Welp, it has been quite the week for Elon Musk’s Twitter. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that next week won’t be much better. Especially since he is laying off up to half of the work force.
The thing that really has me skeptical of Twitter future is this new “Twitter Blue” package that includes some pretty uninspiring features. There are a whole bunch of rumored features that will come with this service that have the potential to make things so much worse. However, the “big one” is that for $8 a month you can get verified.
Verification started as a means to, well verify, that the person behind the Twitter account was the actually person the account claimed to be. If you saw Barack Obama tweet something and the account had the blue check mark next to the name, then it was Barack Obama.
Naturally, verification was applied to the accounts belonging to politicians, celebrities, athletes, and other notable personalities. This helped make Twitter a safe place for them to be and to engage with an audience. If somebody was impersonating them then they would get kicked off.
Of course, that “verification” badge soon became a status symbol. If you were verified then you were somebody on Twitter dot com. I suppose it is human nature to be validated by being verified. I remember seeing a few people from the comedy scene here in Chicago get verified and thought it was odd. It was probably a flaw for Twitter to verify people that didn’t run for elected office, have IMDb credits, work for a news organization, or play for a professional team. Eventually, it just became a status symbol.
Now, Elon wants to give it to anybody willing to spend $8. He even framed it as some great populist uprising.
This completely devalues the perceived status of the “verification” label. It went from being something to confirm an identity to social to status to a signal that you are so desperate to be validated that you are paying $8 a month.
Plus, if some of the rumored features, like say being able to direct message celebrities for a fee, then why would celebrities stay on? Moving the harassment they get in their replies to their inbox seems like a great reason for them to bolt the service.
To me this comes across as a harbinger of the end of Twitter. At its best Twitter was thought of as a “cool” place to be online. While Facebook was a place for your relatives, Twitter was a place to exchange ideas, talk about movies, and keep up to date with the news.
If the perception of Twitter is that it is a super lame place full of harassment then all then why would anybody stay?
So, yeah, I’m guessing that there are bad times ahead for Twitter.