From "Twitter Builds a Wall/Elon Musk’s platform will take its cut or die trying" (New York Magazine).
April 10, 2023
"In the course of trying to build a social-media company, Twitter ended up with a piece of infrastructure."
"It was important to a wide range of people and institutions, but that importance was derived from their collective, often begrudging presence. Twitter’s longtime bet was that more aggressive paths to monetization would destroy what it did have, driving away users and leaving shareholders with even less to be happy about. So it muddled along. And then came Elon.
From the start, Musk made an opposite bet. Rather than worrying about driving people away, he started coming up with ways to charge them.... To users, Twitter’s recent changes tend to read more like threats than invitations. In the broader internet and media ecosystem, Twitter is taking the platform equivalent of a hard isolationist turn and shutting down its borders...."
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All business die that don’t take or can’t get their cut.
Concern trolls gotta troll.
Twitter is free to use. The blue check is not free. It’s a status symbol, and as isolationist as any other. It’s a pretty cheap status symbol though - about the same as a cuppa Starbucks per month. It’s for your ego, so it’s worth it.
Twitter wants to get paid for providing its service.
Oh, the humanity!
Musk purchased sunshine on leftest fascism. The participating fascist still don’t like that Musk exposed them, and they hope to punish him.
So instead of some faceless kommisar handing out blue checks to favored people, Musk will blue-check anyone with eight spare dollars.
Has New York Magazine ever derided Starbucks by noting that the founder of Chock Full o' Nuts charged a nickel for his outstanding cuppa? Eighty-four simoleons for a grande latte? No problem. A virtue, in fact. Keeps out the stingy Republicans and makes the place inviting to gender queers and timid women with issues.
Oh, to find the thing to say to make Elon go away…
Is this all about Blue check marks?
The elite love their freebies?
"It’s a pretty cheap status symbol though - about the same as a cuppa Starbucks per month. It’s for your ego, so it’s worth it."
Not much of a status symbol anymore. Could be a symbol that you got taken in by a con.
I keep seeing this comparison to coffee drinks bought at Starbucks, but tangible items of commerce are different from your digital subscriptions to all the various things you buy access to on line. The drink you possess and consume. The subscriptions are only good if you put in the effort to use them, and you probably have a big list of things that take a cut every month and that you might lose track of. It feels bad to give another company your credit card number and authorized them to take their cut on a monthly basis. It's not the same as the decision in the here and now to buy a cup of coffee.
“I keep seeing this comparison to coffee drinks bought at Starbucks, but tangible items of commerce are different from your digital subscriptions to all the various things you buy access to on line. The drink you possess and consume. The subscriptions are only good if you put in the effort to use them, and you probably have a big list of things that take a cut every month and that you might lose track of. It feels bad to give another company your credit card number and authorized them to take their cut on a monthly basis. It's not the same as the decision in the here and now to buy a cup of coffee.”
The comparison is about the price, not the item being bought.
Good thing we all can figure out for ourselves what we want to purchase with our hard-earned money on an on-going basis or not.
I just watched Glass Onion last night... For those who haven't seen it but plan to, maybe skip the rest of my comment. For those who haven't seen it and don't give a hoot, here we go. No REAL spoilers, but I take no responsibility for conclusions you may draw from what I say below.
It centers on a character who is transparently Musk (played by Ed Norton, who kinda even looks like him these days). The character's a quirky genius, or is he? He surrounds himself with people who do the actual creative work, then he grabs the credit and the spotlight. (Seems to me that was at least as true of pop hero Steve Jobs as of Musk, but whatever.)
The effort to portray Musk as (spoiler alert) "an idiot" throughout all of popular culture is getting old. It's not only perfectly normal but an absolute necessity, ISTM, for brilliant people to seek out and collaborate with other brilliant people in order to build anything of any real size, and the person who has that magical combination of brilliance, ability, charisma, and dogged determination deserves the reward for putting and keeping a strong team together. Even Jobs deserves credit for that.
It's also absolutely normal for "disrupters," much as I weary of that term, to try lots of things and fail at most of them. Not every piece of Bach was scintillating. Not every Shakespeare play was Hamlet. Not every Apple product has stood the test of time.
Musk's impact on society is already clear - Teslas can in fact drive themselves under certain conditions, but what's more interesting, so can my Explorer, because of Musk's pressure on the industry. My husband, long an oil exec, is considering an electric car because his office (no longer oil and gas) has installed charging ports in good parking spaces. And we all know that no one outside science fiction ever seriously considered landing a rocket - on a ship - until SpaceX freaking did it.
(One of our college friends, an aerospace engineer who'd been with SpaceX almost since its inception, texted us on the day of that first landing - something like, "Some days you get up and go to work, write a memo, check the progress of a couple of projects, get some more coffee, and land a rocket.")
So the moaning is that the blue check is no longer reserved for the elite and deserving. Now any crass person who wants to comment and skip a couple of days of "two buck chuck" can be just as erudite / special.
I'm curious as to how previous schemes of selling verification (https://medium.com/@CryptoSavingExpert/twitter-employees-allegedly-sold-verification-checkmarks-for-as-high-as-15k-17c00fc9482a#:~:text=Save-,Twitter%20Employees%20Allegedly%20Sold%20Verification%20Checkmarks%20For%20as%20High%20as,as%20high%20as%20%2415k.) were better.
The drink you possess and consume.
You only rent coffee (same for beer). I think that's why people instinctively reach for it as a comparison. You don't possess it in the sense you possess a durable good. Once that cup of coffee is done and gone, you need to buy another one to get that caffeine rush again, and many people want that experience at least once a day, every day.
Of course, over time that Blue Check is gonna cost you more money than a single cup of coffee but so will many, maybe most, durable goods. However, it's still not going to cost you as much as a cup of coffee every day, even a cheap one.
What people are missing is that free daily dopamine hit of being one of Kool Kidz.
Twitter frequently evokes titters from me.
My cup of coffee is only 2 dollars at racetrack. They have the grinding machine that makes a fresh cup every time. I found out the dark roast works for me better than anything else they have. QT coffee sits in large canisters and it’s as watery as the Niagara Falls.
I’m not sold on why I should be back at Twitter. For one thing, other things are now taking the time I used to devote to it, and I see no good reason to change that now.
Twitter was losing millions. Musk is trying to make it profitable. George Soros can give away millions to influence politics but Musk seems more of a businessman.
Althouse writes, "I keep seeing this comparison to coffee drinks bought at Starbucks, but tangible items of commerce are different from your digital subscriptions to all the various things you buy access to on line."
Absurd. If the Starbucks business was entirely about the tangible, there'd be no Starbucks. In fact, I'd go so far as to insist Starbucks is a service rather than a goods model enterprise, their main service being the stroking of the delicate metrosexual ego. Why do you think Starbucks is the context of so much satirical comedy? (Hint: It's not about the coffee.)
The point of the blue check is to encourage you to assess its value. Imagine the thousands of gas-inflated Twitterites frantically patching their leaks. Jonathan Swift would have laughed.
It’s for your ego, so it’s worth it.
Some find it a good return on investment because they advertise their work on twitter and it increases sales. It is a business expense, and rather cheap at that. Not everyone on twitter is a journalist.
With Twitter now worth between one-fifth and one-tenth of what Musk paid for it, he damn well better monetize something.
Boring. MSM attack on Musk and Twitter, Number 576 and counting. THe Leftwing MSM hates that Musk doesn't toe the party line and isn't "With the program". So, we get these endless attacks and put-downs disguised as "news" and objective "analysis".
Musk needs to make twitter pay its own way. Because of attitude of the MSM, including the NYT's, many of the Big corporations have stopped advertising. And IRC, Twitter, wasn't making a profit BEFORE Musk.
So, its "waah, waah, isn't Twitter awful". And "Isn't Musk doing it all wrong"? And he's failing at this, and being hypocritical about that. None of this was said about the previous Twitter Regime, and we all know why. ANd its not because Dorsey and his Gang were doing a good job.
I like that anyone can be a blue check now. No more mysterious someones (no doubt Joel Roth's team) deciding that this person was a blue, and this person wasn't. Kaus never got to be a blue despite having all the credentials and asking for it. Meanwhile, you had leftwing clowns working for obscure leftwing publications that no one read, getting blue.
So, just one more reason why I applaud Musk. And $6-8/month is nothing to a working journalist or pundit. Judas Priest, a cup of cofffee and a doughnut in SF or DC will cost you that.
What Elon recognized is that people for Twitter for their interact news. In fact, I’d suggest that Twitter is more an interactive news site than social media site. Pre-Elon Twitter got in its own way, censoring viewpoints and legitimate opinions and even news.
Elon let Twitter be Twitter. Other than direct threats of violence, it’s become a vibrant marketplace of ideas - a virtual town square. It ain’t pretty and isn’t meant to be.
The NYT won't let me read the paper without paying, why do they have a bee in their bonnet over Twitter? I can read Twitter for free, without a blue check. In a parallel to the tragedy of the commons, we all want to graze our cattle but no one will pay to plant the grass.
Per our hostess:
"[Twitter Blue check marks are] not the same as the decision in the here and now to buy a cup of coffee."
I agree the Starbucks coffee analogy may be inapposite. Now do why the NYT and WAPO are not the same.
I thought Twitter was supposed to have crashed by now, what with all the layoffs. That's what the journalists told us anyway.
...not just a status symbol, if that at all. It's an economic test of how serious the user is about what he desires to say. "Put your money where your mouth is," essentially.
The casual troll will be all or partially priced out of his petty self-indulgence. The "serious" casual reader thus will (or should) enjoy a somewhat more pleasurable experience. The company will receive some small bit of revenue that it didn't before.
As with any product (and yes, it's a product just like a Starbucks coffee*), time will tell if Musk priced it right....
* you may consume the Starbucks coffee, or leave it on the table/toss it unconsumed in the trash; the subscription buys you access to a particular level of recognition that you may use (consume) or leave on the table (not consume.) Tangible v intangible is not necessarily the best or most relevant comparison for use v non-use, I think.
But I welcome any discussion on that....
The advent of social media has led to the advent of instantaneous Flash Mob behavior of all kinds - not only mobs stripping the shelves bare in the brick&mortar world, but mobs razing social platforms to the ground, like virtual plagues of locusts. Being free from confrontational physical risk brings out the worst in virtual behaviors.
Now it's been decided that Elon Musk has sinned by opening the 'Employees Only' section of the warehouse up for public inspection. Twitter's currency must be debased now, and Twitter devalued until it's destroyed. Elon and Taibbi et al, too. In Virtual Flash Mob World, no communication is necessary - everyone that is tuned in will see the signs. You Must Not Offend the Borg Hive.
Elon got rid of 85% of staff and a bunch of rules, and the thing ran better. That was a lot of payroll. But the operational problems remaining were the problems of any legacy software system--the ghosts in the machine. People still get banned without much human intention or intervention, while others who do the same exact thing are left (and I use the word advisedly) alone. I read that Elon was thinking that it might be better to start over from scratch on the software.
His other big problem was the wokification of corporate America. A lot of pressure was put on Twitter to continue to squash voices dissenting from the lefty world view embraced by corporate C suites and enforced by marketing budgets. Advertising was not going to be a reliable revenue driver if Human Rights Watch demanded every two days that that some ideas be banned because of "hate" and the US security state demanded that Twitter stay on message with the latest party line, whether about Ukraine or Covid-19.
So, Elon is trying out user fees. He'll also add services for pay.
Who knows? Amazon did great by burying delivery fees in Amazon Prime annual charges and adopting one-click, which have gone way up over time.
It's a pretty common thing to compare the cost of various goods and services to the cost of a routine well known thing, in this case the ubiquitous cup of coffee.
I understand that this is a service (buying visibility for your posts should you choose to post), not a consumer good but that's not really the point. The commenters are pointing out the relatively minor dollar expense of the bluecheck. If this was about money, that would be a valid point, but it's not about money. The angry people who used to get the bluecheck for free can easily afford the minor cost today yet they remain angry, so angry.
It's about emotion and their feelings are hurt. The bluecheck used to be free and awarded(!) on your importance as perceived by Twitter people supposedly representing all users. This episode reveals that how it made them feel is what was important to them, not the amplification and visibility. Amplification and visibility is still available to them, but the good feels of being awarded a bluecheck are no longer in reach. That's why they're upset.
John Herrman has two r's in his last name. He hasn't got two original thoughts in his head, but he does have two r's in his last name.
Not much of a status symbol anymore. Could be a symbol that you got taken in by a con.
I find that obtuse. The "con" was the previous system that like journalism pretended to be neutral but had a secret agenda, in this case to reward lefty friends of twitter with blue checks and dole them out quite selectively to anyone else. Sure many conservative journalists and entertainers enjoyed a checkmark too, but the through their secret "buy a check" program Twitter employees exploited an off-the-books revenue stream that further bifurcated the site's users by overrepresenting leftists in Blue Check World. Secret process. Only revealed after Musk bought the company.
Musk made the system transparent and equitable, that is the "same outcome available to all," which is so highly prized by leftists when they wax on about DEI. But somehow this demonstrably more equitable solution is suspect... because Musk. Sounds a lot like the irrational "because Trump" excuses we hear. How is the small d democratic process of equal verification for all the "con?"
I've been surprised by how many folks have picked up a blue check. For writers, it can be a way to keep in touch with their fans, a (small) business expense. For the others it is, I suppose, like identification. Professional journalists are a small, if annoying, part of t(w)itter.
"Not much of a status symbol anymore. Could be a symbol that you got taken in by a con."
It's now a symbol that you are who you say you are, and that you haven't been taken in by a con that allowed anonymous employees to assign you a status symbol based on how much cash you can give them on the side to approve your "status".
I guess in Liberal, White Woman America paying a bribe for status is more status-y than paying a small fee to confirm you are who you say you are.
The previous management had run Twitter into the ground by terminating half of the population’s thought leaders to follow strict election rigging orders. That resulted in sudden competition that only existed to provide a voice to the ELIMINATED Deplorables.
The "cult of free" needs to die, and hopefully this is a start. The problem with "free" is that it enables all the horrible, privacy-invading, addiction-creating, manipulative practices of internet companies, trolls, bots, and the other wandering monsters that plague us. An $8/month fee isn't out of reach of middle-class Americans (for now), but it makes bot-farms and troll armies prohibitively expensive. (in the same way, a nickel-per call or penny-per-email charge would not harm legitimate users but would drive spammers and robo-callers out of business). Furthermore, having paid a price for something makes it easier for the FTC to police various scams and to regulate manipulative and addictive practices, and it creates standing for people who get victimized by the services to sue, improving the behavior of the companies.Similarly, requiring businesses to charge an x-per-month for website access for "adult content" (whether sexual or drug-related), makes it massively easier to keep that content away from children.
The content-supported-by-advertising model, although it was perhaps a good way to bootstrap the internet economy, has now produced the desolate, polluted, and infectious internet landscape. It wasn't always this way, so it doesn't have to remain this way.
So many insightful and informed comments that demonstrate deep knowledge of business and our current social media "condition" on this thread today.
But there will always be dumb lefties like Mark for whom those insights and that knowledge will be as "pearls" before Mark's relentless "swinish" ignorance.
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