Here you are advocating a literal pay for play, and you're identifying certain classes of users as being "worthless" and advocating "nuking them from orbit."
That seems way more radically elitist than wanting to know if something is a parody account or not? Help me understand here?
But charging in pursuit of removing "worthless" users from the platform - you see what I'm saying there right? That's literally constructing an underclass, deciding they are unwashed and unacceptable in refined company, and then charging money to keep them out.
It's the business model of a country club. Maybe it's a cheap country club, that's a difference of degree.
I've paid similar amounts of money to join closed forums before and found them to be enjoyable and relatively free of trolls. I'm not opposed to it in principle. What I was asking about was the contradiction.
I've turned the corner on this. I think he's turning twitter into a place where blue checks publicly talk to other blue checks, and people willing to pay a recurring fee to try to be included in that conversation can try to get their attention. What it's going to be is a massacre of reply guys (who are going to lose visibility) and sockpuppets (whose new/unused accounts will be useless.)
I'm honestly interested in that. I don't even post on twitter, I read, so I'm not giving the perspective of an active twitter participant, but tbh 99% of non-blue-check twitter participants only cost twitter money, are dumb and their accounts should be nuked from orbit. Their only purpose was to make the room feel crowded, and thus to attract more broke users. Not that most of blue check twitter isn't terrible, but that's the terrible that people are actively looking for. Terrible with a fanbase.
So, in the future, you should be paying for twitter or have an account at least a year or two old in order to harass journalists, politicians, and people you watch on television. I could see that being appealing to almost everybody.