News that Elon Musk’s interim Twitter leadership is considering charging users for verification on its platform has caused no end of consternation among current holders of the service’s well-known blue check marks. Complaints have arisen about price (potentially too high) and value offered (potentially too low), among other concerns.
It’s also fair to note that before the Musk deal was completed, Twitter had already begun to experiment with subscription-based services targeting its most active users. I am well aware of those efforts as a Twitter addict; I signed up for Twitter Blue and continue to pay for it. (Though it appears to be only a modest revenue driver to date.)
The calculus of my support of Twitter, however, has changed.
Before the Musk transaction, Twitter’s product cadence had picked up pace. Therefore, buying a cheap pass to beta features, which supported the company where I have long made my digital home, seemed reasonable. Sure, simping for a public company is about as sensical as pining after a celebrity, but what can I say? I’m human.
Twitter started to put much-demanded features behind its low paywall, including an edit button. For some folks, that was a draw.
However, it felt like Twitter wasn’t taking existing capabilities and putting them in a walled garden. Instead, the service was making new stuff aimed at a more niche audience, charging for incremental functionality. That did not bother me in the least.
Now, however, Twitter is controlled by a single person instead of, I presume, owned by a good chunk of its users through index funds. Even more, it is largely owned by one person who took on quite a lot of debt to finance the deal. Encumbered with more obligations than before, Twitter is likely in a hurry to boost the rate at which it generates positive cash flow to service those new debts.
I intend to continue paying for Twitter Blue because my view on supporting Twitter’s product work due to my obsession with its service remains stable. I will not, however, pay to maintain my verification status if asked to do so. Unlike Twitter Blue, charging for verification is taking things that were free and putting them behind a paywall. A gotcha, of sorts.
Charging to retain verified status might delight Musk acolytes in favor of sticking it to media members, who are verified at greater rates than individuals in other industries. But it’s worth noting that Twitter verification was not a feature of the same sort as, say, what Blue currently offers.
Verification is a way to combat misinformation on Twitter, making it a tool that matters. And charging for it, as my colleague Amanda Silberling noted, could be a pretty serious issue for the platform. The potential demand, then, to pay up to $20 per month for Twitter verification feels not like the company offering a neat paid capability but instead demanding that its most active users pay for the company’s debt servicing or else suffer from a perceived loss of status at the detriment of overall service quality.
No thanks.
I have happily contributed to Twitter for free as a user over the course of six figures of tweets during more than a decade of use because I enjoy it, and I think that I am net positive when it comes to my personal inputs and outputs with the service, at least when we take a long view. Now that Twitter is not owned by a large number of people, but instead by Musk, Saudi Arabia and a handful of venture firms, I cannot countenance a demand for more money for flat service. Surely the world’s richest man, a nation awash in natural resource wealth and investors paid to allocate billions of other folks’ money can afford to run the bird app.
Twitter Blue? Sure, I live here. But $20 a month to defend a feature I use on the service that is designed to improve overall conversational integrity so that some folks who should have known better can lose less money? Pass.
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