There’s been a fair amount of criticism directed at Elon Musk over potentially charging users for account verification on Twitter after he acquired it a few days ago. The current proposal going around is that users will pay $8 a month for their blue checkmark. At the moment it is free. However the problem with it today is that Twitter essentially decide who is worthy or not of having a blue checkmark.
Ever since this feature was introduced back in 2009 or 2010 I’ve not used Twitter as much as I did previously. Over time the algorithm clearly has ended up heavily favouring blue checkmark accounts. For example just recently I’ve got a load of posts from Stephen King in my feed - I’ve never followed, interacted with, or looked at his profile before - yet here he is in my feed, with stuff just as useful to say as Doris down the road at number 14.
This clearly ended up creating a two-tier system on Twitter - where if Twitter decides somebody is worthy, they get massive exposure on the platform. Why not give the majority of users of the platform an ability to level it up for $8 a month? Genuine heavy-Twitter users (I am not one) who wanna pay the money get extra exposure for their content, the huge bot and spam-farms hopefully get left behind a bit.
I mean ideally I’d prefer some sort of decentralised blockchain based social media, outside of the control of governments, corporations and eccentric billionaires. But building that out in a legal way without getting banned by every government on Earth would be a considerable challenge.