We have discussed Elon’s autism before, of course. However, if any of you needed further convincing, you can see it affecting Musk’s thinking with respect to the bot problem. While ostensibly the blue checkmark is intended to verify that the account actually belongs to its user, in reality it is a sign of prestige. His attempt to use the blue checkmark to solve the bot problem is further evidence he could not conceptually seperate a thing’s ostensible purpose from its true social purpose. I wonder if he thinks women by Prada handbags simply to carry their stuff as well.
A real solution to the bot problem has to institute a parallel solution to user verification, one that largely allows the blue checkmark to remain as it is.
In order to monetize the blue checkmark, first Musk needed to treat corporate entities with a blue checkmark separately from individuals who have one. Now those companies should be required to either purchase a certain amount of advertising from Twitter or to pay a fee in order to retain their blue checkmarks—and this fee should be rather large, on the order of 800K. This would allow him to extract most of the monetary value from the checkmark and its prestige without upsetting the celebrities whose blue checkmark status keeps them on the platform.
In order to solve the bot problem, on the other hand, Twitter should simply throttle the bandwidth of users who do not pay for “twitter unlocked” which should only cost a very nominal amount—limiting them to making only one tweet a day. Otherwise, one needs to give Twitter a credit card or debit card and, here is the big catch, which will be charged a fee of one dollar a month: This nominal fee will actually add up to real revenue, and if the person is required to use the same name as is on the card, ensure that he people using the site are real: And it will only take real Visa, Mastercard and Debit cards tied to a bank account, not prepaid cards. This will make bots a much smaller percentage of overall Twitter activity since it will automatically throttle their bandwidth without disrupting the prestige economy of the blue checkmark.
In exchange for this once a month fee of one dollar, the user gets unlimited posts and is given higher placement in any tweet thread over unverified accounts but without any marker on their account that interferes with the prestige economy associated with a blue checkmark.
My guess is roughly one third of users will choose to "go unlimited” and that this will massively reduce the bot activity on the site—in turn increasing the value proposition for advertisers. The revenue that comes from monetizing the corporate blue checkmark, along with the 1 billion in revenue that would come from “going unlimited” might place Twitter in a much better financial position. A more well rounded CEO would have realized all of this: But Musk is not a well-rounded CEO.