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Some thoughts as I watch Twitter in the new Elon era...
The $8 blue check is quite an experiment. It could allow Elon to monetize a significant-enough portion of Twitter's 450M monthly active users to be great for business. It also might make trolls & bots impractical & expensive in many cases.
As for the culture war, allowing anyone to be a verified blue check has some very interesting consequences. (Currently, by clicking on the check, users can see who received it for being a "notable person" vs. who received the check for paying $8. This feature seems problematic towards Elon's stated goal of eliminating the class differences on Twitter between the blue check royalty & the checkless plebs, and I speculate it may be removed. And this is where the real classless state could begin.)
Watching those who'd "earned" their blue checks wince and whine is pretty telling. The blue check on Twitter means a lot to many people. I understand it has monetary value for many; beyond that though, I'm seeing a lot of folks try to cope out loud (in various ways) with the loss of their identity.
In the context of why it's problematic to award blue checks for "worthy-ness" to some media & not others, Elon made some comments yesterday about how we've all had the experience of reading something in the media about a subject we just happen to know a lot about, and how the story so often gets most of it wrong, and doesn't grasp any of the important nuance. This resonated a lot with me.
As much as I despise Trump, for me, the enduring piece of his legacy will be the slogan "fake news," and how I've come to change my view of media in the last 6-7 years. While I think Trump is a liar, I now accept much of the media are liars too, bound to ideologies, political interests, personal animus, shareholders.
What is the actual reason I ought to trust one media members' view over some other persons'? What merit do they offer & how can they demonstrate it? By working for a "media organization" with stated "guidelines for journalism"?
Does Joy Reed get to be a Trusted Media Member of Merit™? After unleashing daily/weekly editorial sermons on how much she hates Donald Trump for years? And does Jesse Watters's view on anything deserve increased attention? Certainly if one deserves a platform, so too does the other, right?
Attempts to verify journalistic merit seem problematic, especially in the realm of politics, where values & preferences are at issue. Why not allow The Everyman to be verified and join the conversation as an equal?
What will become of Twitter in 12 months? Will it grow/shrink a lot/a little in popularity? Will it be transformed in some fundamental way? Can it become something very special—The Open & Honest Marketplace/Battleground of Ideas?
I still don't understand, what is the point of the blue checkmark in new Twitter? When I first heard about the $8 charge I thought it'd be a good idea. I thought it'd be a way for anyone to pay $8 for the service Twitter will perform to verify that you are who you say you are. I thought basically, you'd pay the $8, Twitter would assign someone to review your credentials, then you'd get the checkmark. This seemed like an improvement over the previous process because anyone could request a checkmark review as part of an after upon process, and you're also helping to fund the work out will take to do it
Now I see on Twitter's site, it says explicitly:
If the point of verification and checkmarks are to prove that you are who you say you are, and now that verification process and proof no longer will happen, then what's the point? To prove that you have $8 to spend? Are people supposed to believe that accounts that get the new blue checkmark are authentic, when no verification actually happened? It's so confusing.
Please correct me if any aspect of my understanding is incorrect. If the new system really does make sense, I'd be glad and would like to know why.
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The $8 twitter check does not have the functionality of an authentic checkmark. It will diminish the cachet of the checkmark, which I am perfectly fine with anyway.
I think the opposite. For a scammer, $8 is a bargain to conveying the authenticity of being verified even superficially. Someone can create a fake Bank of America account, for example, with a checkmark and pretend to represent the bank.
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Maybe it's just me, but what I've seen a lot of is people complaining that it's ruining the whole 'Verified Only" mode. Which...is not something I have any sympathy for at all. It's a sort of social class based siloing, and I do think that does have ramifications for our society.
Stephen King epitomizes this . I will be happy to see the 'blue mafia' be diluted.
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But the new verified users are dumber, less capable, less knowledgeable, less connected, etc, relative to the old ones! The utility mark cuban gets out of twitter had slightly decreased, less useful information for work, less interesting cultural information, fewer connections, whatever. (iirc aella also mentioned using verified replies on twitter a while back). There's a reason everyone's getting their knowledge of e.g. the FTX collapse from bloomberg and the WSJ, or twitter users with substacks and 50k followers, or sam and cz themselves (w/ blue checks), and not in a decentralized manner from @cryptopepe515 (verified with Blue!). Social classes form around useful distinctions of competence, connections, activity, etc. The fact that you are surrounded by smart people is, itself, social class based siloing - any clustering at all is social class based siloing - and it's tremendously useful - whether randomly on the internet or IRL, i'm surrounded by very smart people who are half programmers, and both the intelligence and programming thing I greatly prefer to 'sports fans who do manual labor'.
Not that the blue checkmark is the driver of the 'social class based siloing', all these people will still find their frens with or without a checkmark differentiator, it's just a mild inconvenience. Nor that the current social classes are godo as they are! Plenty of unverified accounts with 10k followers are more useful than the average interested bluecheck on the FTX incident. It's just useful to understand why people are complaining, and the ways in which they are losing something somewhat useful.
It is genuinely annoying to sift through 100 replies from 100iq people that could've come from GPT2 to find a few interesting ones
Is this a joke where you give all the motte defenses of blue check utility loss but gradually you forget what you're doing until eventually you're just screaming about brain dead npcs? Because you need to work on your delivery.
Okay, here's a better way of arguing this:
If we go back a bit before the blue checkmark change, when the bluecheck filter still worked, here's mark cuban retweeting some non-verified tweets: i just ordered a 90 day supply of TWO of my medications for 18 fucking dollars 😭😭 shoutout @costplusdrugs I work in Medicare and I refer beneficiaries to Cost Plus Drugs daily. I discovered on my own medications that I pay less without using my health insurance, and that with CPD I pay less than my co-payments. Thank you @mcuban @costplusdrugs !!! I paid 15$ for a 3 months supply for what would have cost 70$ for a months supply! #richmangivingback. Obviously, this is advertising his company, but he clearly interacted with nonbluechecks some before the change.
However, let's look at a random tweet of his before the change. Early voting starts today in Texas ! #Vote with face pic.
There are six hundred of these!
If we go into his recent replies, we can see tweets like this, where he interacts with bluechecks who have questions that both form complete sentences and are somewhat relevant. This is an old bluecheck, not a new bluecheck, despite the change making it hard to distinguish between them. So I can see why he'd prefer the old system
Funnily enough, he has a 0 follower burner account he uses regularly "Precisely so I can have the same experience" as the average user.
I think any "neutral and factual" description of "Oh no. You got Pfizer Eye too?!" "I hope you vote Republic!" ends up sounding about as insulting as "brain dead npcs".
I get it man, you liked the way blue checks worked, so you want to defend it. But you did it the same way every blue check does - with a veneer of rationality covering barely suppressed contempt and arrogance. Mark Cuban's use case is not representative of the typical blue check, the typical blue check is not flooded with thousands of replies to every tweet. But the blue check thinks 'yeah, it's me and Mark Cuban, big dick swingers like us don't have time to deal with these fucking p-zombies!' because that was the true value of the blue check system. It made them a member of an exclusive club of beautiful people - aka billionaires and celebrities - which made them special, which made them better than some checkless pleb. That is what has been destroyed by Musk's move. Yeah yeah, you said there are checkless users who are smarter and more worth following than many blue checks, but then you just couldn't refrain from saying the quiet part out loud. That's the part that puts people off.
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The Blue Check circa 2012 was essentially a spoils system. Basically if you had a sufficiently well-connected PR person, they could get you fast-tracked through the process. It was supposed to fight impersonation rather than being a mark of high quality information, but the blogosphere (remember the blogosphere?) was a bucket of journalist crabs looking for ways to stand out. And since the process was neither automated nor quick, the people who got priority weren't necessarily the most likely to actually be impersonated, they were the people who both (A) wanted it badly enough and (B) had the connections to make that happen. And sure, huge A-list celebrities got to jump the queue, but after that it was mostly B-list (or C-list, or...) media personalities begging for Silicon Valley scraps.
Treating the blue check as a signal of information veracity is like, downstream of the anti-impersonation aim, so I can't say it has mutated beyond recognition. But certainly it has mutated. Moving to a pay-to-verify system cashes in on that mutation, kind of, in an I Am Rich sort of way, only instead of signaling wealth, you're signaling a willingness to pay a whopping $8 per month to prevent impersonation and presumably get some other perks as well.
Network effects are huge, so I'm reluctant to predict that Twitter will die any time soon, but I suspect its popularity has peaked.
I think it is easier now. anyone who uploads docs can get it . This was in 2021.
Were they still punishing people for wrongthink by taking away their checkmarks, or had that also changed?
no, they are punished by being promptly banned
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