What will happen on Twitter, now that the elite are no longer boosted by the old blue check system?

I'm reading a Twitter thread from Nathan Hubbard, who presumably is who he says he is, since he had a blue check when he wrote this last night:

1) As someone who was (briefly) in charge of the Twitter Media team - the group tasked with getting high profile people onto Twitter, and verification - AND as one of the few ever to voluntarily give up the blue check...

But you've got a blue check now. 

... I want to try to articulate how risky this policy change is.  

2) The reason the Twitter Media team existed was because *almost all* of the engagement on Twitter happens with tweets from high profile people/organizations across government, sports, music, business, news, whatever the Kardashians are, etc. They’re the lifeblood of the platform.

Are or were... but it doesn't have to be. TikTok works on the power of the individual message posted and uplifts complete nobodies if the platform users engage with it. 

3) We verified those people so that any user could know they were interacting with a real account; part of the fun of twitter is the real time dialogue with thought leaders (that then flows to others in the replies who get to share their thoughts and ideas).

There are the important people and the peons who ought to be thrilled at the chance to interact with them. Is that how it always should be? TikTok challenges that model. Notice how Hubbard sneers at the Kardashians — "whatever the Kardashians are" — but still expects the little people to go on forever engaging with them rather than finding, say, Yuri Lamasbella, which is what happens, magically, on TikTok.

Hubbard's point is that it's "risky" to change, but maybe it's risky not to change.

Back to Hubbard:

4) There were a bunch of important safety and security reasons for doing this as well. Hero tweeps like @KatieS and @Larakate have all the scars/stories to prove it.

He's just gesturing at a problem — not telling us what it is — and he is trusting us to believe that the old blue check system was a solution.

It was also possible to organically build a verifiable account by gaining followers and impact on the platform.

That just means someone who didn't begin with elite credentials from the outside world could earn status from within the Twitter system. Hubbard is arguing that it's not thoroughly elitist or not entirely exclusionary to people who become famous within social media — but they would have to build that fame without the assistance of the check that was given to people who had status in the world outside of Twitter. 

5) There can be some debate over whether Twitter thrived on giving many non-verified users false hope that they were doing anything other than shouting into the void; regardless, it was (and is) the case that verified users are what drive engagement.

Hubbard concedes the whole game there. That's what Twitter was. 

6) Now, surely there are verified users today who don’t deserve it. They craved the status symbol and found a way to worm their way in.

Worm! They didn't want worms. They weren't just verifying that people were who they said they were, they were establishing an elite level and signaling to readers that these were the people worth reading. They were exclusionary. No worms! That's too much judgment, not enough democracy. 

The percentage is low, and the impact to the platform negligible. Any designation like this is by definition subject to human judgement.

Hubbard's writing is becoming lax at this point. I suspect he knows he's offering bad arguments. He just conceded that granting and withholding the checks was done subjectively, based on the insiders' conception of merit. Who doesn't suspect or know that this was done in a biased, political way? That makes the argument in favor of Musk's new blue check system: It's democratic.  

7) But again, the Media Team spent all their time and resources supporting the people who - and the data undeniably proved this - support the platform. We knew where our bread was buttered. Twitter didn’t exist without these creators sending tweets.

Again, Hubbard's writing is lax. Did he mean to say the old system was there to boost the voices of elite media and to do it for the money? By the way, the cliché he's grasping for is to know which side your bread is buttered on. Maybe he knows that but didn't want to say "side." It sounds so partisan.

8) There were times where certain high profile people actually asked to be paid to join Twitter.

That was my feeling toward Twitter back when it began and I was a successful blogger: Why would I contribute my writing effort to their page, which they monetize, when I have my own page, which I have the chance to try to monetize. Obviously, they had to fend off these requests. Their whole project depended on convincing people to work for them for free, for the sheer benefit of getting to connect with other people that they'd collect in one place. 

There was some internal discussion about this over the course of the company’s history. But the decision was always to hold the line and hope the network effects would win.

Yes, that's what I just said. Their business model was that users must be convinced it's in their interest to write for them without pay. That was the risk Twitter took, and it worked to the extent that it worked. 

They did.

Twitter held the line and won. 

9) But what Twitter is going to start doing tonight flips the equation - it is going to ask its most important creators to *pay Twitter* instead of the other way around.

So, now, the change isn't that Twitter will start paying its content creators. The change is in the other direction: Twitter users should pay. If they want whatever power inheres in the blue check.  

 Every other social media platform has found a way to pay its creators, not charge them. 

Facebook and Reddit don't pay. In blogging, you can get paid. Google's Blogger has Google AdSense. It's a way to get paid for blogging, but even with a large readership, it's not much — not worth the clutter on the page for me. 

Will it work?

10) Every day that goes by validates Zuck’s famous “clown car crashed into a gold mine” description of Twitter.

It's not so famous that I've heard it, and I don't really know what it means. Wouldn't it mean Twitter just lucked into something profitable? How is "Zuck's" — ugh — metaphor supposed to support Hubbard's point? Maybe he just means the original structure of Twitter happened to be a lucky guess, so don't change it, because you're unlikely to get lucky again. Don't try to make it better, because you might turn off the magic.

While it looks like a criticism on the surface, it is in fact praise for the underlying resilience and perseverance of Twitter. As Zuck discovered, it’s hard to kill.

Those 2 sentences are too annoying to parse. Why are we talking about "Zuck"? It's creepy. 

11) Tonight is another test of that resilience. While a lot of web3 stuff has proven nonsense, the underlying principle that creators should have ownership in the consumer facing platforms that their content powers is still a vibrant idea, one most creators passionately believe.

Tonight, i.e., last night. We'll see how new Twitter functions. 

12) This is the first major opportunity for creators, as a whole, to flex their muscle and reclaim power in the web3 age (if that’s a thing 🤷‍♂️). If most OG blue checks stop tweeting in protest of being asked to pay to create the content that Twitter lives by…Twitter dies.

It's kind of a strike... by the elite. Stand back and watch, Hubbard tells us, and we might see it die. And, he says, it will die if they do go on strike and stop writing because they refuse to write without free blue checks. These are all people who were writing without getting paid, but somehow they might be people who won't pay to write (or just write without blue checks).

13) The likely sequencing will be like LeBron...

Ugh! I have to have been following "LeBron" to understand this sentence. 

... first, give up the check and not pay. But as the experience degrades and impersonation abounds, creators will start to wonder why they’d contribute content to a platform and company that holds them in such contempt.

Contempt? You mean like what you had, in the old system, for the writers who didn't "deserve" their blue checks but "craved the status symbol and found a way to worm their way in"? Is democratization really so repulsive to you? What's so awful about a TikTok style approach where posts rise and fall depending on their value to users? What is it you fear in the marketplace of ideas? That some elite media writers won't bounce to the top when they scrawl routine things? That the readers will decide?

14) That will be the point at which we might expect a wave of silence to ensue.

Are you expecting "silence"?  I'm expecting lots of messages from all sorts of people, rising to the top as some professionals resist playing the new game. It's a big opportunity for those who choose to take it. 

The first real staring contest of the creator economy is upon us. Will creators seize the moment? Can Twitter sustain it? 

I note that Hubbard resists predicting failure.