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.
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.
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)?
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.
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 :).
That goes both ways.
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
> 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?
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-...
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 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.
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.