Elon Musk

Lol this defeats the purpose of the blue checkmark. Enough notable ppl will decline to pay that no one will look for it as a credential anymore.

There are apparently 300k verified users so this would bring in like 70m a year if they all cough up.

It’s going to be a badge that says “I pay for this treatment and I like Elon musk”. What is the market for that?

yeah thats such a fundamental misunderstanding of what the blue checkmark is for and also a perfect encapsulation of what Elon thinks Twitter actually is. can't wait for a ton of people who decline (or just let their accounts go inactive) to get impersonated by trolls which will no doubt fool some high profile political or media figures

It's so dumb that it seems like the real point must be to basically eliminate them — most people won't pay, and you probably shouldn't trust the ones who do. I keep waiting for this to not seem like a giant trolling exercise, but at the moment that still feels like the main motivation.

he may think he can squeeze some money out of big orgs willing to pay, but even if it works its gonna be a drop in the bucket for a company that paying a billion dollars a year to service its debt

the checkmark is not important for most people and ill happily lose it, but if there's no exception for journalists, this amounts to asking the NYT, say, for hundreds of thousands of dollars so that trolls can't impersonate their people to cause trouble https://t.co/KfN8h5ayjf

— Christopher Hooks (@cd_hooks) October 31, 2022

whether or not it's a good idea i expect most bluechecks will pay the $20 to stay verified

Yeah it’s extortion sort of.

Remember: The reason Twitter has "Verified Accounts" in the first place is because baseball manager Tony La Russa sued Twitter over an impersonator account: https://t.co/dXLuQiCzNq

— David H. Montgomery (@dhmontgomery) October 31, 2022

It’s not very good extortion, historically.

suspect someone who worked at buzzfeed five years ago or whatever prob doesnt care enough to give twitter hundreds of dollars a year

I bet it doesn't actually end up being $20 a month. $20 a year I could believe.

Another site (platformer) is reporting $5/month fwiw

so basically you pay for twitter blue and they give you a check mark as part of the package guess i could see that

The real money will be in every wannabe influencer/scammer/grifter paying for verification for a few years until it's completely devalued.

Another site (platformer) is reporting $5/month fwiw

I believe that was something they were thinking about pre-Musk, and now that he's there he's gonna try and squeeze as much money out of his expensive new toy as quickly as possible, because he's dumb as shit and has no idea what the actual value of his expensive new toy is. Twitter is going to death-spiral incredibly fast; I'll be surprised if it still exists a year from now.

yeah if its $5/month I guess a lot of people will just do it. if it's $20 I suspect the blue check mark is gonna be the next NFT profile picture, having one will get you mocked relentlessly

the check mark would be nice for people doing literal fraud on there

ah now hes looking through internal coms and tweeting stuff out

Wachtell & Twitter board deliberately hid this evidence from the court. Stay tuned, more to come … pic.twitter.com/CifaNvtRtt

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022

ahahaha of course the first thing he'd do is review all the internal docs for messy drama

as business strategy it makes no sense to take a company private and immediately jack up prices, something you'd do to juice revenues to placate impatient shareholders. whole point of going private is to free you from those short-termist incentives and let you experiment with risky investments with potential long-run upside

same with all the firings

Fun fact: because Twitter is under an ftc consent decree its slack is set up such that you can’t delete or edit a comment after 5 minutes. The sheer amount of shit that was talked about him on there is staggering.

lol

And unlike the previous ceo, who I never once saw on slack, I hear he actually spent the entire weekend logged in. Apparently his username is ermt. Feel free to email him @twitter.com.

terminal posting disease, good god rich ppl used to have standards

The idea of forcing people to pay for blue checks gets Twitter’s value proposition totally backward.

For Twitter to have value, it needs to provide valid information from legitimate sources. If anyone can pay for the appearance of validity, the site losses all value.

— Max Berger (@maxberger) October 31, 2022

I mean yeah that's kind of what the whole appeal of Twitter was, you could hear from celebrities, athletes, and journalists all at once. like 90% of their users joined because a specific person was on it. maybe that's not the case anymore but still this sounds like a remarkably idiotic idea

I don't understand why somebody wants or needs a blue check unless they're actually famous enough for someone to want to impersonate them

I mean it's a cool status symbol I guess. especially if you're a pretty niche writer/artist/musician or whatever

But isn't having the followers the status symbol? Is it high status to have a blue check and, like, 1000 people following you?

seems easier to get followers if you have the check though

wow lol

so my understanding is at twitter HQ, the folks running things in the “war room” are Musk, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis (VCs/Elon pals) Sriram Krishnan (exTwitter/current a16z), Elon’s legal and finance head guys (Spiro, Birchall) and a fleet of Tesla/BoringCo engineers

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) October 30, 2022

Jason c is a podcast content grifter with a get rich quick intro to angel investing book and literally zero management experience. Krishnan is ex Twitter for a reason.

everyone made fun of jason for pledging his sword to elon but whos in the war room now

First task: Get rid of all the spam!
Second task: Get companies to pay to spam your DMs!

Guys. pic.twitter.com/e3G9m4TSLb

— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) October 31, 2022

twitter only needs one person to pay $20/month. that's enough to buy four tomato plants. after 6 months that's 100 tomatoes. plant them. 6 more months that's 2500 plants. plant them. 6 months it becomes 62,500 plants. 12 months later that's 39MM tomatoes. sell them for $1 each

— leon (@leyawn) October 31, 2022

lmaooo that's a deep cut

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgXqR1_WAAIoHbq?format=jpg&name=900x900

interesting

Welp, I just got fired from this bird app ya’ll. It’s been grand.

— ttl.eth (@taylorleese) October 31, 2022

The ongoing layoff process is a complete farce and an embarrassment. It’s a bunch of Tesla goons making decisions about people they know nothing about other that number of code commits. It’s complete absurdity.

— ttl.eth (@taylorleese) October 31, 2022

senior managers getting canned for not writing code on a sunday night

I'm sure Elon's goons are goonier than usual, but that also sounds like any number of M&A bloodbaths.

Twitter crashing and burning is probably a good thing, depending on what comes next

xp Firing middle managers for cost efficiencies is expected. Firing middle managers *because* they’ve being doing their job (management) rather than a different job (writing code) is bizarre.

In retrospect, there was no way a little blue checkmark was not going to evolve from a fraud prevention tool into the online equivalent of The Star-belly Sneetches in the minds of these cringe-y losers.

anyone with .eth in their username probably deserves to be fired tbh

Twitter crashing and burning is probably a good thing, depending on what comes next

That's just nonsense. So many marginalised voices have been amplified on the platform. I've learnt a lot from them.

People quitting bcz of Musk are silly. Did you not know the weird people who owned the platform before he came along? Not to defend the cunt but the previous ppl had a contempt for the product and hardly ever tweeted. At least he uses it.

That's just nonsense. So many marginalised voices have been amplified on the platform. I've learnt a lot from them.

This is exactly right. If you think the cumulative cultural impact of the right-wing knuckle-walkers outweighs the cumulative cultural impact of Black Twitter, to pick just one, well, that's on you. It's certainly not my experience.

ive got multiple paul pelosi conspiracies in my trends this morning

a multiplicity of paul pelosis

it’s also simply been a net negative in the world under any objective measure

Would like you to print out the data on this and bring it by my office in 30 minutes.