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Notes -
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?
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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