Raise the price and drop the features, makes sense to me. Next step, the MMO route: sell different-color flair for your account so everybody can tell how much you spend per month on Twitter. Then, let people filter by tier: Twitter Blue can block Twitter Blue and no-check users; Twitter Red cannot be blocked except by Red and above... on up to Twitter Diamond who can't be blocked by anybody but other $100k/mo users. Sure, people will hate it, but will they pay?
The 90s sitcom Frasier parodied this mentality to hilarious effect. Frasier and his brother Niles got memberships to an exclusive spa and then progressively kept discovering that there were more and more exclusive membership levels to which they promptly upgraded. Then they see one last non-descript door leading from the diamond room. Niles opens it to an astonishingly bright white light, they step into the light and their eyes adjust just as the door closes and locks behind them, and they realize they are in the back alley with the smelly garbage.
More recently, in an episode of Modern Family, Jay keeps discovering there are more floors on the hotels he's staying in, where he thinks he's on the most exclusive top floor only to be denied some service or other which is reserved for the tier on the floor above.
Well we already have antagonistic political factions and a common vernacular shorthand referring to them by a pair of colors so idk how far we have to go to recreate anything really.
Airlines? Politicians? I think it was credit cards who started (or at least popularized) the Silver/Gold crap, but I'm unsure.
And... I'm not sure that I'm being cynical here. I think I'm extrapolating on a pretty solid trend in economics. I'd like to think that the $100k value I tossed out is unrealistic, but I've been surprised before (looking at you, Diablo)
First class twitter blue? For everyone else’s the first 140 characters are free, then .1 doge per character, unless you forget to add your characters at the beginning in which case you can add them in the edit for free, but have to collect them at baggage claim (the metaphor breaks down)
Fast passes at amusement parks, airlines and online dating like other comments mention, concert tickets, hell tickets for anything. Court side seats are as much about being close to the action as being seen by others which is a similar vein of vanity as a blue check.
"For $10/month, you can message with any profile on DatingSimulator dot com, and for only $25/month we will highlight which profiles are of humans instead of bots." (but you can still message the bots, if you want)
The difference is that "whale economic" implies some users are paying huge huge amount of money. Like, over thousands of dollars in month in case of computer games. That sort of thing.
And they're paying it through microtransactions. Most populations follow a power distribution like that, not just gaming. The most loyal customers spend way more than the tail. They don't spend it all at once usually, it's over many transactions. But they are still the group you target.
This phenomenon is true in all lines of business not just gaming, and it's due to loyal customers who keep coming back (regardless whether it's a premium purchase or not), not single large ticket purchases...
Sports have super fans that come to every game
Airlines have business travelers
Etc etc.
I mean some would call it a game but Tinder/Match does this. They have subscriptions starting at $10 with some bonus features but there are also pre-set options for subscriptions/boosts that go up to $100 so I'm assuming those whales are using a lot.
It's obviously not too dissimilar from Twitter. I bet some people get a very similar rush from a match as they do from a shared tweet.
I imagine it's still mostly guys who buy the super futures but there's also a large class of OF models, aspiring influencers, etc. who use Tinder features because it is good value for their goals. I imagine people who use Twitter for clicks/attention would be in same spot.
Accounts with blue check marks are some of the worst offenders when it comes to misinformation on Twitter, because that status gives additional legitimacy to whatever they say (compared to a random bot). Charging them $20 or whatever else isn't going to change anything.
Given how Twitter's new owner has been re-tweeting political conspiracies, I'm not sure 'reduce misinformation on Twitter' is anywhere on his list of priorities.
Well, it's possible he may be inclined to reduce the amount of misinformation that harms his and his friends' political ambitions.
(To be fair, though, it's not clear how Hunter Biden has anything to do with anything, and why anyone is still talking about him, because last I checked, unlike another royal family, Joe did not fill the cabinet with his relatives...)
Because there are allegations that he was peddling access to his father while his father was VP which may be backed up by emails on said laptop. Now that it's confirmed as genuine, an investigation needs to be done. We would demand nothing less if this were the previous president.
You sure about that? From what I remember the smoking gun email that said "10% for the big guy" is from 2017. Notably not when Joe Biden was in office.
You act like that's a really bad thing but tbh requiring payment for verification seems to me one of the easiest ways to combat misinformation. Suddenly you have an actual source of money tied to an actual person that ties someone to their actual account. Meanwhile it can be assumed that anyone that doesn't verify is likely pushing false information. Seems like it is the easiest way possible to combat the misinformation not by becoming some sort of arbiter of truth but merely making it harder for people to push information out anonymously in the first place.
Isn't the "verified" check mark meant to indicate that the account doing the tweeting is the famous or notable person they claim they are? In my opinion, Twitter puts the verified check mark on accounts as an aid to help other Twitter readers; to help ensure they are reading the person they intended to follow.
While paying for the check mark is certainly a valid way to earn money it won't really serve the same purpose. Many notable accounts may choose not to buy in, accounts that are not notable may choose to buy in, adding to the confusion.
> While paying for the check mark is certainly a valid way to earn money it won't really serve the same purpose. Many notable accounts may choose not to buy in, accounts that are not notable may choose to buy in, adding to the confusion.
In the current existing system, famous people also have to go a verification process when they are invited or approved to be verified. Paying for a checkmark would presumably include the same verification that takes place in the current system.
> In the current existing system, famous people also have to go a verification process when they are invited or approved to be verified. Paying for a checkmark would presumably include the same verification that takes place in the current system.
It will presumably include some verification process, but the current process is relatively small volume (compared to what Musk wants for the new premium accounts with verification, which he seems to want to be the norm for active, non-trivial-reach users) and I would imagine doesn’t scale well, so he probably wants a more streamlined, scalable identity verification system like what EdX does for verified certificates.
> Isn't the "verified" check mark meant to indicate that the account doing the tweeting is the famous or notable person they claim they are?
I don't think so. There are blue check accounts that get purchased, and then have the name and image replaced with that of a famous person to sell scams. Check the replies under any real Musk tweet.
> Isn’t the “verified” check mark meant to indicate that the account doing the tweeting is the famous or notable person they claim they are?
That is what it was, in theory. There are some issues in practice, and in any case Musk has a very different vision of what it is for (the user facing reason seems to be largely “paying for positioning in the algorithm”.)
EDIT: In addition to algorithmic prioritization, you also get a 50% reduction in ads and the ability to post “long video and audio”, per Elon’s recent announcements.
> Suddenly you have an actual source of money tied to an actual person that ties someone to their actual account.
Did that stop Alex Jones from slandering the victims of Sandy Hook?
Last time I checked, Alex Jones's web traffic increased, because that slander / misinformation made him more money. People wanted that misinformation badly.
His long term outlook is very poor though. Judgements will likely be reduced (if Jones co-operates with the court this time) but he'll be lucky to have a home when everything is over.
Does Elon Musk's blue checkmark stop him from posting misinformation on say... the number of bots on Twitter and whether or not they'd allow him to not buy Twitter over that argument?
Or TSLA going private for $420?
--------
These online personalities have proven that they don't care one tiny bit about telling the truth, even if they have money and their name attached to their accounts
>Seems like it is the easiest way possible to combat the misinformation not by becoming some sort of arbiter of truth but merely making it harder for people to push information out anonymously in the first place.
People with blue checks, who have had their identities verified and aren't anonymous, already stretch the truth and put out misinformation. Adding a $20/month fee isn't going to change that. $20/month is worth it for many people who want to bend the truth for their own personal gain, whatever that may be. I really don't understand how charging people for a blue check next to their name somehow also "combats misinformation".
> You act like that’s a really bad thing but tbh requiring payment for verification seems to me one of the easiest ways to combat misinformation.
Sure, telling big accounts that are the major source of content bringing people to the platform that you view their presence as a headache that you need compensated extra for rather than a welcome thing that you are willing to do costly work to make secure is a great way to shrink the platform for all uses, including misinformation.
Their content is basically advertising their brand to their fans though. Stephen King can announce a book tour or new title and reach millions of fans for a meager 20 bucks a month. On the flip side, I personally don't need to have celebrities on the platform to see the value. When Twitter started there were no celebrities on there and they only got involved once it took off because it is a cost effective way of reaching fans.
> When Twitter started there were no celebrities on there
When Twitter started its unique selling point was posting & reading via SMS, and it had essentially no competitors. The market Twitter is in now is radically different.
> Stephen King can announce a book tour or new title and reach millions of fans for a meager 20 bucks a month.
The current planned price for the algorithmic juicing plus reduced ads plus verification that merges and replaces the existing verified program and Blue premium subscription is $8/mo in the US, adjusted by PPP in other countries.
People push misinformation under their real name all the time. Why anyone would expect this to change that, I don't know.
Meanwhile, plenty of people will farm out verification of accounts for purposes where paying the verification fee for an illusion of authority will be worth it for a lot of uses.
I guess the good faith interpretation is they want out of the news game and don’t see their core competency as Netflix for news Which honestly makes some sense, it has almost nothing to do with Twitter as a platform and gets them into the world of bullshit content licensing.
With how unsuccessful Apple News+ has been, it's frankly unsurprising and would likely have happened whether or not Musk owns Twitter. It's obviously not why people subscribe to Twitter Blue, why increase costs for no reason?
Me too. I absolutely loved Scroll's idea - subscribe to a whole bunch of sites and have your money split between them, depending on how much you read them.
It's a shame to have them be bought out just to be closed down.
Brave browser does something similar with its attention tokens, which by default get allocated* depending on your time split between sites.
*provided the site supports it, unsure what the process for that is. Some really weird ones do, like specific Youtube channels, The Guardian, or some GitHub users.
Scroll wasn't locked into a particular browser, didn't use a pointless crypto scheme, and actively sought partners instead of opting sites in against their will.
I wasn't aware of the business model, merely that it's conceptually similar, if a bit "web 3.0" in implementation. Not sure it's any worse than browsing with an ad blocker, in which case the websites get 0 revenue, crypto or otherwise.
That's actually the reason I'm principally against using brave: they were accepting token payment on behalf of unsuspecting content creators without their consent. [1]
I don't know if that rises to the level of fraud legally speaking, but morally it's very sketchy. I don't want to associate myself with that and I don't trust them.
Fair enough, I am not advocating for that project, but it is close in spirit to what was described in the parent comment.
Aside from that, I personally do not see the issue with being able to opt into automatic crypto payments for browsing time, vs seeing nothing at all from the same. The default behaviour for unverified creators is that it goes into some internal pool for marketing, which is a bit sketchy though yeah.
Apple News+ is kinda similar. You get a whole bunch of free news and pay one monthly bill, instead of dozens of bills. I like it so far. I don't know how they compensate the publishers, but I hope they get a reasonable cut.
Apple News has mostly low-quality publishers on board. $12.99 or whatever they charge isn't going to get you access to publications that cost $20/mo. on their own.
Reminds me of how AT&T bought Time Warner and how Verizon Bought Yahoo/AOL. They overpaid for those services and tried to recoup their money in some way and some how. It ended up lowering the value of the brands, and definitely turned away the customers.
Leave twitter now. Let the dust settle 1 year later. and join then. Otherwise, you will be riding the same roller coaster.
One thing that I might have paid for is individual access to their API so that I can write my own client. It would proactively show me things that I care about and would filter out the things that I don't care about. I'd be happy with restrictions, e.g., for my use only etc.
It might be an interesting open source project as well- build a model that can be trained to your tastes that runs on hardware that you control.
Strong aversion to longtermerist bs and concern for growing hostility toward many of my users (trans, lgtbq, etc). I don’t want to moderate UGC myself directly and have even less trust now in hate content being moderated by using their platform for extending my customer community
My problem with twitter is any big name person tweeting has absolutely garbage replies. It's half random memes and images and half vitriol that is completely missing the point or completely unrelated to the specific tweet
And there are still ads in the timeline. Whoever dreamt up Blue should be shown the door. $4.99/month for no ads in the timeline and a reverse chronological view that doesn't change back randomly is a no-brainer.
Agreed. No idea how it’s possible that this hasn’t even been floated for several years at this point. Every time Twitter announces a paid feature that isn’t this, I am disappointed.
There is a secret Twitter hack for chonological view: put all the profiles you want to follow into a list and view through the list. The feed will be reverse chronological, not algorithmically sorted.
Impossible. Bridges charge per use and people still use bridges! Twitter is like a bridge, but instead of connecting roads it connects people. Also, there are pay-per-use toilets, and twitter is like... well you get it.
Of course! Because that other bridge is free only in a monetary sense but the twitter bridge will be free in a speech sense. Can't say racist/homophobic/anti-Semitic/misogynistic/hateful things on that on that other bridge? Do the moderators on that other bridge frown when you try and spread false stories about recently attacked politicians? Well on twitter bridge, you pay the fee and say all this and more! There is so much hate and craziness out there right now. People intensely wanting to say hateful and crazy things to other people. Why not monetize it? Billions to made! Billions!
My experience with Twitter Blue was that, quite frequently, the "ad-free articles" were still behind a paywall and inaccessible. So very little of value is being lost here.
According to N.N.Taleb, Elon over-paid for twitter. $44 billion for a company that is according to Taleb ~15Billion. Now that cheap money era is over, Companies esp. in tech have to spend based on their cash-flow and profit instead of valuation.
That means, Elon has to pull at almost all stops to make Twitter profitable and that means a lot of pain and change at Twitter. Every change need not make it front page of HN. The tactics may be new, but the strategy is as old as it gets.
He doesn't "need" Twitter to ever be worth anywhere near what he paid. As long as he can make the debt service payments, he can die with Twitter still in the red and he'll die with more in the bank and a higher quality of life than you, me, and Taleb.
All the usual business calculus kind of goes out the window when you have a single owner that only needs to stay afloat and may not care about maximizing profit or value.
Of course, the counterargument is that all of Elon's moves so far have been exactly consistent with a new owner who only cares about profit. Cutting staff, implementing draconian crunch time, telling advertisers things that are what they want to hear but the opposite of what you're telling the public, adding fees where they weren't there before, raising prices and cutting features...
He has to maximize profit. Otherwise he won't be able to pay that debt. It is not like he has a choice there, he took on huge debt and even maximized profit might not be enough.
> If he wants to, he could simply off the debt, or run at a ~1 billion loss for the rest of his life.
Can he actually off the debt without endangering his other businesses? Do you really think 1 billion yearly loss is something he can be comfortable with? His worth is in propery and businesses mostly, he does not have it sitting in a bank. That is the thing. He needs to maximize profits in order to ... not be in huge loss.
Like, yeah, this is political project of his and it is both celebrated (by political side that gains by him owning it) and yelled about (by political side that is about to be pushed away from there) for political reasons. But, that does not mean he can have it as complete looser - if nothing for ego reasons.
And his initial moves are moves of someone desperate to save some cash and panicking.
>Can he actually off the debt without endangering his other businesses? Do you really think 1 billion yearly loss is something he can be comfortable with? His worth is in propery and businesses mostly, he does not have it sitting in a bank. That is the thing. He needs to maximize profits in order to ... not be in huge loss.
Yeah, I think he could realistically run twitter as a non-profit if we wanted, and eat the cost until he died. He owns half of SpaceX worth ~125 billion, and could sell $1 billion per year indefinitely without losing control.
The reality is that he obviously doesn't want to have twitter as money sink (reference intended).
He is no stranger to losing vast amounts of money in the short term, so I personally don't think panic is driving his behavior. Rather, I think this is simply what a hostile Elon takeover looks like and how he operates. That is to say, like a bull in a china shop with full media coverage.
There will be flailing, bold claims, pivots, mystery, and intrigue. Underneath that, the real work will be a radical restructuring and gutting of the existing corporate culture.
And, the broader market crash would have also hit Elon Musk's own holdings as well. So I'm not sure how much better of a deal he would have gotten in terms of price and purchasing power.
I think there's a lot of variance in how much analysts are valuing Twitter; Dan Ives is valuing Twitter at $25 billion. Kevin O'Leary (of Shark Tank fame) valued Twitter at only $10 billion. But I think all analysts are agreeing that Elon Musk paid way over market price.
Those aren't ideal comparisons; Meta's embroiled in its own problems, and Snapchat is losing users. Pinterest is also widely-hated and practically dead.
Twitter was unprofitable, but people generally accept that for companies with consistent user growth. The valuation without Musk would likely have been around $25B to $35B. "$10B" is the fundamental DCF valuation, which isn't what anything is traded at these days, even after the tech crash.
That's tough to debate since you're arguing the unknown. How about this instead. Musk revealed his stake on April 4th and his intent to acquire on April 14th. One could argue the TWTR rally across March was due to Musk buying his ~10% stake in the first place but we'll ignore that.
Revenue means nothing. If I sold $10 bills for $9 each, I'd have billions in revenue in a week. The path to breakeven here will be long and arduous, impossible if for some reason twitter gets the facebook treatment from the population. Musk himself is doing his best to make twitter look "not cool". He is losing his bearings fast and probably thinks twitter is the way it is because of some conspiracy in management. He shut down his own "free speech absolutist" stance pretty quickly post acquisition. If he has his way, many people will not comfortable associating themselves with twitter (what happened to facebook) and well, without enough users / activity to make it your while, twitter's future looks bleak unless Musk regains his bearings somehow. And what if something new and fresh comes along in the meantime that gains traction? Twitter, and the concept is old. People want to communicate, want to be heard and become influential - this will never change, but the medium can change and it can change relatively fast.
Twitter is a 75% squeezed lemon, has some life in it but Musk is set on wasting it thinking it is a staple like telephone / email is.
Lay off 1000 employees and start cutting or renegotiating vendor contracts. 221M should be easy money to find for a company of Twitter's size.
I say this as someone whose been a big tech co employee my entire life and who has seen how easily 10 or 20 million gets spent. I have also seen how easily a million gets thrown out here or there for vendors to do some data analysis work, or even worse, create shiny powerpoint slides to present to higher ups.
Remove a layer of management, stop all the outsourced make-work, and you may end up halfway there to saving 200 million.
Musk has saddled Twitter with a lot of debt as part of this deal. The interest on that debt is about $1 billion / year. So they don't need to just find $200M, they need to find $1.2B. Does it still sound easy?
I guess I should have stated that Twitter could have been profitable awhile back, and it was likely a choice they made to not be. Not sure why they made that choice, and it seems like everyone who does know why no longer works there.
My overall point was that large corporations have a lot of waste in them, entire teams dedicated to making shiny dashboards for execs who only ever look at them once or twice a year, or, something I saw at Microsoft, hiring vendors to write software, and also hiring another vending firm to manage the first vending firm. (Because MS, despite being filled with program managers and software developers, wasn't set up at the time to do short term projects so the easiest solution to that organizational problem was to flush a few million extra down the tubes...)
