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Twitter for iOS Updated With New $8 Subscription Offering Verification and More [Updated: Not Yet Live]

Rogifan said:
I get the feeling way fewer think of the blue check as some sort of status symbol then some want to believe. Some want to push this narrative that all blue checks (themselves excluded of course, if they have one) think they’re better than everyone else and now Elon’s here to take their status symbol away. I’m seeing quite a few ‘blue checks’ who say they’re not paying $8/mo and if their checkmark goes away they don’t care.

I do find the marketing on it odd. ‘Power to the people’…if you give Twitter $8/mo. It’s hard to turn this into a class thing when you’re charging people $8/mo. I would guess a Twitter subscription doesn’t fit into the budget of many working class/blue-collar people.
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Yeah probably.

I think the idea is to make it cost prohibitive for there to be sock puppeting and bot armies rampant on the platform.

If that makes a few pointless celebrities feel a bit less special then so be it I suppose.


fat jez said:
You do know that verified users get an extra stream which only shows verified users?

www.engadget.com

Twitter gives verified users a mentions filter / velvet rope

Twitter is making it easier for the truly famous to chat with each other in public, now that it's added a couple of new filters for users with Verified accounts. While the general public continue to have their mentions open to one and all, verified users can see their @ stream either "Filtered"...
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com
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Why is that a problem?
 
Mrkevinfinnerty said:
Yeah probably.

I think the idea is to make it cost prohibitive for there to be sock puppeting and bot armies rampant on the platform.

If that makes a few pointless celebrities feel a bit less special then so be it I suppose.




Why is that a problem?
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Maybe there are some blue checks out there whining about not being special anymore. But I’m just not seeing it. I’m seeing some say they won’t pay $8/mo and don’t care if they lose it. I’m seeing others say verification shouldn’t cost a monthly fee or that you shouldn’t be able to get a checkmark (which used to mean verification) just because you give Twitter $8/mo. Like I said, it seems people who don’t have a blue check care way more about it than those who do.
 
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Rogifan said:
Maybe there are some blue checks out there whining about not being special anymore. But I’m just not seeing it. I’m seeing some say they won’t pay $8/mo and don’t care if they lose it. I’m seeing others say verification shouldn’t cost a monthly fee or that you shouldn’t be able to get a checkmark (which used to mean verification) just because you give Twitter $8/mo. Like I said, it seems people who don’t have a blue check care way more about it than those who do.
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Be interesting to see how many actually don't pay and give up the verification.
 
maccymac42 said:
It won't even signify you're a real human being. It'll signify you pay for twitter blue. There is no longer a verification system, just paying users having a little logo to show they pay.

No idea what the poster you were replying to was on about - I've seen journalists verified with less than 1000 followers, because they're journalists! The fact that person doesn't see the rug being pulled is kind of hilarious, bless their cotton socks.
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Ok? I've seen various YouTubers with big followings without a checkmark, same with small indie game teams, developers, modelers, etc.
 
fat jez said:
Only for existing verified users who perhaps have a large following and a noisy notifications stream. For them it was probably a useful filter, now also to be devalued in its use.
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Not sure how it's less valuable to people who already had it because others now have it?
 
edolecki said:
Great. When it goes live I’ll jump in. I’d rather have a profitable Twitter than one that ceases because bankruptcy.
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Twitter has around 400k of those blue-check accounts. There are no numbers for twitter blue, but let's take a very, very, very optimistic guess and assume it's 100.000. Let's also assume that they add something else of value to that subscription so, instead of maybe 60% of those 500k sjbscribing they'll more than double that and have 1 million paying subscribers. Makes it easier to calculate. So, that's 8 Million revenue a month or 96 million a year without having paid any employees, infrastructure, taxes,.... .

96 Million, a.k.a. a little less than 10% of what Twitter needs just to pay the interest rate of it's debt every year. Even if they had no employees and no other expenses they'd need that 1 billon/year just to not go bankrupt. Getting less than 1% of it's users to pay $8 a month is not going to save it, the anual income from that probably won't even keep the company afloat for a week.

Personally, I'd love to see that toxic cesspitt go up in flames in a frw years - which has become much more likely now with Musk increasing it's debt. It's still interesting what he'll do, because that must have been glaring obvious to him from the beginning that this will be much harder than going to mars.
 
I think that a lot of people will not pay for blue check ...

If Musk expect to get cash money by this , he will be disappointed...
 
darkpaw said:
When everyone is verified, no one is verified.
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That will very much depend on how it is implemented but as a blanket statement this is obviously not true.

When everyone is verified, everyone is verified -- as long as there is a functioning process behind it that carries out meaningful checks to actually verify anything.

What's certainly true is that a 'verification' process that stops at the payment details doesn't fundamentally solve any of the problems true verification should. It increases the financial cost of doing disinformation on Twitter, which might price some malicious actors out of the market, but adversaries who want to do propaganda on a large scale or influence elections will still have the means to do so, just at a higher sticker price.

I think if they had just called it a premium membership instead of it being a verified account the criticism would be different.

Not defending Elon Musk here, he's become one of the people I truly wish to see fail.
 
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fat jez said:
Because suddenly a lot more users will be able to appear in the verified feed purely by paying $8 a month. It makes the verified filtered-feed less useful to a verified user.
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I've heard rumors that some users that applied for a checkmark got declined, then messaged by a Twitter employee to cough up $15k just to have a checkmark near their name. Not sure if it's true or not, but that could explain one of the few reasons why verified people are complaining.
 
bobcomer said:
Oh you mean verified verified. lol! You can't have your cake and eat it too.
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You may be more on the money than you realise. $8 gets you a peasants blue tick. $10 gets you a prestige purple tick. $20 gets you an “ elite “ gold tick.
 
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Many people like to stay anonymous without impersonating others. I have to make a confession: "Skyscraperfan" is not my legal name in my passport.
 
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JPack said:
The irony is that far more advertisers are backing out of Twitter than this $8 could ever possibly hope to recover.
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Compounded with the the irony of someone who runs other companies infamous for not advertising took over a company that is so dependent on advertising revenue in the first place.
 
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Rogifan said:
So I saw celebrity Valerie Bertinelli, who was/is verified, change her name to Elon Musk. I guess trying to show that the site will become full of impersonators now? The question I have is in the past could people with blue checkmarks change their name to be anything they wanted? Could Bertinelli have changed her name to Elon Musk two weeks ago? If so, then I’m not sure she’s making the point she thinks she is.
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Anyone could always change their name to anything they wanted, regardless of whether they were verified or not. But before, if an unverified user changed their name to Elon Musk, it'd be immediately obvious it wasn't the real Elon Musk, because there would be no blue check. And verified users had no motive to change their names to Elon Musk, because the reason they were verified is to post as themselves. Once the new "pay for blue check" system is operational, then people who want to impersonate somebody else just have to pay $8, get a blue check, and call themselves anything they want.
 
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Night Spring said:
Anyone could always change their name to anything they wanted, regardless of whether they were verified or not. But before, if an unverified user changed their name to Elon Musk, it'd be immediately obvious it wasn't the real Elon Musk, because there would be no blue check. And verified users had no motive to change their names to Elon Musk, because the reason they were verified is to post as themselves. Once the new "pay for blue check" system is operational, then people who want to impersonate somebody else just have to pay $8, get a blue check, and call themselves anything they want.
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But it will be obvious they are impersonating somebody because they will need a verified payment method, billing address and name.
 
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Mrkevinfinnerty said:
But it will be obvious they are impersonating somebody because they will need a verified payment method, billing address and name.
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To Twitter, yes it'd be obvious. So once someone notices and reports the impersonation, then they could ban the offender quickly, provided they have enough staff. But someone reading through Twitter posts might not notice, and they could fall for scam or misinformation.
 
Not sure if really tons of money is need not run Twitter. The servers will cost a lot of money, but I think that Wikipedia has much higher server costs and that runs without ads just by donations.

Maybe having an uncensored platform might be worth more than the money for Elon Musk. He does not need his investment back. Instead he just want the daily costs covered. $4 million loss per day already seems very small. It should be possible to compensate those losses by costs cuts.

His long term goal is building a platform which can also used for payments. If he already has the payments details of the heavy Twitter users for the $7.99 per month, it will be much easier to convince people to use Twitter as a payment platform like WeChat.
 
The checkmark doesn’t mean ”verified” anymore, it just means that you’re paying $7.99/month, right? If so, then that’s kinda lame.

They could have expanded the verification from celebs to everyone as long as they are willing to send in some form of identification or something that would verify them as a real person. Musk really managed to take a cool feature thats always made Twitter unique and turn it into something meaningless and lame.
 
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