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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Sam 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-
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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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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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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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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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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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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.-
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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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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. -
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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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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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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
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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-
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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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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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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.-
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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Halloween Ghoul
https://i.imgur.com/QHXbJHU.jpeg -
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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 -
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