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Who here has tried Twitter Blue, the subscription service from twitter?
Superficially, it is a verified account. It has the requisite blue checkmark. It looks legit like a real verified account. Anyway, if you post too often with it, all your tweets go away for 24 hours or so. Also, there is major throttling of links and other drawbacks. It's not at all like a true, authentic legacy verified account. People are paying $8/month or $80/year thinking they are getting an actual verified account. But it's not.
I think this is false advertising. But not surprising. Twitter is not going to enable full functionality for only $8. That would open floodgates for spam and other abuse. I think this means gold, checkmarks, which cost $1000/month have become the new 'verified'
The old verified twitter accounts meant something, pre-2022. If you got verified it meant not only status of having a a checkmark, which was rare, but the unthrottled posting privileges that came with it.
Twitter features are changing by the hour. If you were to explain to in perfect detail what each check does and how to get one, it would be completely useless by next week. I sort of understand why advertisers aren't coming back. How would you even explain to them what exactly they are buying?
If the gold checkmark does give you the privileges of a 'real' blue checkmark, it is worth the $1k/month . More post visibility and posts not being hidden by twitter. Also, premium support, impersonation defense.
Ordinarily. But many celebrities (notably Lebron and Stephen King) also seem to be factoring in the fact that there is a reputational cost outside of the price for paying Elon Musk's Danegeld
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One of the big aspects of a Post-Elon Blue Check for a while, was that blue check replies would automatically get listed at the top of replies to a tweet. This significantly degraded user experience because instead of the top replies being whoever got the most likes it would be whoever paid $8. This is part of what sparked the mass blocking of blue checks because if you actually wanted to see the top replies without scrolling for a while it's what you had to do. Blue Checks now seem like a signal of a low-quality engagement bait, or someone who is trying to commercialize their content.
The original blue check system existed to solve the problem of people impersonating brands. celebrities and major newscasters, but the marginal journalist who got certified enjoyed an unearned credibility boost over random bloggers and posters which led to a lot of animosity towards blue checks from right-wing posters. Elon tried to turn the mild status boost into a subscription service, maybe it'll work out, but now we're in a period of weird experiments where it seems to have mostly damaged the average user experience while benefitting opportunistic engagement-baiters.
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Right but despite it being added for that reason, it became a tool that allowed twitter to privilege certain people while claiming that they were largely impartial.
They attached benefits to verified users that gave those users a substantive advantage in the twitter agora over other users. Then they preferentially gave verification to users with the preferred left leaning (or at least non-challenging) politics, thereby amplifying the voices of cultural figures on the left over everyone else.
They used verification to launder this advantage and cover the political preference it represented. They could defend giving advantages on their platform to some people and not others by saying "well that person needs verification and that other person doesn't" or just "we're not sure if that person needs verification, but it's in the pipeline to be considered". The requirement for verifications were opaque and allowed them to pick and choose at will who got these advantages and refuse to give any explanation for who got them.
If the purpose of verification was just to prevent impersonation then the rules could have been made explicit. However that would mean that a lot of people who are outside the overton window - but not so outside the window as to be deemed bannable - would get verification, which twitter didn't want.
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