen King after all, if he stays Twitter Blue. (Presumably his share of the money would be more than $8/month.)

How they distribute the money will be key. Would it be based on generic follower counts & likes & engagement - which will surely drive massive waves of spambot activity - or will each user's $8/month be distributed to the accounts they follow, almost Patreon or Flattr style? That might actually be interesting.

After Elon replied, a user came up with this gem:

"Only on Twitter can we watch a man worth $200 billion negotiate with a man worth $500 million about saving $12 a month"

Honestly, Stephen King probably loses more brand equity than that just from what he posts on Twitter. It’s gotten to the point where I actively avoid following any writers or creative types on Twitter just to avoid my perception of their work being colored by how they conduct themselves on Twitter.

It may be true that only a very small percentage of Twitter users are actually creators and influencers.

But a far larger number of people think they are or aspire to be influencers, and they're going to want the badge too.

> So you want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.

I think it's only Onlyfans that can get away with such a business model.

Onlyfans may be an extreme example of it, but all such successful platforms – YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and the rest – are paying their popular users a lot of money to stay there.

Twitch, Patreon etc. etc.

Arguably also Netflix, Roblox and free-to-play mobile games run on this sort of scheme as well.

also i guess YouTube is that as well, Consumers pay with attention to ad's, YouTube red, Channel members, super chat.

> > So you want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.

> I think it’s only Onlyfans that can get away with such a business model.

OnlyFans is not (by far) the only site that has a business model of “consumers purchase from producers and the site rakes in a share from that”, nor even the only one (again, by far) with that model where what is purchased is digital content.

How many people are willing to directly pay for content on those other platforms vs those who are not? Constrast that to Onlyfan's monetization success rate.

Spotify?

Just checked. They do have an impressive conversation rate (42% of total MAU [0]) if the numbers are true.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/25/23423510/spotify-total-s...

> Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line

As Stephen King rightly pointed out: Twitter should be paying him - not the other way around (IHO). Anyway, this is going to be interesting.

> That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal.

I doubt you know what thoughts Elon has in his head. He likely has ideas for changes, similar to the linked page. After all, he purchased the company in order to make changes.

He purchased the company because his lawyers finally convinced him he was going to be forced to and that it was a poor choice to continue damaging the asset he was going to be owning.

That's your belief. It is quite likely that the court actions were mean to pressure twitter. That isn't an uncommon tactic. The two facts we know are that Musk stated he would purchase twitter to make changes, and he has started to make changes after the purchase.

He was trying everything he could to get out of a horrendous deal. If you can’t see that, I don’t know what to tell you.

The 1% rule seems to hold up pretty well across any online community [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

> In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.

Creating YouTube content takes considerable effort besides just having interesting things to say.

Twitter on the other hand is just text. Anyone can write tweets.

Not anyone can post YouTube videos.

>f you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value.

Maybe I'm an outlier but of my hundreds of follows ~1% have checkmark. The bulk of my followers are artists, photographers, niche bloggers, subculture news aggregators which are all creating content.

The verified checkmark is basically a non-entity to my time on twitter, maybe it's different if you mainly follow more mainstream western pop culture and political/news media.

Gonna disagree with you here.

Musk is only doing with Twitter what Fark.com did over 20 years ago with TotalFark - you pay a small monthly fee for admission, and you get a shiny badge next to your username, along with a few perks.

Just like Something Awful forums did before that - paid admission - it's an excellent tool to weed out the obvious bots and low effort trolls.

Twitter has no "creators" - it's just a fancy message board.

Everything old is new again. The Gen-Z kids on Twitter and TikTok were still pooping in diapers when these sites ruled the Internet, and now have sadly been relegated to a dusty corner thereof.

Bad actors who are trying to push some agenda to make money for example, are more likely to pay than ordinary lurkers who click the "retweet" button once in a while. Twitter is not that important, if it becomes pay-to-play, I'm out, sorry.

It'll just become the new version of Twitter's "super follow" - a thing that makes you stand out as a bit of a mark, and a target for ridicule.

And Fark and Something Awful are both dead.

> So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money

This sounds like "pay to follow" (or at least "please donate X monthly to your favorite creators" ala Patreon).

I think to most Twitter users, content has a value of €0. If you ask users to pay then they'd rather switch to another free creator, or not use Twitter at all.

If users see any value in creators at all, that'll be having interacted with creators for a long time and having developed a deep connection. Or if creators started publishing "premium content" that's obviously worth in.

But who wouldn't pay $8/mo to reduce the number of ads they see to only half!!1 /s

I assumed the verification fee serves a different purpose to gathering revenue: the cost to buy influence could go up by an order of magnitude. Economics will neuter the bots.

Everyone working at the IRA.ru troll farm now needs to be issued with (even more) stolen payment credentials and monthly costs go up by $8 per troll account.

Even worse, recruiting useful idiots — unwitting members of the public who are aligned with the troll message and who voluntarily amplify misinformation — is going to get much harder. Now you don’t just need Average Joe to retweet your carefully worded calls-to-action about missing emails or stolen elections. You need him to pay $8 a month too.

But if you are a frequent creator, you're also planning on making the content a viable financial venture. At the very least, Twitter is used as a marketing platform. Which means paying $8 a month for what is essentially free hosting for your marketing, is a no brainer.

I'm not sure why asking consumers to pay would be a good idea because we already have Patreon. Only a fraction of consumers would actually pay for content, so doing this would probably cause a lot of consumers to leave. Whereas the price for a content creator is very low, even at $20/month.

In other words, if you want the blue checkmark, you're definitely interested in the marketing yourself. So, why not pay for that privilege?

For journalists it's not basically part of your job, it often literally is! Many media organisations require their reporters to maintain an active online professional presence on Twitter.

I once wanted to be a journalist in college. Lucky for me, I had a teacher who was a former newscaster for the local Fox news station teaching a class on just that. Long story short, she connected me with someone currently working as a journalist. His advice? Everyone is freelance now, only a rare lucky few are permanent staff writers today. You have to have a social media following, first thing to do is start a Twitter account and build a presence. He also heavily hinted that I should not enter the field unless I absolutely love it because it's getting to be an awful job. Just my experience.

> If you’re a journalist, being on Twitter is basically part of your job so maybe you should have to pay a bit more just like the customer of some business software

I think this completely misunderstands why social media products like Twitter are successful.

Those journalists (or gamers, or comedians, or porn stars) that you're arguing should be considering $9 a month as cost of business, they are the content creators and the only justification for a business like twitter having any value at all. Principally, twitter is a network, and these users are the highly connected nodes of that network. How fast will superconnectedness decline without them? Superexponentially.

The people with blue check marks aren't your customers or clients: they are your product.

I think you're wrong. The network is stronger than that.

Yes, those highly-connected nodes could easily kill the network... if they all coordinated to leave at once. Which is a real risk here, because of how high-profile and controversial the issue is right now. But normally, they're just as glued to the network as everyone else. Perhaps even more so, because...

... they aren't creating content for fun. They're creating it to make money off the audience. So they have to stick to where the audience is.

People with blue check marks would like to think they're special and valuable to the platform, but they're not. At this scale, they're a commodity too. They play a different role on the platform, but for the platform, users with different roles is just what makes the whole thing tick and print money.

This is exactly right. It's the same as how some popular YouTubers hedge their bets by publishing in parallel to their own sites or to other video platforms, yet they keep letting YouTube dictate their business decisions because it's the only place they can make money.

Nope. That may be true for a thin slice of Twitter's most active and popular users, but not at all for the long tail of people posting in niche interest areas that keep people engaged. The scientists, engineers, artists, philosophers, OSINT researchers, etc who post interesting content and keep people returning to Twitter to engage with it.

Some of those get some reward from it in terms of added publicity, others in terms of building out their network, but a bunch even do it anonymously and seem to get no real world financial benefit from it other than sharing what they're working on and having discussions with other people interested in the same things.

Musk seems to fundamentally misunderstand not only how and why regular people use Twitter, but also how popular but non-celebrity people use it. He only sees it through his own lens, which is as a marketing tool, a way to move markets, and a place to shitpost freely. His changes make sense in that context only.

Think you're over-estimating their value, if they were posting their thoughts elsewhere without the blue check next to their name no one would be engaging with it, it's honestly such bad content.

Oh, you mean like the articles in the newspapers that they regularly publish? What exactly do you think a journalist does, just post on Twitter?

how's that going for them

Better than Twitter it seems!

There's journalism and there's "journalism". There's certainly standup publications with great authors who make names for themselves by writing great articles. I've been really enjoying Heather Knight's coverage of public waste/corruption in SF for example. On the other hand, there's a lot of really crappy journalists who churn out top 10 lists on shady publications to get paid and desperately need that blue check to add whatever legitimacy they can grasp for to their names. The former category will have no trouble without Twitter, the latter will struggle. That's the steelman anyway. Most crappy journalists would flame out with or without a blue checkmark though.

I wouldn't call anyone from buzzfeed a journalist but okay!

If you’re a journalist (or your other suggestions) then you’re basically using Twitter as free advertising to (a) your followers and (b) people who read your tweets which have been retweeted. Having people coming towards the way you actually make money is probably worth a lot more than $8 per month to you, even considering that journalists aren’t so well paid (the idea of blue checks getting paywall bypass could be very good for journalists too – they could end up more directly getting value out of people coming to their work from Twitter).

Paying $8 per month for this free advertising seems pretty great. How much would it cost to send this out via actual ads or eg mailchimp (but of course it is much easier to have new people see your tweets than your marketing emails)?

Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting the fact that $8/mo is a ton of money in some areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such journalists, users etc.

Blue checks should never be pay to play. They weren't designed that way. The problem is the ambiguity of the blue check leads to arbitrage that it seems all parties are interested in cashing in on. If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. Elon's backtracking about price parity just illuminates the capitalist nature of the entire thing. Charge what we can, not what we should.

We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.

> Each and every one of these arguments seem to be forgetting the fact that $8/mo is a ton of money in some areas, prohibitively so, and this policy is exclusive of such journalists, users etc.

And those areas don't proportionally don't matter to Twitter. Even so, the very next tweet by Musk, in reply to the linked one, says:

> Price adjusted by country proportionate to purchasing power parity

So that addresses this complaint.

> If Twitter is our modern Greek forum, it certainly seems like a classist and exclusive landscape. (...) We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.

Since when is Twitter our "modern Greek forum"?

Just until a few days ago, being critical of Musk was strongly correlated with the belief that social media companies are private entities, free to do as they wish (and in particular ban whoever they want). It's ironic how fast things change :).

I understand that Twitter doesn't care about poor minority areas. I agree. I already addressed the parity tweet in my above comment so regarding your question about Twitter being a modern forum, I'd ask you if there are some better popular examples of the digital equivalent of a public, outdoor area where social activity, meetings, debates and more are conducted.

> It's ironic how fast things change :).

That goes both ways.

> We should ask ourselves if we should be placing Twitter's financial needs over the social and intellectual needs of humanity as a whole.

25% of US Adults produce 97% of tweets on Twitter. 75% of Twitter users don't post a single tweet per month. 42% of Twitter users that produce < 20 tweets / month find civility issues with the platform, and only 27% of them feel politically engaged. Twitter has nothing to do with "humanity as a whole". It's obvious that the group that uses Twitter is niche yet highly engaged. Matters relating to Twitter's "social and intellectual needs" are only relevant to highly engaged Twitter users.

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/1-the-views-... for all the stats

This is normal for a community. These statistics naturally fall in line with the Pareto Principle, and the concept of the vital few. [0]

> Twitter has nothing to do with "humanity as a whole". It's obvious that the group that uses Twitter is niche yet highly engaged.

You are confusing posting on Twitter with using it. The vast majority are lurkers who still consume information and then regurgitate that information in real life on other platforms. The statistics you provided don't paint an accurate picture of the "usefulness" of Twitter in modern public discourse.

Do you have a better popular example of a modern day forum?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

> This is normal for a community. These statistics naturally fall in line with the Pareto Principle, and the concept of the vital few.

The Pareto Principle is just a rule-of-thumb, it's not an actual law of anything, and is just an expression of power law dynamics. It's true that power law dynamics are common in most online communities, but 97% of content being created by 25% of users is staggering, a much stronger power law than most other forums. This is a highly engaged, medium-sized community (though I realize the nature of the platform (followers, algorithmic priority, etc) means that there are multiple overlapping sets of communities rather than a single community, and that these communities often vehemently grief each other.)

> You are confusing posting on Twitter with using it. The vast majority are lurkers who still consume information and then regurgitate that information in real life on other platforms. The statistics you provided don't paint an accurate picture of the "usefulness" of Twitter in modern public discourse.

Only 23% [1] of Americans use Twitter. Compare that to 81% of Americans using Youtube and 69% of Americans using Facebook. Only 13% of US Adults [2] get their news from Twitter, while 31% from Facebook and 22% from Youtube. Americans are the largest users of Twitter, followed by the Japanese. It's main significance in the public discourse derives from the 69% of American journalists [2] that use Twitter as part of their job, and this is not "public" discourse as much as journalist discourse.

> Do you have a better popular example of a modern day forum?

I know very few people in my real life that actually use Twitter. The ones that do are mostly in subcultures with a large presence on Twitter. My family doesn't use Twitter, most Twitter employees I know don't use Twitter. My partner only uses Twitter because she networks with other artists on it but doesn't actually use it for news or politics. Most of my friends don't use Twitter. Most people in my network know of Twitter only through quoted reports in news articles.

I think, and unless you have statistics to show otherwise, that the idea of a "modern day forum" role for Twitter lies only in the minds of highly engaged Twitter users. I mean I'm a highly engaged user of HN and I would be quite sad if it went away and actively fight to maintain its culture. I've watched a lot of online communities rot over time so I understand what it's like to watch your community change. But I don't pretend that HN or other online communities I'm part of are somehow a vital resource for all of humanity. The only noteworthy thing about Twitter's community is the number of journalists and celebrities talking to each other on it. That's all.

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/05/10-facts-ab...

[2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/27/twitter-is-...

> The Pareto Principle is just a rule-of-thumb, it's not an actual law of anything, and is just an expression of power law dynamics.

I never said otherwise.

> 97% of content being created by 25% of users is staggering

100% agree, it's just not surprising and is within a range observed in other communities. It's also unclear how many accounts constitute as active.

> I know very few people in my real life that actually use Twitter.

I don't know if most citizens necessarily hung out at the forum all day either, I'd be curious what percentage of ancient Greek and Roman populations made use of forums, and how frequently. If, besides commerce, discourse was often left to highly engaged citizens.

> I don't pretend that HN or other online communities I'm part of are somehow a vital resource for all of humanity.

I think positive networking is one of the most important activities our generation should be engaged in. We should be forming rich, useful and sustainable social networks which allow us to tackle problems at scale. A lot of serious relationships, companies, and ideas come out of places where similar minds meet such as Hacker News. Whether it's vital to some arbitrary societal metric is of little interest to me, as it is personally vital to my own life and I'm sure my individual experience is common enough to warrant nurturing.

> 75% of Twitter users don't post a single tweet per month.

75% of actual users or 75% of user accounts? I'm guessing the latter since the former is impossible to count. I'm almost surprised it's not higher — I think I have 5 twitter accounts and I definitely haven't posted from 4 of those for way over a month.

Indeed. This discussion has been far too American-centric and not considered the impact this would have on Twitter users elsewhere in the world. Especially journalists in developing countries and war zones, who have been able to use Twitter to amplify stories that would otherwise have been missed or ignored.

Conventional journalists don't get paid more based upon the number of views their articles get

I can't find a reference off the top of my head but earlier this year I saw a journalist post their engagement data on Twitter and it was shockingly bad. If I recall correctly they had hundreds of thousands of views and hundreds of click-throughs to their website.

I guess I am an outlier in this, but I don't think I have a single "famous" person that I follow - maybe some bigger figures in a niche area, but the people that have the blue mark are not the draw for me.

But when I do search for them, it is convenient to see the blue mark to figure out what might be the account I am looking for.

I don't think it is convenient. These people have a website or verified profile on Google to already determine which social media profiles belong to them. All the blue checkmark will tell me in the future is these people are dumb enough to pay for snake oil.

I don't follow famous people. Way too much noise. I follow dev and engineering stuff.

> Way too much noise. I follow dev and engineering stuff

Now imagine the people you follow being deprioritized by the Twitter algorithm in favor of the LinkedIn-influencer types (you know they'll be first in line for the checkmarks)

>the blue mark to figure out what might be the account I am looking for

If this is part of what blue checks were designed to solve, they're solving the wrong problem. Fix search and content quality / spam instead.

To your point here's a tweet from Stephen King that was making the rounds where he protests the idea that he should be paying Twitter instead of the reverse: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144

Where does Stephen King go if he's not on twitter ?

(Genuine question, not rhetorical)

He's got a dedicated audience reading millions of his books.

Quite a lot of his twitter presence is reactions to the decline in America and America's politics. Musk would probably prefer King's voice quietened.

anywhere or nowhere else. do you think tweeting is really an essential part of Stephen King's professional or personal life? he could just stop.

he's a famous author. he's got a website, a publisher with an advertising budget, and other social media channels. his audience will follow him. he can post on facebook, his mailing list, his own website, or none of the above.

And I agree with Stephen King. YouTube rewards content creators and provides a strong platform for creators to market themselves. Twitter provides a platform for brain farts and now they want to charge for a blue checkmark. I guess Musk believes if people are stupid enough to believe in his lies before that they'll be stupid enough to pay for a blue checkmark.

Wait until you see how they begin marketing the subscription.. it will be ridiculous. Might as well be trying to sell snake oil.

How much profit does YouTube make?

Revenue or profit? I don't know how much profit they make but their revenue is significantly more than Twitter

> Might as well be trying to sell snake oil.

Look at LV 'hyperloop' [0], and people who paid upfront for FSD [1] and are issuing a class action lawsuit and re-think what you just said about 'might.' I think this isn't about Tesla or SpaceX or any specific company he is CEO of as they are all amazing feats of tech/engineering, it's about Elon's horrible PT Barnum type marketing that worked for a bit but has lost all of it's luster at this point.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040 1: jhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htJcPEXn040

>> But other people use Twitter in different ways.

Saw a roundtable about this and a film maker said it was really hard when they're about to release a film and someone uses a fake Twitter handle that's close to theirs releases the trailer or footage before they wanted it released.

Paying to have a blue check on their account would cut down this type of piracy or release of trailers before the producer wants to. They said it would be very worth it to maintain the legitimacy of what they're doing.

I'm assuming other types of creators would see the value in being able to say, "If its not from my verified account, then its not (me, my work, my companies work) and you should ignore it."

If the barrier to a checkmark is $8 then all the scammers are going to have checkmarks too

and now we have more of a paper trail to stop them

Yes because most scammers provide their real information when scamming

The most common scam I see on Twitter is imposter accounts replying to a real person with a link to some crypto scam. Right now you can usually immediately tell it's a different person since the reply doesn't have a check mark, this system seems like it will make it easier since the scammer can just get a checkmark.

You really don't though. It's trivially easy to create new valid unique payment information with a free virtual credit card number and a fake name/address. This is a very hard problem to truly solve.

There's a reason there are entire companies that focus on the problem of ID verification, it's difficult problem.

Sounds like a valuable problem for twitter to play cat-and-mouse with. They literally make money for every try.

Are virtual cards actually useful for crimes? I assumed they were primarily for ending subscriptions that make canceling orders of magnitude harder than signing up.

Actual scammers I expect have stolen credit card databases to test.

If you can't stop the bots, might as well monetize them?

As Elon said, the bots are the most valuable

I wont be paying. I only paid for blue to get rid of the spaces button in the app. I really only use Twitter as a way to complain and vent into a void. I know no one else cares what I say and I'm fine with that.

yep, just make account packages like a SaaS service

basic is free

oh you can pay to have your nft shown

then additional packages for people that want to use social media managers

that deal with impersonation

etc

Personally, I'd be more than willing to pay $8/mo for Twitter if it meant no more ads and helped the company become profitable from something besides ads. I have YouTube Premium for those exact reasons. I hate what the attention economy has done to user experience, and if paying for Twitter gave me a significantly better user experience, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Twitter's market position gives it plenty of power if they just figure out how to use it. If they gave free blue checks to government officials, tenured professors at accredited universities, and licensed medical practitioners, they could easily get away with forcing everyone else to pay. It's the standard nightclub trick: women get in free, men pay. People will pay to be in a group with the highly regarded people you gave free entry to.

> If you mostly use it as a social network between your friends you might not care because they’ll presumably see your tweets because they follow you rather than because they found them in search or whatever.

One would think, but I rarely see tweets from people I follow.

For example, I just scrolled my feed, and 51 out of the first 60 tweets were from strangers (the other 9 were either tweets or retweets from people I follow). One of the tweets was even from Taylor Swift. I have no idea why Twitter thought I'd want to see that, since I mostly just follow devs. Downranking people who don't pay the subscription means I'm going to see even less of those devs than I already am.

If you scroll back through my post history, you'll see me singing Twitter's praises and telling people that they just need to curate their feed if they don't like what they're seeing. This is no longer the case. I admit defeat.

You can make lists of people you want to follow and only see their tweets. I'd never use twitter if it weren't for this option.

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists

The underlying message here appears to be that one size does not fit all.

But for personal data collectors and advertisers, the largest size is the only one that fits. Quantity not quality. Audience. Reach.

> There’s a small number of users with potentially lots of followers for whom Twitter is an important part of their work or life.

Twitter also needs them so it’s a symbiotic relationship. In some cases I’d say Twitter needs them more than they need it. Like popular music celebrities, sport stars etc. So Twitter has to tread carefully not to antagonize such crowd pullers lest they migrate to a competitor social media.

I went into twitter hoping to find more of the SWE community. I took the approach that when you're posting it's you to everyone. I went to a few conferences and made a few connections. But often times it thins out, and you really don't maintain that connection there.

It ended up feeling like it was nothing but tribes and influencers bolstering themselves or people trying to market their product (dev advocates). Theres no motivation to have productive conversations, learn new things, or really get a lot of value out of it. On top of that you have extremists trying to make sure you don't the wrong opinion.

> Half as many ads $8/month and you don’t even get ads removed?

Seemed almost reasonable until that point. That said, they probably make just a little over $8/user/no in ads or US people, I'd guess.

That's a misinterpretation of what the blue tick mean. It's to protect the reader from impersonators. That it does help the authors to get followers is an almost unintended side effect.

If you charge for it, you are essentially inverting it purpose, and eventually what will happen is that readers will no longer have that protection, since authors might not pay for it.

Given that, Twitter becomes a less secure place for readers and, if people are smart [1] they will leave it in favor of networks where they can at least trust that what they read came from who they think wrote it.

1: people usually aren't, so I wouldn't be surprised if only a small percentage of people give up on Twitter after this. Still, that's what should happen.

Edit: typos