It’s been about 48 hours since Elon killed legacy checkmarks in an attempt to convince people, but hopefully especially celebrities, to make the switch. How’s it going?


Oh.

Well then! Let’s talk about why this is such an awful and in retrospect obviously avoidable catastrophuck.

The blue checkmark first came into existence on Twitter not as a status symbol, but as a legal defense mechanism for the fledgling social media network. In 2009, a baseball manager named Tony LaRussa sued Twitter after a parody account that pretended to be him made some incredibly bad taste jokes. The lawsuit was dropped, but the checkmark would emerge within its wake. Eventually, a full team at Twitter was hired to be responsible for verifying that celebrity accounts were actually controlled by actual celebrities.

This direction proved to be rocket fuel for the fledgling network. Not only did it provide legal protection, it also created a sense that you could hobnob with and talk shit to actual celebrities. On Twitter, you could hang out with Stephen King, Bette Midler, Trent Reznor, Edgar Wright, Chrissy Teigen, William Shatner, Tony Hawk, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Lebron James… the list went on and on. Some were more prolific Tweeters than others and plenty of celeb accounts were actually heavily sanitized corporate accounts managed by some social media lackey, but still… Twitter was a place you had ACCESS to the biggest stars in the world. And more importantly, in many cases — you knew it was actually them. And it was free.

The news and sports media formed a parasitic nature with Twitter during this period of time. Twitter is a great place to sniff out leads, and that level of direct access to reporters is great. Throughout the 2010s, it was incredibly common to see bylines at the end of web articles giving the reporter’s twitter handle. Or the twitter handle of an ESPN talking head show up on screen during their show. This, of course, sent all their viewers to Twitter so you could tell Skip Bayless directly to his (virtual) face that you thought he was full of shit.

But a funny thing happened on the way. Actual verification has a manpower cost, and Twitter had to draw arbitrary lines over who got considered for it. Where that line was was blurry and ill-defined, and frankly not terribly consistent. There was some amount of Twitter employees sneaking friends in the back door. And there were lots of ‘people who snuck in’: a writer who did a 6-month stint at Buzzfeed but were now posting out of the back of their van to their 6K followers might have a blue check. Meanwhile, Gail Simone, one of the truly great modern comic writers as well as one of Twitter’s most playful and prolific tweeters with 200K followers, never got one.

Along the way, the Blue Checkmark started to be associated with STATUS. The blue checkmarks were the sign that you had, somehow, ‘made it’. It was wildly coveted- I admit even by me. And so when Elon Musk was forced by the Delaware Court of Chancery to honor the contract he signed to buy Twitter for a wildly overpriced $44 Billion dollars and he needed to increase revenue fast, he stumbled upon and clung to the idea of SELLING that status.

The problem is that status isn’t why the blue checkmark was important . And because he didn’t understand it, now the status associated with the blue checkmark is roughly as desirable to wear as a dead fish found in the anus of a rotting skunk.

The core of Elon’s idea was to juice up Twitter Blue, a very early Twitter experiment first launched in 2021. It was very nascent and at that point not terribly useful, with features like an improved the bookmarking system and a 30 second window to undo a tweet. It was something like $5. Almost nobody bought it. Most Twitter used just didn’t NEED any of that.

One group that DID seem to buy it were cryptobros, for a reason that’s hilarious in retrospect: it was one of the only places on the web to display your NFTs in a place that muggles could see them. A Twitter Blue subscriber had the ability to choose an NFT from a crypto wallet to be their profile, and it would advertise to the world that they were the sort of person to drop 4 figures on a JPG because of the unique hexagon portrait shape. It was dumb.

But it does make one wonder if the fact that Elon surrounds himself with the sort of silicon valley libertarian cryptobros that loves NFTs is somehow a factor in the stupid decisions that were to come. Maybe not, but one way or another, Elon became convinced that selling subscriptions was the way to save Twitter.

I’ve worked in subscription-based design for most of my career. Particularly, the time spent on Free-to-Play (F2P) Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs) is instructive here. Most F2P MMOs in fact do have a subscription-tier – a mode where they get certain advantages over free players, usually in the form of convenience or reducing tedium.

Those who count beans love subscriptions because they are relatively reliable predictors of future revenue. Sure, things like selling lootbox content might temporarily dump some money in your coffers, but you never know when they’re going to catch the player’s imagination. By contrast, if you have a million people paying you ten bucks a month, you can be pretty sure you’re going to get about $10M a month for at least the next few months.

The goal when designing a subscription service for a F2PMMO is to make it so that, if you’re going to spend money in a F2P game, the best value is that subscription. MMOs have a nice suite of features that you can use to upsell an MMO player into a subscriber. You can offer faster levelling, more inventory space, earlier access to features, more frequent opportunities to teleport home, and faster mounts as examples. MMOs tend to embrace selling convenience and reducing tedium in the USA and other Western markets because most game audiences here reject games where you can straight-up buy power advantages. In Asia, selling power is yet another tool they have in the toolbox.

A subscription HAS to have value because subscriptions ‘stack’. Every digitally connected person on earth has multiple subscriptions running, and they directly compare the ongoing costs with all the other subscriptions they have. How many MMO subscriptions will one person pay for? How many streaming services will a customer keep active at one time? And so on and so far.

In this competitive landscape, if you’re hoping to hit big numbers, it becomes absolutely vital to offer a subscription service with high tangible value and also to never piss off your customers so much they think about hitting that ‘unsubscribe’ button. Because they’re only going to support so many subscriptions at one time, and every service is competing for those dollars.

With all the above in mind, let’s take a hard look at Twitter Blue and its rollout.

You can do long-form posts! (Most people rarely need to do this – hell, the majority of Twitter users almost never tweet – and if they do, a tweetstorm is fine). You can post 1080p video! (Most people will never post their own videos at all) You can use italics! (Who cares?) You can edit tweets! (Only its weird and cludgy) You can show your NFT profile pic! (How very 2021 of you).

The one thing that’s of moderate interest to your average user is having your tweets be ranked higher than that of other users. But if everyone subscribes, this becomes a non-feature! If everyone is special, then no one is!

All of this is on the roadmap to Elon’s vision of Twitter as an everything app, but the truth of the matter is that this is simply not a very compelling suite of features. The most charitable thing you can say is that it would only appeal to power users – the sorts of content creators who are creating longform articles and videos. Put another way, Twitter’s subscription is far less useful to the average user than Youtube Premium, a fantastic value that nonetheless very few users subscribe to, as a percentage of the userbase.

Let’s put aside the fact that Twitter’s longform writing is lightyears behind competitors like Substack, and their video and streaming is lightyears behind YouTube and Twitch, or that charging money to the passionate people who were previously generating free content for you is insane. The fact of the matter is that it’s obvious that around 99.999% of the Twitter population has no real need for this suite of tools. Elon probably realized immediately that he’d need another angle to goose sales among the rank and file.

He decided they were selling STATUS.

The problem is that STATUS is not what the blue checkmark is about. It’s about AUTHENTICITY. It’s about knowing that if Stephen King tweets something, it’s actually coming from Stephen King. And that authenticity has the runoff effects of providing LEGAL PROTECTION to Twitter as well as a sense of ACCESS for Twitter users.

This is all, obviously, pure upside for Twitter. Beyond legal protection, it created that sense that you were rubbing elbows with celebrities, and that if a news outlet says something, it’s actually coming from that news outlet.

But a lot of people confuse this need for AUTHENTICITY for STATUS or even ENDORSEMENT. As an example, I think that Michael Knowles is an absolutely loathesome toad of a human being, but I also think it’s important that anyone like Knowles, Ben Shapiro or Alex Jones to be verified if they have an account, because it advances the cause of free discussion and debate greatly to know that the person you’re angry about actually said whatever they said.

But Elon needed to MAKE it about status. And so he did. And in doing so, absolutely destroyed the status value of the blue checkmark.

Every social media site is a bit of an echo chamber, and they all have their own political lean. In the case of Twitter, the audience has always leaned left, by which I mean Twitter has always been a political universe where a bulk of the population believes not just that Bernie Sanders walks on water, but also things like unions are universally good, all cops are always bastards, landlords are universally scum and that racism and transphobia is bad. Upwards of 69% of Twitter’s most active posters were left-leaners and most of them consider Joe Biden to be far to the right of them.

Which is why it’s even more mystifying that, upon purchasing Twitter, Elon got hard at work declaring war on that 69%.

In just a few months, Elon has directly boosted voting for GOP candidates, encouraged transphobia, mocked combating racism, boosted insane right-wing conspiracy theories and warned of the dangers of birth control and abortion on an appearance on Tucker Carlson. He’s also banned several left-wing activist groups based on an obvious right-wing ops, while simultaneously welcoming back actual white supremacists and neonazis.

Needless to say, the 69% that made up the core of Twitter’s audience was not amused. This is kind of like buying a fine restaurant, and then serving the audience giant piles of poop on a silver platter.

The end result is that support for Elon’s efforts became a culture war thing, where support for Elon was a support for right-wing extremism. Elon’s big-name early adopters are a collection of some of the biggest garbage people on the face of the earth. Ben Shapiro. Matt Walsh. Charlie Kirk. Ian Miles Cheong. Mike Cernovich. CatTurd. James O’Keefe. Andy Ngo. And, of course, Elon himself.

That’s the club you’re announcing you’ve joined if you put a blue checkmark next to your name. You’re no longer announcing you’re in a club with Steve Martin, Eve 6, Selena Gomez, Malala Yousafzai, Bill Gates, Cheech Marin, Aaron Rodgers, Bette Midler and Mark Ruffalo, none of which are verified now. It’s now a club whose most visible members are among the most divisive, racist, transphobic, anti-science, conspiracy-spewing jerks on the planet. If not to everyone, then certainly to the bulk of Twitter’s young, mostly progressive audience.

The blue checkmark is now a virtual MAGA hat.

At some level, Elon realizes how bad this looks. As such, he’s visibly given free verified access to stars like Jason Alexander, Stephen King, Ice-T and Lebron James, even after they made it clear they don’t want it.

Which has resulted in Elon’s sycophants harassing these celebrities for ‘not being willing to pay $8’ when the money was never the issue. The issue is that nobody wants to be associated with them.

The ironic thing is that more people verified would be very good for Twitter. It would help protect Twitter legally. It would let you know quickly if you were actually hobnobbing with stars. It would mean more people were attaching their opinions to a persistent identity, which would probably reduce trolling and generally being shitty to each other.

If Twitter charged a ONE-TIME fee of $20 bucks, and spent that money actually verifying that people were who they said they were, a ton of people would likely sign up for that. Actual verification is useful, not just to the speaker, but to other users and most importantly Twitter itself. It would make Twitter a place where disinformation was less free-flowing. It would make Twitter a great place to do citizen journalism. It makes it much easier to fight ban evasion! All of this is good!

But the current verification model is too expensive, and doesn’t verify a damn thing beyond that you have a working credit card number. So instead what we have is that a hundred bucks a year buys you a seat in the Elon Musk fan club, and attaches a symbol to your profile that is roughly as popular as leprosy.

And don’t even get me started on how Elon expects Journalistic outlets to pay orders of magnitude more, despite the massive amount of free content and traffic those outlets drive to Twitter. It’s probably just a coincidence that I see Twitter handles on TV shows and in journalistic bylines a lot less than I used to.

Can this tailspin be corrected? Hard to say. At its core, Elon will fail unless he embraces these core principles:

  1. Actual verification is so important to the foundation of Twitter’s appeal that whatever they can do to maximize number of verified users is good.
  2. Depending on verification to be the revenue engine that monetizes Twitter is therefore counterproductive and doomed to fail.
  3. The actual feature list of Twitter Blue is something that only hardcore content creators should or do care about, and will never have mass appeal.
  4. Verification that isn’t verification isn’t shit.

I’m personally pessimistic that Elon will figure these things out and actually correct Twitter before it runs out of money, and even if he does the right thing, he will then have to overcome huge cultural opposition to the fact that he made Twitter Blue an absolute poisoned brand.

So until then, enjoy how Twitter puts all the Blue Checkmark reply guys at the top of a thread’s replies, as it makes it much easier to block them.