That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal. So every user paying $X/mo to solidify their place in the graph makes some conceptual sense.
In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. A tiny percentage of users are creators while the vast majority are consumers. If you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value.
An average user (part of the 99.9%) isn't going to care about any status or badges – they are only there to look at memes.
Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line, and (2) the platform needs them as much as they need platform.
So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.
Twitter is basically a broadcast platform for people who matter "in the real world". It gives them an easy way to reach their audience on their own terms without any middlemen.
As a centralized platform, Twitter creates more value for those who follow than those who broadcast. Because the broadcasters are primarily known for something other than the "content" they create on the platform, they would find their audience anywhere. Followers, on the other hand, can conveniently follow many people on the same platform. Regardless of whether they are interested in global celebrities, local politicians, or professionals in a specific subfield, they can often find those people on Twitter.
Blogs used to be popular among many of the groups you can now find on Twitter. I guess Twitter replaced them, because the short message format forces you to focus on the essentials. Creating a new post is much faster, and you will reach many more people, because reading the post is not a significant time investment.
Twitter replaced blogs because blogs were not discoverable or aggregated. Twitter accounts are.
Twitter was born out of the short "status updates" fad at the time, on both Myspace and eventually Facebook.
Those were born out of MSN Messenger and other IM programs at the time that had customizable social profiles of sorts - including an updatable Status that was shown as a subtitle in your contacts' respective friends lists.
I remember the general sentiment of Twitter when it started was that the short character count (120 characters or whatever it started with) was a fun novelty, nothing more. It wasn't seen as a "social network".
Twitter gets its name in part from the saying "A little birdie told me ..." intersected with the fact that your phone twitches (vibrates) when you receive an update. It mimicked the other popular app names at the time that often omitted a vowel, such as 'flickr'. The original site was thus called twttr.com. The whole point was to be short, concise, non-serious communication. "Yo" tried to take this to the extreme several years later and ultimately failed (or pivoted, not sure which).
When Twitter started gaining traction, it was clear that more involved discourse was nearly impossible with the shorter character count, thus the limit was bumped up to what it is now (240 or 280 or something). The initial response was, understandably, negative. People predicted at the time that this would devolve the platform into another battlegrounds for shouting matches and arguing just as Facebook had. In hindsight, they were mostly correct.
Threads were also added to improve cohesion within lengthy conversations, and those features alone are now what form the core of Twitter's major feature set.
It's worth noting that Twitter hasn't changed much, which is pretty widely regarded as a feature in itself and can earn long term retention even with on-the-fence users (see: Steam).
However, this is mostly just my recollection of events.
Technically true, but I think the comment you're replying to was thinking of the era when celebrities had to go on late night shows in order for people to hear what they had to say. Like literally, the middle man had limited airtime and got to pick and choose who was allowed to be broadcast.
If you had some opinions on the latest whatever, if no television station felt like interviewing you, you just told it to your friends or whatever like everybody else. No matter how famous you were.
> Twitter is basically a broadcast platform for people who matter "in the real world".
Absolutely true, but it doesn't PRESENT itself that way. It PURPORTS to be an egalitarian platform. The truth is that the specific way Twitter's network effects work, you simply don't matter unless you're a celeb (either in Hollywood, or in some particular niche) or a journo. Celebrities I can understand. I don't know why Twitter is so bent around journalists, but it is, and it's obvious. To me, it goes back to the insinuation that the platform has been specifically engineered to influence national public opinion, but I suppose it might be just a "lucky" side effect. In any case, just being a random person on the platform can sometimes be pretty frustrating, because all the engagement is eaten up by people with hundreds of thousands of followers.
I looked the top 50 in that list and maybe ~5 of them are what you describe. The rest are big music labels, TV channels, artists and other such independently popular figures, not very different from Twitter.
Unclear why this is getting downvoted, it is accurate statement. Only 20 of the top 50 channels are not brands. Of those 20 if you exclude music channels like BTS, Blackpink, Justin Bieber, etc. you're only left with 10 channels.
BTS was popular in SK way before they got big on YouTube. But their massive explosion of popularity in the west (and outside of SK in general) happened perfectly in sync with them getting big on YouTube.
I think the point still stands. 6 of the top 10 on Youtube got their large followings being making content for Youtube. 0% of the top 50 on Twitter are primarily known for their tweets.
> 0% of the top 50 on Twitter are primarily known for their tweets.
Why limit yourself to the top 50? 0% of all Twitter users are primarily known for their tweets. Tweets are, by design, unsuitable for publishing content. They're useful for advertising content you publish somewhere else.
I know for (indie) games, twitter is a lagging indicator. That means you don't get famous through twitter, but twitter is a lagging indicator of the success on Steam. I can look up the source of this statement if you're interested.
Marketing wise the difference is huge. Say you release a new game, and want to know which marketing channels to focus on. As it turns out, Twitter will not give you much new customers that haven't come into contact with your game before.
I agree with you that once you have those followers, you can leverage that with other content. But building up your audience mainly needs to happen through other channels.
Anecdotal but Lil Nas X was very well known on twitter before he got popular. I recognized his handle from screenshots and made the connection only after Old Town Road came out.
Yeah, the only analog bouncing around my brain are accounts like that one, and, say, SwiftOnSecurity. There are people who are really big within a particular niche, and become a "sun" within a solar system. I'm blocked from both of those accounts, but I don't know why. (It's odd, because I usually avoid strong comments of ANY kind). The net effect on this sort of behavior on traffic patterns at Twitter works out quite a bit differently than on YouTube. You probably wouldn't block people on YouTube for the same comment you see on Twitter, and when you do it on Twitter, you're hard-limiting your audience.
Well yeah. If you exclude people like him who got famous on YouTube, then it, indeed, will turn out that nobody becomes famous on YouTube. I have zero idea what your point is trying to illustrate.
What's so special about Justin Bieber that disqualifies him from being counted as someone who became famous on YouTube?
It's VERY different in the way that Twitter is dominated by the US. YouTube, while heavily favoring India and to some extend the US, is much more mix in regards to country of origin.
I agree with the observation that Twitter is for people who are already famous, especially those made famous by US media. YouTube seems to at least allow for creators to build their own following and more importantly: Make money off their work.
If you're famous, you'll almost certainly have a twitter account, although there are obviously exceptions. The same just doesn't seem to go for YouTube. Creating content on YT is a lot more time-consuming than creating it on Twitter, of course.
That's silly. While you can't directly monetize your Twitter account, it can expand or straight up create your reach which you can use as a funnel to whatever monetizable content you have. That probably makes it less valuable for Twitter Inc., but it sure is valuable for Twitter users.
As a recent example, think of Pieter Levels (@levelsio). You think he would've gotten $10k first day sales on his avatar AI project without his Twitter account's reach?
Yeah, but that did a hasty negotiation that resulted in a no-due-diligence contract at that figure, tried very hard to escape the deal, including openly repudiating it and being sued to be forced to consummate it, and only relented and agreed to close on it in the face of court action to force him to which might have imposed additional costs as well.
So, while it is probably worth something, we can say that it is pretty clearly not worth $44B in the clear light of day, even to Musk.
There's not enough "room" to produce interesting content solely on Twitter vs YouTube — you have to hiccup out your value in segmented tweet threads. Thus if Twitter does provide value to followers it is in referencing outside material. Elon is supposedly directing Twitter engineers to go full-steam on reviving Vine so we'll see if that can turn things around.
The vine crowd has long moved to Tiktok; even IG and YT couldn’t steal mindshare from them. Vine has no chance, given that they’re starting with a 6yr old product
I don't know much about Vine, but anecdotally I have ended up spending way too much time on YouTube reels, and have also now been drawn into the equivalent on Facebook, whatever that's called, and I barely use FB. So I don't think the super short form video market is a winner takes all one by any means.
On the contrary there's plenty of room for genuine innovation in this space. For example FB short form videos don't have a dislike button, so I have no way to guide the algorithm, and YouTube reels seems to zero in on some local maximum (in my case, game of thrones and golf videos). There's so much room for improvement in this space.
> There’s not enough “room” to produce interesting content solely on Twitter
While I think that Musk’s plan is going to backfire, it is worth noting that he tries to address this in a narrow respect, in that paid users under the new plan would be able to distribute longer video/audio content with tweets.
The idea that what matters most is having the most followers is very arbitrary and not relevant to many strategies for enjoying Twitter. In my experience, Twitter is best as a place to have conversations, and this is optimal at some number of followers below 10k. There are many accounts out there having an amazing time at small numbers, having curated a medium-sized following of people who are interested in talking with them about the things they want to talk about.
> Twitter has no real "content creators", YouTube does.
I don’t understand the logic. They can be both well known outside of Twitter and create content. Sure, that is not their source of income, but it is harder to monetise a Twitter account, so that’s more or less by design. From the point of view of random people there is not really any functional difference.
In a way Twitter fills the space of being a proliferator of existing content, in a more concise form. In this way people don’t have to choose “do I create on platform X or Y” and instead they create on platform X and feel empowered to share on platform Y because it fills a different use case.
Nice observation. It's more like a direct marketing channel than an actual consumable. The most successful users are directing users to YouTube, e-commerce, voting booths or news sites to actually convert.
If I were YouTube right now, I'd be evaluating the opportunity to eat Twitter's lunch as it'll get distracted by a randomizing new owner. The YouTube posts product really isn't relevant in the current YouTube app, but as a separate experience focused on posts, it might have some value for non-creators on the platform. Bad as it is, YouTube has more of its act together than Twitter when it comes to designing and enforcing content moderation policies at scale.
Today while selecting a handle I was wondering why YT is doing this. There is no real added value except for using a standardized symbol used in social networks.
In my eyes YT is no social network, even though many claim it is.
The comment section, where the discussion and interaction takes place, is like SMS is to WhatsApp, in the sense that it has no surface to enrich dialogue. For example, you can't add images in replies to a comment, comments can't be embedded in websites.
I don't see how they can expand to a multimedia platform, which is what Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are. They're just a video platform and lack everything else which could move it towards a multimedia platform.
Sure he's successful in the real world but having money doesn't make you a celebrity. I wouldn't recognize most of the Forbes list if I passed them in the street. He's actual famous, instead of Wikipedia famous, because of how he's engaged his supporters through Twitter. The chance to interact with him or have him like your meme is the content.
Tho, big difference is that moving to Canada is huge effort and risk. Many people doing that would be mass migration and Canada would try to stop it.
Meanwhile, platform dying cause people left is something that happened many times already. Usually they don't leave with one bang and they won't here. It happens over months slowly.
So I guess they are actually planning to pay Stephen King after all, if he stays Twitter Blue. (Presumably his share of the money would be more than $8/month.)
How they distribute the money will be key. Would it be based on generic follower counts & likes & engagement - which will surely drive massive waves of spambot activity - or will each user's $8/month be distributed to the accounts they follow, almost Patreon or Flattr style? That might actually be interesting.
As someone who doesn't use Twitter, remarks like this have left me very confused. Clearly these people found Twitter valuable before. Does not having the checkmark make it less valuable? Is there an alternative service that provides similar value?
The blue checkmark is a service. Now they want money to continue that service. If you don't want it, don't pay for it. Leaving over concerns about Elon's vision for the platform makes sense, but I really don't get leaving over the checkmark subscription.
I wish I could remember where I saw this to credit (and not paraphrase), but I saw a tweet which said, basically: "Twitter somehow got Stephen King, Taylor Swift and thousands of others to produce content for them for free. And now they want to lose them over $20/month?"
> Twitter somehow got Stephen King, Taylor Swift and thousands of others to produce content for them for free
That's true, but for very small values of "produce content". After all, being rude or posting hot-takes in 140 characters has limited utility outside of your cohort of fans/friends.
Because the content on Twitter is generated by a relatively small number of users. A lot never tweet, quote tweet or retweet but it goes beyond that number once you weight it by audience. A small number of people have a large amount of reach and thus are responsible for a good chunk of the content.
That content is why the users are on Twitter and it is those users who are advertised to that pay for Twitter to exist. That's what Stephen King means.
Now you can turn this around and say that those power users are only there because the audience is and that they get value for being there but platforms need users and users follow creators more than the platform as a general rule.
Maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding of what compels people to use Twitter. I thought the few people in question use Twitter as a convenient tool to communicate with wide audiences (i.e. marketing) and the rest are mostly especially dedicated followers who want to be marketed to. Are there actually people who primarily use Twitter for "content"? Are the blue checkmark people (i.e. celebrities) even the ones generating that content?
The content for billboards is also "generated by a relatively small number of users", but those users still have to pay to use them. I've always seen Twitter as a personal billboard, and a checkmark as a coveted signal booster. But maybe that's wrong?
I’m a research scientist and mostly use it to keep up with people working in similar fields.
There’s certainly some marketing (“Check out our new paper”, “My lab is hiring”, etc), but it’s not particularly top-down; everybody does it to some extent. It’s also mixed in with actual scientific discussion, lab “hacks”, and some silly banter/blowing off steam. All in all, it’s been pretty helpful for me careerwise. I think I’ve gotten more useful advice about grant writing and papers to read than many more formal mentorship arrangements.
There are a few “blue checks”, but they’re mostly a) early adopters or b) people with some kind of public presence. As far as I can tell, neither I nor most others care about the checkmark per se. I talked about my research (twice!) with John Carmack and it was cool to know that it was really the Doom Guy, but I think I probably would have engaged with anybody equally curious about my work.
I'm in a few niche Twitter interest bubbles but none of us are "blue checks". If you're on Twitter for your small niche circle this is a lot of hubbub over little.
It seems rather symbiotic to me. twitter has nothing to offer without people of note. People of note use it to become more popular. I think generally people of note don't need twitter to be successful but twitter needs them
Honestly, Stephen King probably loses more brand equity than that just from what he posts on Twitter. It’s gotten to the point where I actively avoid following any writers or creative types on Twitter just to avoid my perception of their work being colored by how they conduct themselves on Twitter.
Everyone seems to either be assuming King somehow cares about paying $$ instead of making a political statement and/or Elon was making a serious earnest reply to King, instead of being his usual needling shitposter self. Neither of which both of their histories supports.
Stephen King will quit Twitter just as credibly as Jay-z “retired” from rapping.... like Elon Musk gives a shit about convincing a person worth $500M+ that $20 vs $8/m is too much to ask.
I'm sure there's politics involved in the fact that King is the first person we're seeing in this public argument with Musk, but the dynamic he's talking about is apolitical and pretty obvious. For true celebrities, of which King is obviously one, Twitter needs them more than they need Twitter. Twitter should pay them to use the platform. Nobody has ever bought a copy of Carrie because they saw the blue checkmark next to Stephen King's name.
Musk hasn't addressed how he will compensate or at least incentive creators yet. Having a mainline stream of subscriptions certainly provides more avenues for such a thing.
So personally I think the compensation or promotional quid pro quo deals are a very different animal than checkmarks. Unless it means multiple tiers of checkmarks.
He needs something, because he's tied tens of billions of dollars of his own money in an LBO that left him in control of a company with about a billion dollars a year of debt service cost.
I don't need Twitter, since I rarely post on the social, I don't use it for work, and it kind of annoys me too, and if it disappeared I would forget about its existence in two weeks, like I forget about my favorite podcast three days after they started their 3-week summer vacation.
I don't need to go to the gym, but I have been going for about 30 years. If they forced me to spend an extra $8 a month, maybe I would move to another gym where I pay less, but how ridiculous would my statement be, "I don't need the gym, bye"?
Stephen King doesn't need Twitter to publicize his work, and he doesn't even need to work, since he seems to be quite well off. But most celebrities -- "most" is vague, I know -- live to be the center of attention, to be heard, to be considered. And a few years ago the platform was Facebook, then Twitter, after Trump's election, became more and more the place to be if you want to participate in the "discourse."
King needs Twitter now or another platform now or in the future because, apparently, he needs to be heard, to be part of the conversation, to have his old man criticisms heard. But now that platform is Twitter.
On a similar note I feel like Elon is the Ultimate Tweeter in the sense of validation (and amount of validation) he seems to get from posting. I've been wondering if it colored his perception of how the average person interacts with Twitter.
Anywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience. That's what's so funny about this particular example. There are indeed Twitter celebrities who depend on Twitter for their audience, but King isn't one of them: he's pumping more credibility into Twitter than he's extracting from it, and the platform (and all the Twitter celebrity remora attached to it) depend on people like him to keep doing it.
He's right: Twitter should be paying him. That's not true of all blue-checks, but it's true of many of the most popular of them.
I think it is true of most. If your identity is worth verifying by Twitter, it is apparently worth something to Twitter. If you wanted to prove that your twitter account was you, you wouldn't need their permission, right? Surely you could sign a file on your Twitter account with your PGP key or whatever.
This has always been the bullshit story Twitter tells itself about the blue check. In reality, the value of the check has practically nothing to do with verifying identities, and everything to do with conferring status on people "notable" enough to qualify. The energy source for that status is, in fact, people like King, Swift, LeBron, Obama (and Trump), J. Lo and Jimmy Fallon; Twitter trades off the idea that the check puts its users in the same status tier as those celebrities.
How you know this is, there's a huge population of well-followed Twitter accounts without blue checks, and identity verification controversies virtually never occur. If you found a non-checked 50k-follower account tomorrow and tried to spoof them with a fake account, you'd get shouted down quickly enough that it wouldn't be worth the effort.
My point, again, is that the "verification" part of this is horseshit. It's not the value. It's not why anyone cares about the checks. The checks are endorsements of popularity and importance, and that's all they are.
Diluting that value (to zero, as seems to be the Twitter Blue plan) probably won't chase many celebs off the platform. Why would they care? Twitter isn't doing them any real favors; it's rather the opposite. But it'll lay bare the real dynamics of those stupid blue checkmarks. That might be a positive development for Twitter! But it's not going to make blue checks the next Bored Apes.
(Again: who knows? Maybe a critical mass of Twitter randos will pay for Twitter bling. Weirder things have happened; see apes, above.)
To be fair, it was specifically introduced because of how impersonation of well known people was becoming a problem. Twitter was sued by Tony La Russa because of an impersonation and had a bunch of celebrities complaining about it. [0]
That it has also taken on a status aspect does not take away from its original intent and ongoing usefulness as a verification mechanism. That's especially true for celebrities, politicians, organisations, and journalists.
This is all accurate in my experience but I’d add an additional dynamic that I’ve noticed in a lot of accounts I follow- people who are somewhat popular but not huge celebrities who do have blue checks who since the announcement was made seem to be upset that their coveted blue check is going to be indistinguishable from one someone who didn’t “earn” it who is just paying for it. It’s somewhat like rewarding some kids in the class with a gold star then deciding later everyone gets one. Case in point: https://twitter.com/garyblack00/status/1587332152072568832
The other group are those who have decent followings who have wanted a blue check and have used the imposters argument as a reason for deserving one to protect their followers. In reality it’s a thinly veiled attempt to get what they believe is a symbol conferring status.
The whole thing is pretty pathetic and funny to watch and reminds me of the sneetches.
>> Anywhere Stephen King writes, he'll have an audience.
Is that really true? Suppose King goes to a new social platform. Sure, I might install that app, but without a critical mass or others on that platform, what are the chances I actually check that app frequently?
Yes, this is really true. People on HN will see less of Stephen King, to the extent that they're not part of his audience (maybe HN is more of an Ari Aster crowd). But that doesn't matter: people aren't spending hundreds of millions of dollars on 2019 movies based on books he wrote in the 1980s because he's driving lots of Twitter engagement.
This whole discussion about King's relevance is super weird. I think it's just Internet poisoning (it happens to all of us). The fact is: Stephen King is probably more culturally relevant than Twitter. That a lot of people on this thread wouldn't even entertain this thought is a cognitive bias that comes from being very online. Most people aren't very online, and even among the very online, Twitter's relevance has been waning for many years.
Most people don't use Twitter at all! But it's actually possible that a significant fraction of the American public --- maybe even most of it! --- has seen or is deeply familiar with a Stephen King film. The #1 film in the IMDB Top 250 is a Stephen King film!
I agree with you to an extent, but I will note that while most Americans don't directly use Twitter, I think a much much larger fraction are exposed to it. It's hard to escape when every news outlet and gossip farm cites it constantly and you have to factor that in when discussing its relevance.
I simultaneously don't think I personally know a single person that uses Twitter regularly and yet I equally don't think I know a single person that doesn't know what it is and sees second hand content from it regularly.
This is so true. Virtually all content in my feed is absolute shit and Twitter unlike Facebook and tiktok is terrible at driving engagement. Everything that’s suggested is crap. Probably just the nature of the platform and its content. I visit the site pretty frequently as a way to gauge stock market sentiment and for that it’s pretty decent but make no mistake the site overall is a bubble of a small sect of society who think they and the site are far more important than they are.
I don’t know a single person in real life who uses the site at all.
While this is true, I think twitter still greatly increases his outreach. It's the only reason most of us are hearing about him. Otherwise, I would definitely not be reading his blog. While I'm sure he would have a dedicated audience, it's not twitter. Not only that, but the more people start personal blogs the less viewers the harder it is to compete for views. For Stephen King, a generational talent, it may not matter-- but there is a calculation to be made for a lot of celebrities. It's kind of like what happened to Netflix; if every celebrity tries to start their own personal blog fans aren't gonna go check all their favorite actors, musicians, writers, developers, socialites, and youtubers blogs'.
Anecdotally this isn't true. The only time I have heard anything about Stephen King in the past few years has been in relation to a tweet he has made.
I think this is true for many significant accounts on the platform: I'm not going to read their blog or watch their Youtube video, but I'll probably see someone resharing a tweet they have made, whether on Reddit, HN, a news website etc.
Which is where I see the huge value in Twitter: a mainstream platform designed to present content in bite-sizes, appropriate for discussion or resharing. Twitter is a reach multiplier for many accounts for this reason.
People who have not heard of King before Twitter and only hear of him from Twitter are not going to be the people buying his books.
So even if there were significant amount of people like you, he is not gaining anything from people seeing his Twitter. On the other hand, I have relatives who created Twitter accounts only to follow authors they like - the number of curated lists of notable literary figures is a testament to that fact.
I'm not saying Twitter is worthless to writers - readers talking about the books certainly helps sales, but that occurs regardless of whether the author themselves are on Twitter or not, and Twitter is certainly not the main platform people use to discuss books.
Trump had 88.9mm followers on twitter.
He has 3.9mm followers on Truth.
Trump will have people listen to him no matter where he’s writing, but one of these platforms is certainly a downgrade in terms of audience than the other.
It's quite a lot, but I wouldn't put it in the realms of addiction. It seems to be quite typical compared to even the personal (i.e. non famous) people I'm following; the higher profile accounts I follow tweet multiples of tens per day.
He wasn't haggling. He was mocking the blue check status symbol in King's face and audience.
$8 makes it cheaper than a Netflix subscription for something that previously exclusive and had no dollar value attached to it. It was literally unbuyable.
We're not really discussing reality if you believe that Stephen King gets status from the blue check rather than it working the other way around. There are people that do (sadly, pathetically) extract status from blue checkmarks, but they're only able to do that because people like Stephen King play ball with this system. The "blue checkmark status" could literally be phrased as "people as high-status as Stephen King and those like him".
Obviously, substitute Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Selena Gomez, and LeBron in as appropriate to your particular interests.
The silly way Stephen King distances himself from the unwashed masses is the 400 million copies of his books that he's sold to them, and the various movies and TV properties built on his IP. Again: you're not talking about reality if you think people like King care about blue-check status more than Twitter cares about keeping them happy. You can wishcast that away any way you please, but that's all you're doing. Twitter needs Taylor Swift on the platform talking about Midnights. Twitter could kick Swift off the platform and do nothing at all to her popularity.
What's pretty clearly happening in these conversations is that Twitter-believers are conflating blue-check remora users who have no public profile outside of Twitter with actual celebrities. King is right, and Musk knows it: if he's smart, Musk will in fact find ways to kick things back to King, Swift, and LeBron to keep them happy. He needs them, and they don't need him at all.
No. His last major film, from 2019, had the second-highest opening weekend of any horror film in history. His work might not be relevant to you (it's not especially relevant to me), but we're back in motivated unreality when we start talking about him being culturally irrelevant, or that "nobody knows he's still alive".
Yes. It's a movie from 2019. Stephen King appears in it. I agree: his cultural impact in American is significant enough that books he wrote nearly 40 years ago are the bases for moves that set opening records today. It's pretty nuts!
Twitter needs LeBron James and Taylor Swift and the latest Kpop stars.
It has a sort of symbiotic relationship with world leaders and journalists.
But it does not really need people like James Woods and Kevin Sorbo (to pick two from the other end of the political spectrum). Same goes for 90s grunge bands or 80s hair bands. I fully expect those guys to pay to try to stay relevant. And I would put famous authors from the 70s and 80s in the same category.
In fact, if you visit his IMDB page: <https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000175/>, you'll see that right at this moment, the population of a medium sized city is employed producing content based on his writing.
Except of the social networks I browse, stephenking.com is not one of them. So really no I wouldn't hear of him. I'm sure his die hard fans will though.
You misread what I'm saying. Obviously I would hear his name but I would not be checking what he's posting about online. Which is clearly the situation for a giant writer like King.
I always felt Twitter as "old man yells at cloud" kind of communication. I've never seen proper "content" created (like pinterest, tik tok, etc). Most of the "content" I see are the asinine multi-post threads and text-pictures notices from angry people/companies.
The "content" here is just tweets. It may not be "content" in the way you are imagining, but it's still true that almost all twitter users are using the site to view tweets from a small number of people (call them content creators or influencers if you like) with large numbers of followers.
I’d argue this isn’t true in sports journalism. A news tweet from Woj, Schefter, Rappoport, or Shams has far more reach than the same content in a random ESPN article or sportscenter segment. Without twitter, a whole world of addicted sports fans would have no idea who those guys are.
Agreed. If I like a writer I always find better ways than Twitter to follow them - Substack, etc
And even if they tweet something worthwhile it’s usually followed by 98% garbage replies with “LOL you’re so stupid” so I’m not wasting my time sifting through that trash heap.
It is useful for events with people on the ground to share info - the story of the guy in Pakistan tweeting about helicopters when Bin Laden was killed was pretty amazing to be honest.
But those types of writers tend to die out after the event.
I guess it depends on what kind of content you're looking for. One account I follow tweets what amounts to live reviews of video games (often obscure) with video clips and images. I think that's just as 'proper' as anything I've seen on pinterest or tiktok.
> In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.
Musk is only doing with Twitter what Fark.com did over 20 years ago with TotalFark - you pay a small monthly fee for admission, and you get a shiny badge next to your username, along with a few perks.
Just like Something Awful forums did before that - paid admission - it's an excellent tool to weed out the obvious bots and low effort trolls.
Twitter has no "creators" - it's just a fancy message board.
Everything old is new again. The Gen-Z kids on Twitter and TikTok were still pooping in diapers when these sites ruled the Internet, and now have sadly been relegated to a dusty corner thereof.
Bad actors who are trying to push some agenda to make money for example, are more likely to pay than ordinary lurkers who click the "retweet" button once in a while. Twitter is not that important, if it becomes pay-to-play, I'm out, sorry.
> Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line
As Stephen King rightly pointed out: Twitter should be paying him - not the other way around (IHO). Anyway, this is going to be interesting.
>f you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value.
Maybe I'm an outlier but of my hundreds of follows ~1% have checkmark. The bulk of my followers are artists, photographers, niche bloggers, subculture news aggregators which are all creating content.
The verified checkmark is basically a non-entity to my time on twitter, maybe it's different if you mainly follow more mainstream western pop culture and political/news media.
But if you are a frequent creator, you're also planning on making the content a viable financial venture. At the very least, Twitter is used as a marketing platform. Which means paying $8 a month for what is essentially free hosting for your marketing, is a no brainer.
I'm not sure why asking consumers to pay would be a good idea because we already have Patreon. Only a fraction of consumers would actually pay for content, so doing this would probably cause a lot of consumers to leave. Whereas the price for a content creator is very low, even at $20/month.
In other words, if you want the blue checkmark, you're definitely interested in the marketing yourself. So, why not pay for that privilege?
I assumed the verification fee serves a different purpose to gathering revenue: the cost to buy influence could go up by an order of magnitude. Economics will neuter the bots.
Everyone working at the IRA.ru troll farm now needs to be issued with (even more) stolen payment credentials and monthly costs go up by $8 per troll account.
Even worse, recruiting useful idiots — unwitting members of the public who are aligned with the troll message and who voluntarily amplify misinformation — is going to get much harder. Now you don’t just need Average Joe to retweet your carefully worded calls-to-action about missing emails or stolen elections. You need him to pay $8 a month too.
> So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money
This sounds like "pay to follow" (or at least "please donate X monthly to your favorite creators" ala Patreon).
I think to most Twitter users, content has a value of €0. If you ask users to pay then they'd rather switch to another free creator, or not use Twitter at all.
If users see any value in creators at all, that'll be having interacted with creators for a long time and having developed a deep connection. Or if creators started publishing "premium content" that's obviously worth in.
Onlyfans may be an extreme example of it, but all such successful platforms – YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and the rest – are paying their popular users a lot of money to stay there.
> > So you want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.
> I think it’s only Onlyfans that can get away with such a business model.
OnlyFans is not (by far) the only site that has a business model of “consumers purchase from producers and the site rakes in a share from that”, nor even the only one (again, by far) with that model where what is purchased is digital content.
How many people are willing to directly pay for content on those other platforms vs those who are not? Contrast that to Onlyfans' monetization success rate.
> That's the core problem with this approach. Elon and others have the idea in their head that Twitter is a social graph where people come to interact with each other, and everyone is relatively equal.
I doubt you know what thoughts Elon has in his head. He likely has ideas for changes, similar to the linked page. After all, he purchased the company in order to make changes.
He purchased the company because his lawyers finally convinced him he was going to be forced to and that it was a poor choice to continue damaging the asset he was going to be owning.
That's your belief. It is quite likely that the court actions were mean to pressure twitter. That isn't an uncommon tactic. The two facts we know are that Musk stated he would purchase twitter to make changes, and he has started to make changes after the purchase.
In reality Twitter is more akin to YouTube than Facebook. A tiny percentage of users are creators while the vast majority are consumers. If you go by the rough count of their currently verified accounts, only ~0.16% of monthly active users are producing content of any real value.
An average user (part of the 99.9%) isn't going to care about any status or badges – they are only there to look at memes.
Creators and influencers on the other hand are going to care, but (1) there are too few of them for their $8/mo to make a substantial difference to the company's bottom line, and (2) the platform needs them as much as they need platform.
So you really want to instead do the exact opposite – ask the consumers to pay and fund your creators with that money.