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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 Meritâ„¢? 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?
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.
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 ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ 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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