Eh, honestly I think it is a good move, fuck you and your status symbol.
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2022
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Yeah, from business perspective this seems to actually be pretty sensible. Verified accounts largely represent official accounts from companies such as news orgs. Paying 20 bucks a month for verification is pocket change for them, and they will do it to continue having official presence on the platform. There are literally millions of such accounts translating into tens of millions in monthly revenue.
This approach also creates a direct monetization model as opposed to the current indirect ads/analytics based revenue stream. Ad revenue is currently crashing as US economy enters a recession. Both Fb and Google are showing huge losses and doing layoffs already. Focusing on the main product would also likely allow cutting down on the employees significantly which is something that Musk keeps talking about.
yep as much as I dislike Elon's politics, this is actually a good business move.
Though I doubt this will impact the ads/analytics side of things.
Yeah, I can't see them dumping that entirely either. Data analytics in particular will likely always be profitable. That said, it is likely there will be some cuts going forward just to trim the operating expenses.
That is, we are going to see many new users in the fediverse
I doubt there's much overlap between verified accounts, which tend to be associated with corps, and people moving to fediverse.
Corporations and businesses may bear the monthly expenses for Twitter, but I doubt that ordinary users will spend money to participate in Twitter, as far as current median salaries go. There are going to be many who are going to send them to hell, looking for alternatives.
The proposal is to charge for verification which is the blue check mark. Regular users aren't affected by that.
I think that the point is that "regular users" also includes people who are neither a business nor a corporation but that are notable and active enough to have got the "verified" check-mark. Like a lot of individual popular figures and social media presences.
If a few of those big individuals ends up deciding to not pay up and instead moves to an alternative, the audience following them might be tempted to move as well to follow them up there, so it could potentially start a snowball effect.
That said, I don't believe the verification badge alone would be enough reason for them to move...
The assumption here is that people mostly stay on twitter for the content from blue checkmarks and that enough of them would move to other platforms. I personally have doubts about that. Vast majority of users aren't verified and tend to build networks with each other. If a verified account left the rest of their network is still on twitter.
Meanwhile, from the perspective of verified users they'd be losing access to their existing network. If this network is important to them then it's worth paying 20 bucks to keep it. And they always have the option of going unverified if they can't afford it.
I don't see where you find in my comment the assumption that people mostly follow verified accounts (if anything it's the other way around, one of the requirements for verification is notoriety, that doesn't mean that verification creates notoriety, nor that notoriety cannot exist without verification). Nor did I say that "enough" of them would migrate (enough for what exactly?). I was trying to be careful with my words and I used "if" when I meant "if", not "when".
I was simply explaining the other view point, not necessarily saying that it will happen, but that it's a possibility and it wouldn't be so surprising to see an increased interest towards Twitter alternatives as a consecuence from changes like this, perhaps translating to a (small?) spike of new users exploring the fediverse (even if it's possible most wouldn't stay). But I don't have a magic crystal ball so I can't tell you what will happen.
Your last paragraph is essentially part of what I was meaning to say in the last two lines from my previous comment. We agree.
(and btw, it wasn't me who gave you that downvote, to be clear)
Right, I should've perhaps phrased it differently. I meant to point out that the two assumptions would have to hold in order for any sort of user migration from twitter to happen, didn't mean to imply you were saying those would hold.
am i the only one who thinks this is actually a good idea? this is essentially the perfect form of monetisation: you pay for something superficial which doesn't provide you with any inherent advantage except for looking cool
it's like skins in counter strike 🤷♀️
Basically, and the target audience will pay because they want the prestige or they belong to a large organization or a government. Does seem like a reasonable way to monetize to me.
reddit is so mad about this for some reason, like bruh, don't buy it if you don't want smh 🤷♀️
LOL yeah, it's especially funny given that reddit sells flair and people seem to pay for it.
sells flair
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no really, i know that the sell avatars and shit, but do they actually sell flairs?
oh I was thinking about avatars. Point is they sell frivolous stuff that people on Reddit pay money for, while moaning that people in Twitter will now pay money for similar kinds of frivolous stuff. :)
Mmmm, we might need a mastodon.verified instance maybe? 🤔
You can self verify on Mastodon as long as you control a domain where you can stick a tag into an HTML page. You just stick a <a rel="me" href="https://your.mastodon.server/@your-id">Mastodon</a> tag in the head of the page and then reference the page on your Mastodon account. This proves that Mastodon account owns the domain.
That's possible just for the owner of a mastodon instance, not for standard users who visit an instance
This has nothing to do with being an owner of an instance. Here's my self verified account on mas.to which I'm not an owner of. When you go to your account preferences there's verification section under your profile:
Gotta better understand how that works then, thanks
@yogthos @Suoko Btw, this is a brilliant feature that Mastodon came up with and I'd wish it was adopted by all ActivityPub implementations. I wonder if you could even verify the ownership of other fediverse profiles in a similiar matter. Every once in a while, talks about unified identities across the fediverse re-emerge and that just might be an extremely simple way of going about it.
This is capitalism at its best. Everyone though Elon Musk is this savior for Freedom of speech. Turns out he is just putting a price tag on it.
Right in the bot farms, ouch!
Identification brokerage. What exactly will Twitter add to the identity verification matrix? When you sign up, and want to get those sophisticated things, they ensure you give them verifiable proof you are who you claim to be. Phone number which you can receive a text from periodically, email address which implies other people verified you, date of birth (I do not know how this helps other than then running triangulation on it from other ID providers) etc. After you do all this, they then ask you to pay to be "verified". The status aspect on Twitter notwithstanding, it sounds like those "irrational" market outcomes.
The funny thing will be governments paying for this, when they are literally the origin of the very documents Twitter uses to verify people.