Everyone can’t buy a checkmark. Bots will be almost impossible to scale at $8/mo, which means if you deprioritize or hide content from bots without the check, Twitter has a realistic shot at eliminating the bot problem.
Bots are probably a very big problem for a small subset of Twitter users, like Musk himself, who is positively swarmed with them. But the median Twitter user is unlikely to care about this problem to the tune of several dollars a month. I get a crypto spam message about once every other day. I wouldn't pay anything to take care of that problem, because it's just not big enough to care about.
I think it's more likely that the real goal of this "Twitter Blue" proposal is to start getting users to pay for bling. Which could work! It certainly works in gaming communities.
Certainly, services for current blue-checks can't be a big part of the plan here, because of:
(1) The Stephen King problem, which is the (correct) observation that people like King are adding far more value to Twitter than they extract from it, and are reasonably not inclined to ante anything up to Musk.
(2) There aren't enough of them to make a dent in Twitter's cash flows.
If you took away the publicity angle (which Elon Musk can't take away but we can hypothetically), Stephen King's social media professionals might pay $800/month and not even tell him if that's what helped accomplish their goals.
checkmarks mean prestige, exclusivity, and validation. public figures and journalists love prestige, they live for it. twitter just removed one thing that made it attractive to them. being able to buy it means it s useless for anything other than removing spam
that s a very odd way to remove spam . and personally i dont see twitter bots because i dont go searching for them. Musk is completely obsessed with the wrong problem
checkmarks ALSO mean you are who you say you are. making them a feature of Twitter Blue (note: one feature of Twitter Blue) eliminates any status that might have been conferred in the past, yes, but it also goes a long way to sorting legitimate from fake users.
They are who you say you are - assuming you can do proper verification of individual identity and affiliation, authorization to represent a business or brand, etc. for some portion of that first $8 payment.
