Twitter reportedly to charge $20/month for verification checkmark
The developers working on the Twitter Blue update have a week to deliver or will be fired.
The story of Elon Musk and Twitter has drawn a lot of attention over the past six months. The CEO of a lot of companies continues to make waves with the latest being a rather controversial update to Twitter Blue. According to people close to the matter, the company’s subscription model will receive a price hike and will include a verification feature.
Reported on by Alex Heath of The Verge on October 30, 2022, Elon Musk has allegedly set in motion an update to the iconic verification checkmark system of Twitter. According to sources and conversations seen by The Verge, Twitter is aiming to charge $19.99 USD for Twitter Blue which will also verify users.
It’s not clear whether the traditional verification system will remain in place or if this new system will be the only verification mechanic moving forward. What is clear, though, is that it appears some users will be able to buy their verification rather soon.
The report goes on to note that the developers working on the update were given a deadline of November 7. Failing to meet this deadline will result in being fired.
Elon Musk has only just claimed the title of Twitter CEO following the closing of the deal. Some of his first actions included firing former Twitter Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, and Legal Affairs and Policy Chief Vijaya Gadde. He’s also set to establish a Twitter content moderation council which has its work cut out for it considering anti-Semitic content spread on Twitter following Musk’s takeover.
Elon Musk has taken to Twitter on Sunday to note that the verification process is being revamped. Whether he is talking about the Twitter Blue subscription cost update and verification feature or the traditional verification process remains to be seen.
The whole verification process is being revamped right now
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 30, 2022
Be sure to keep it locked to Shacknews as we bring you the latest on the Twitter fiasco. It seems as though this story has more pages to read before it’s over.
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Shacknews
replySam Chandler posted a new article, Twitter reportedly to charge $20/month for verification checkmark
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In today's fun Twitter news, they will start charging $20/month for being a verified user, and will force employees to get this
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/30/23431931/twitter-paid-verification-elon-musk-blue-monthly-subscription-
YES. He's gonna fuck this up so bad, it's great.
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Don't see where it says that it'll force employees to get it.
It does say that they're giving them 7 days to launch the feature. Which is fucking hilarious.
As bad as I feel for the employees, I kinda hope this is real and causes all the employees to walk and ultimately kills Twitter.-
“I mean, how hard can it be? A few lines of code? It’s just $20. We’ll give them…one week. Should be plenty of time.”
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On Friday, engineers were asked to print out their recent code contributions from the last 30 to 60 days and bring them to be reviewed by Musk and Tesla engineers. They were then quickly told to shred their print outs and show the code on their computers instead, as first reported by Platformer’s Casey Newton.
...lol
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On shacknews.
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Then I hope all the other more reasonable people leave them to it.
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Feels like that’s how he runs most of his ops. Basically threats and insane hours grinding people into dust.
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i would laugh so hard at this ridiculous ultimatum.
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Yup. I'd basically be "ok bye" and walk. No knowledge transfer or anything. Fuck that dude. Remember when he was the tech golden child? I think people are seeing him for who he really is now. He's not even really an innovator, he just buys innovative companies. Both Tesla and SpaceX were around before him, right?
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^^ absolutely this. who in their right minds would drop everything to make a subscription feature like this one in less than 7 days QA included.
fuck that.
just start planning it, and call their bluff when the deadline occurs.
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Tesla didn’t have a product resealed yet and SpaceX was started by him when the Russians wouldn’t sell him ICBMs to map greenhouse gasses in the early 2000s. He was definitely a major driving force behind both companies.
That said he’s a piece of shit and I hope his twitter endeavor fails spectacularly while not affecting his other businesses as they actually do good.
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How does he know what the dead weight is? He's only been the boss for a few days.
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haha, imagine being Twitter and trying to hire for any of their 110+ open roles right now.
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lol, November 1st is literally tomorrow -- they'll get their grants. Folks should begin shopping around todayh.
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You would have to be insane to still be there without a plan to get out. It's been coming for a while now.
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I need a way to make Twitter demonstrably worse for users looking for accurate information, create a completely marginal amount of increased revenue, and terrorize my new employees so a bunch of them quit and I can avoid paying severance... hm what to do....
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Boy, do I have an idea for you!
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Musk has a debt service of several billion a year, and this is before him starting billions in the hole. His debt obligations are not sustainable with the current Twitter so we’re going to keep seeing them throw dumb shit on the wall to see what sticks.
What’s funny is that his offer kept Twitter floating sky high while the rest of the sector crashed and burned.
Sure, he can say that he’s going to drive engagement by making it easier for likeminded people to interact with one another, but yeah, he isn’t going to take the long view
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Seems like a great way to annoy users that provide valuable content for not that much money.
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Someone get crayons and draw pictures on why Twitter matters for anything?
We live in a world where everything is 24/7 cycling news etc, there are many social media platforms, forums etc.
Why does twitter matter at all.-
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That's what I thought. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. So, it doesn't matter and people will go be armchair Internet experts on a different platform. Got it. Thanks
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Twitter did hit on a winning formula early by making the blue check thing and intentionally? turning it into a status thing.
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I can't see many media orgs leaving twitter, where else are they going to get their stories.
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Every reporter is on Twitter. What happens there drives the news.
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It's absolutely the best way to keep up to date with research in the fields I follow and to keep up to date with some of the creatives I'm friends with. I had an account since Twitter launched and never used it until probably the last 2 years when I discovered that, if you take the time to curate your feed, it can actually be remarkably handy.
If you just look at what's trending, though, of course it's going to be filled with dumb shit. Might as well just read bodybuilding.com forums at that point.
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That seems rather cruel and excessive.
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I'd expect high performers with options to do this immediately. We'll see what happens, though.
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more like twat
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This will backfire in the left bubble as it will be the "I pay Elon 20 bucks a month" sign.
It will go up in the right bubble as it will amplify visibility of tweets.
And it will go up in the right and libertarian bubble because it is the "I pay our lord and saviour Elon 20 bucks a month" sign. -
I didn’t realize this, but twitter now has a billion dollars per month in debt service, so of course he’s going to be desperate for a monetization strategy.
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Question: How is that legal? How is it legal to buy a company using loans and then saddle that company with the debt you incurred buying them?
I've seen it happen a bunch and if I remember right, it often crushes the acquired company under a pile of dept, tanking their ability to be profitable.
I've always wondered why that was a legal thing you could do. It seems super shady.-
I mean the borrower makes the argument they are buying an under valued asset and can extract that value to make the profit to pay off the debt. Then someone is stupid enough to loan them the money.
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I assume whomever loaned him the money, a combination of banks and Saudi Arabia, would take ownership when he defaulted.
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isn't this the model private equity frequently uses? it's legal because they bribe people like Kristen Sinema to make sure their preferred strategies are legal
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This is pretty naive.
This is the way all M&A's work
Remember all that corporate raiders stuff in the 1990's and early 2000's?
Toys R Us got bought out, and the debt used to buy the company was put back on the the ledgers so now the company was ladden with debt.
Just because a person you don't like uses this tactic doesn't mean it's illegal. You gotta shut down wall street if you want to go against these tactics. That's what the occupy wall street was about.
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So apparently there are just under 300k verified users on Twitter, right now; please correct me if you find a better source of data. That means a potential revenue stream of $6 million per month / $72 million per year. And I guarantee not all 300k are gonna pay.
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Yeah, that seems reasonable. And if debt service really is $1 billion/month -- as mentioned by greenbergMD directly above my post -- then I don't see $3 million/month doing much.
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Then it probably won't be worth whatever the monthly asking fee is.
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And you don't think this attempt at charging $20/month to verified users fits that description?
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Imagine being the banks that signed off on the loans for the Twitter acquisition.
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Now this is the kind of maverick who will get humanity to Mars.
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I’ve deleted Twitter. I refuse to support this in any way. It’s been a week and I literally haven’t missed it at all.
It’s funny that for all the worship that so many people throw at Elon as some tech/business genius, at the end of the day he’s just another shitty corporate CEO that does the same shitty big business bullshit. This is the same infuriating bullshit that any modern scumbag piece of shit business guy would do when coming in as the new CEO after a take over like this. There’s literally nothing NOTHING special about Musk. He inherited money and then just did the standard “bottom line is king, people are worthless” crap that they all do.-
I deleted the app off my phone and links of my browser. I still have the account. I do miss it. A lot of fandoms and communities I follow still don't exist anywhere else. Facebook groups are kinda there but it isn't the same. Everything is small and isolated.
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Guess it's time I launch my alternative app, Twatter.
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oh, that would be such a pity.
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All FAANG / etc companies are not the same and it also highly matters which team/org you're in
Whereas Elon takes a super hands-on micro-manager approach to all his companies (emails about listening to music on the factory floor??) so no matter where you are it's like you're working directly for him -
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I was holding out hope he wouldn't ruin twitter, but its been like 3 days and its already turning into a shit show.
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Sadly, real Twitter employees have started being let go today. I've seen several announcements from engineers there.
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Sometimes I think about some kid fresh out of college / grad school who finally got his big break and landed a huge opportunity by getting a job at Bear Stearns and started like a couple of days before it all collapsed seemingly out of nowhere, and how much that would suck. There had to be at least some people who were just hired and starting like a week or even days before it all went down. What shitty timing! Especially if they turned down offers from other places to work there instead thinking it’d be this awesome high profile place to have on your resume etc
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A long time ago I worked with a guy who was really good at his job, worked in operations and he was a lead then manager. Anyway that company did one of those bullshit moves where they let go all their senior people and then rehired younger/more junior people. Dude got laid off. Got another job in the same industry, different company. Was super happy. 6 months later his new company got bought by his older company, and those motherfuckers laid him off again.
I think about him when I'm annoyed with my job or feeling mistreated for perspective.
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Anywhere you've seen to track this? The only one I saw was this guy from a NYPost trash article.
https://twitter.com/taylorleese
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My money's on "is".
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Yes, he's a fucking idiot. I think he managed to luck out on buying some good companies and then hired some smart advisors and (used to?) listen to them. Dude is just another zuckerberg or trump. He does nothing but grift and thinks he rules the planet. I cannot stand the worship of him.
https://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=41302805#item_41302805 -
"I'm the world's richest man and a very smart engineer so by proxy I am an expert in absolutely everything. How hard could figuring this Twitter thing out be?"
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Games industry Twitter stalwart Nibel, who built a following of 450,000 for regularly tweeting breaking news and memes under the handle @Nibellion, has today quit the social media platform.
"After some introspection, I've made the decision to focus my time and energy elsewhere and move on from Twitter," Nibel tweeted today, now from a locked account. "This marks the end of my video games coverage and my active participation in this platform. Thanks to everybody for the fun times!"
https://www.eurogamer.net/video-games-industry-twitter-legend-nibel-quits-platform-
Seems a bit kneejerk.
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The article said they set up a patreon and turned out he wasn't going to be able to monetize the 450k twitter followers as easily as expected. So that's probably the real reason.
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As a creator Twitter is basically the worst of all the social networks for everything. It's the hardest to build a following, the hardest to get your content into other peoples' timeline (especially non-followers), the hardest to monetize, the lowest total users of networks (by 10x). When you're having to manage your presence across 3-4 platforms at once and Twitter is giving you the lowest ROI it's probably not a hard call.
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Twitter to lay off 25% of workforce in first round of job cuts
"Oct 31 (Reuters) - Twitter, which was acquired last week by billionaire Elon Musk, plans to let go of a quarter of its workforce as part of what is expected to be a first round of layoffs, the Washington Post reported on Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter.
Celebrity lawyer Alex Spiro, a long-time Musk legal representative, led the conversations about the job cuts, according to the report.
Twitter had over 7,000 employees at the end of 2021, according to a regulatory filing and a quarter of the headcount amounts to nearly 2,000 employees."
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-lay-off-25-workforce-first-round-job-cuts-washington-post-2022-10-31/
https://archive.ph/LWSrX-
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Is that a thing -- the 60-day layoff warning, I mean? Cuz if so, yeah, enjoy paying for those lawsuits. Might be big enough for a class-action.
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Might be a Cali thing https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/layoff-protections-california-employees.html
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Federal WARN act.
requires employers to give their employees at least 60 days of notice of a plant closing or mass layoffs. This allows employees to look for a new jobs and begin retraining before they are unemployed.
The WARN Act applies to employers with one hundred or more employees. This does not include employees who work less than six months or part-time employees who average less than 20 hours per week. All employees are covered by the Act whether they are paid hourly or salaried. Managerial and supervisory employees are also covered, but business partners are not.
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They can layoff right away, and just pay 2 months of salary. The employees will be “on the payroll” during that time but only on paper. They’ll have no access to any company data.
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I just picked a great time to be winding up my Software Development degree.
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hah, as if he'd allow unvetted questions
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sure you would internet tough guy
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25% != 100%.
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Could & should have asked him the same question prior to extending him a line of credit.
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You'd be fired on the spot.
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25% != 100%.
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Lots of people have dumb ideas for social network monetization. Making your users pay to have the network contain trustworthy sources is obviously dumb. This is going to increase spam and fake accounts as people who were previously verified will not pay. Now other people can easily impersonate them. News orgs are basically being required to spend money here to verify their employees so they can't be impersonated by random spammers but that revenue is a drop in the bucket.
The actual way to be profitable is be big enough to have a profitable advertising unit. Twitter has failed at growing for decades so it does not.-
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Twitter allows verified users to change their display name, even to the same name as other verified users. Users who were previously verified will also now choose to not be verified for $20/mo. So where once there was a verified account you trusted now another user (who may or may not be verified themselves) can change their display name (and avatar) to look like someone else or even register a new account with an @ handle very similar to the previously verified account (doing the usual things like using a lowercase L instead of 1, etc).
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There are existing rules about impersonating someone, you have to mention that it is a parody account and users have been banned for not doing so
> To avoid confusing others about an account’s affiliation, parody, commentary, and fan accounts must distinguish themselves in BOTH their account name and bio.
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/parody-account-policy
But I get your point, the blue check is a quick and simple way to verify what we're looking at.
Perhaps there will be a differentiator for actually verified users and paid verified users.-
Impersonation is not proactively policed. It requires users to report impersonators and wait for Twitter to act. If Twitter actually cared about it they wouldn't let you change your display name to match someone else's.
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Twitter has been historically bad at handling impersonators. Musk himself is the prime example: For the longest while, any popular thread would. have a fake Elon Musk account spamming Bitcoin scams. They would even be in the replies of the real Musk’s tweets.
The latest scam is to have the bot accounts block whoever they’re impersonating and replying to. The real account can’t see and report the spam replies, but everyone else can.
Twitter is terrible at handling fake and spam accounts, and the process of moderating those is labor-intensive. And so it is unlikely to become better under the new ownership.
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I never understood why they didn't charge organizations more to maintain their brand presence on twitter via business accounts. Seems like you are kind of held hostage as a biz and expected to have a twitter so they could have charged for that, and even tier it so that it plays nice with advertising spend on twitter in terms of spend (e.g. spend $10k on advertising we give you all these tools to help with conversion and comp your monthly fee). but just spitballing here
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Seems like a great time to start a twitter competitor.
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Parlor has joined the channel. Truth Social also joined.
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Halloween Ghoul
https://i.imgur.com/QHXbJHU.jpeg -
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The husband of one of my wife's friends who admires Elon, once uttered the phrase, "...deep thinkers like Joe Rogan"
I instantly lost all respect for him
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Watching Twitter Now Musk Has Grabbed Control & Wants to Use It to Damage the US & Ukraine
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Verdictive and petty
(Video with sound)
https://i.imgur.com/MM5hAk6.mp4 -
Deactivated my account today and deleted the app.
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Thanks for letting us know.
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