21:38

I’m kinda laughing my ass off at this $8/month for Twitter Blue thing.

• Letting the platform monetize your content in exchange for free hosting has always been the deal of social media. Allowing Musk to get away with this means, social media can finally monetize the user. Personally, I’d be really pissed if I had been lured into a walled garden, have to provide/be the content, now also have to pay for hosting and am still not in control over anything.
• Your visibility will be severely limited without Twitter Blue. If you want to spew hate, you now have to register and pay (no more sock puppet accounts). So, Musk is effectively choking off his most important engagement tool here.
• Twitter Blue is suppose to make running botnets unprofitable. But wasn’t it Musk himself, who tried chickening out of buying the company by claiming the platform is overrun by bots? Would be hilariously funny to see Twitter implode because an accidentally effective bot-counter suddenly makes everyone realize that talking on Twitter is actually talking in an empty machine room.
• Conservative thinktanks can easily pay $8/month for visibility (and will gladly do so), the woke army of social justice warriors and gender confused snowflakes will have a much harder time, getting their voice heard. So, by shifting the political landscape away from the the ultra left, Musk also alienates/marginalizes exactly those users that reliably draw attention and engagement to Twitter.
• Paying $8/month turns you from a user to a customer. So if Musk promises that Twitter Blue gives you more visibility, then there’s now grounds to sue for disclosing the algorithm.
• If Twitter Blue really boosts one’s visibility, then Twitter is putting itself in the same position, Google was in a couple years ago, when it made paid ads look like the spitting image of genuine search results. That’s another law suit in the making.

I have absolutely no idea how this is going to play out, let’s just hope for the worst…