Musk has indicated that he will do a pay-for blue checkmark.
Right now having a verified account is a form of privilege were you pleased some sort of twitter corporate representative who decides these sorts of thing. They have a history of giving blue check marks to accounts they agree with and taking it away from verified people they disagree with.
By handing out checkmarks to anybody willing to pay them for it (and by extension tying their legal identity to their twitter one) then it neutralizes the political aspect of verified accounts while improving a revenue stream.
The revenue stream would improve in more ways than one.
Turns out knowing a person's browsing history and what accounts they have online is not really that useful or interesting to advertisers. It's not a big money maker.
However if you can tie financial identities into online identities then that is vastly more interesting and is something advertisers are willing to pay for.
This is why Facebook insists on having "real identities" nowadays when people sign up. They partner with other data mining operations and tie people's financial history into their facebook accounts. This way adverisers know people's buying habits, income levels.
Pretty much everything you fill out for drivers licensing, hunting licenses, loan application, credit card history, debit card history, mortgage applications, etc etc.. is now tied to your Facebook account if they can figure out to connect the dots. Which isn't that hard for most people.
> By handing out checkmarks to anybody willing to pay them for it (and by extension tying their legal identity to their twitter one) then it neutralizes the political aspect of verified accounts while improving a revenue stream.
I don't think that extends in the fashion you believe it does. It's like the HashCash solution for email. It was never employed because it probably didn't work, it just made spamming more expensive but didn't eliminate spam. The current walled-garden state of email has also made spam very expensive, but email spam persists to this day.
Ability to pay for something online also does not indicate actual identity. It's trivial to get an anonymous Visa number, and so on.
If you are dealing with individuals that know and care enough to circumvent the tracking built into our financial system then that is also probably not a person that advertisers are very interested in.
Not only because it is an incredibly niche market, but probably because they don't see the advertisements in the first place.
We are talking about people trying to figure out how to extract money from tracking and documenting the great unwashed masses. The hyper tech freaks can abandon these platforms en masse and it wouldn't amount too much more than a rounding error.
Remember:
The purpose of Twitter and Facebook and other social media sites, including Reddit, is to provide services to people willing to pay to disseminate propaganda. Primarily in the form of advertisements.
The platform for discussions and content is not the product. The product is the people that use the platform. Anything they can do to improve the quality of the product, ie information about the users, can increase revenue.
Comparing to email doesn't make sense. Also Email is such a garbage protocol nowadays that it is much more profitable to prolong its brokenness than actually solve its problems.
> Musk has indicated that he will do a pay-for blue checkmark.
Please fact check me because who knows where they finally landed on this but at one point Elon Musk backtracked on the blue checkmark in favor of a different symbol for a paid account (iirc down to USD 2 from USD 3 and different amounts for different countries).
Right now having a verified account is a form of privilege were you pleased some sort of twitter corporate representative who decides these sorts of thing. They have a history of giving blue check marks to accounts they agree with and taking it away from verified people they disagree with.
By handing out checkmarks to anybody willing to pay them for it (and by extension tying their legal identity to their twitter one) then it neutralizes the political aspect of verified accounts while improving a revenue stream.
The revenue stream would improve in more ways than one.
Turns out knowing a person's browsing history and what accounts they have online is not really that useful or interesting to advertisers. It's not a big money maker.
However if you can tie financial identities into online identities then that is vastly more interesting and is something advertisers are willing to pay for.
This is why Facebook insists on having "real identities" nowadays when people sign up. They partner with other data mining operations and tie people's financial history into their facebook accounts. This way adverisers know people's buying habits, income levels.
Pretty much everything you fill out for drivers licensing, hunting licenses, loan application, credit card history, debit card history, mortgage applications, etc etc.. is now tied to your Facebook account if they can figure out to connect the dots. Which isn't that hard for most people.