EricBauman posted:

subscriptions can work for twitter, but you can't pull enough money out of verification, even if you don't actually do verification.
you'd have to charge normal users. but you can say goodbye to the middle east, asia and africa if you do that.
selling europeans and americans a twitter subscription for thirty bucks a year is possible

but then you hit all of the problems sa has figured out over the past decades, like the two big ones that you'll immediately need to deal with:
- do you want people to be able to evade a ban just by paying?
- chargebacks when you ban or suspend people

selling people a spam and scam license for $8 just isn't going to cut it

Chill Monster posted:

If my math is correct, Twitter would need 40 million subscribers at 30 dollars a month to cover the debt service payments which Twitter got from the lawsuit and leveraged takeover.

Sounds reasonable.

quote:

- Well, I did want to congratulate you on very briefly getting your second official check mark. I don’t know if you saw that.

What?

- It’s not there now, so you won’t see it, but he briefly added a second official check mark to all these accounts, including yours—

Oh no!

- And then within a few hours they were gone. He said he had killed it. He decided it wasn’t working. [Ed. note: The “official” check marks eventually returned, although not to Patton Oswalt’s account.]

I don’t even know, at this point, what the value of a check mark is except to protect your identity.

- This was supposed to be a second check mark to protect your identity in addition to the blue check mark, which now just means you paid $8 a month.

Well, wait a minute, then I want my blue check mark gone! I don’t want people thinking I paid him $8.

- I know, that’s what I was thinking. It’s going to be like a blue check mark of shame that you paid Elon.

Oh God, well if that becomes the thing, I want my blue check mark gone immediately. Holy poo poo.

Beeftweeter posted:

a tiny dinosaur skeleton

EricBauman posted:

selling europeans and americans a twitter subscription for thirty bucks a year is possible

Cat Face Joe posted:

it's actually the skeleton of the dog they got at the beginning of the pandemic and had put down cause they "just didn't have time for it"

Beeftweeter posted:

unless i'm missing something it's already $96/year and lmao if you think he's not gonna jack that up

quiggy posted:

hello this is from several pages back but the dc metro is good, actually (well, mostly)

signed, a queer dc resident

EricBauman posted:

that's for the blue check, but to make enough money, you'd also have to charge for regular access. it just doesn't work out based on blue check revenue.

and if you get into charging for regular access, you really cant charge that much for that. a few bucks a month is the most you can charge, and you'll have to charge it per year to cut payment processing costs and to frontload the revenue

MononcQc posted:

proposal to rename elon stans to muskitos since they’re similarly annoying

MononcQc posted:

proposal to rename elon stans to muskitos since they’re similarly annoying

https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296/elon-wyd posted:

I was an intern at SpaceX years ago, back it when it was a much smaller company — after Elon got hair plugs, but before his cult of personality was in full swing. I have some insight to offer here.

Back when I was at SpaceX, Elon was basically a child king. He was an important figurehead who provided the company with the money, power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly) maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions.

Managing Elon was a huge part of the company culture. Even I, as a lowly intern, would hear people talking about it openly in meetings. People knew how to present ideas in a way that would resonate with him, they knew how to creatively reinterpret (or ignore) his many insane demands, and they even knew how to “stage manage” parts of the physical office space so that it would appeal to Elon.

The funniest example of “stage management” I can remember is this dude on the IT security team. He had a script running in a terminal on one of his monitors that would output random garbage, Matrix-style, so that it always looked like he was doing Important Computer Things to anyone who walked by his desk. Second funniest was all the people I saw playing WoW at their desks after ~5pm, who did it in the office just to give the appearance that they were working late.

People were willing to do that at SpaceX because Elon was giving them the money (and hype) to get into outer space, a mission people cared deeply about. The company also grew with and around Elon. There were layers of management between individual employees and Elon, and those managers were experienced managers of Elon. Again, I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy.

Twitter has neither of those things going for it. There is no company culture or internal structure around the problem of managing Elon Musk, and I think for the first time we’re seeing what happens when people actually take that man seriously and at face value. Worse, they’re doing this little experiment after this man has had decades of success at companies that dedicate significant resources to protecting themselves from him, and he’s too narcissistic to realize it.

This post is long so I’ll leave you with my favorite Elon story. One day at work, I got an all hands email telling me that it was Elon’s birthday and there was going to be a mandatory surprise party for him in the cafeteria. Presumably Elon also got this email, but whatever. We all marched down into the cafeteria, dimmed the lights, and waited. Elon was led out by his secretary (who he hadn’t fired yet) and made a big show of being fake surprised and touched that we were there. Then they wheeled out the cake.

OK, so, I want you to imagine the biggest penis cake you’ve ever seen. Like the king of novelty sex cakes. Only it’s frosted white, and the balls have been frosted to look like fire and smoke. This was Elon’s birthday “rocket” cake.

For as long as I live, I will never forget the look on everyone’s face — in that dark room of mostly-male engineers — when he made a wish and cut into the tip.

Improbable Lobster posted:

quote:

Managing Elon was a huge part of the company culture. Even I, as a lowly intern, would hear people talking about it openly in meetings. People knew how to present ideas in a way that would resonate with him, they knew how to creatively reinterpret (or ignore) his many insane demands, and they even knew how to “stage manage” parts of the physical office space so that it would appeal to Elon.
[...]
People were willing to do that at SpaceX because Elon was giving them the money (and hype) to get into outer space, a mission people cared deeply about. The company also grew with and around Elon. There were layers of management between individual employees and Elon, and those managers were experienced managers of Elon. Again, I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy.

Twitter has neither of those things going for it. There is no company culture or internal structure around the problem of managing Elon Musk, and I think for the first time we’re seeing what happens when people actually take that man seriously and at face value. Worse, they’re doing this little experiment after this man has had decades of success at companies that dedicate significant resources to protecting themselves from him, and he’s too narcissistic to realize it.

MononcQc posted:

god this is some amazing "here's how you can succeed with Elon" cultural insight about managing up in the most aggressive way possible. Like to deal with him being present you need to have this whole structure into neutralizing him in a way that still makes him feel important and how unprepared Twitter now is for it.

Improbable Lobster posted:

Improbable Lobster posted:

Beeftweeter posted:

really it's what i'd expect. elon is a caricature

like his official title is "chief engineer" for fucks sake. motherfucker thinks hes geordi laforge

fart simpson posted:

well he is african american

fart simpson posted:

well he is african american

Cat Face Joe posted:

for the last time, they are called bazingas

qirex posted:

he’s basically a mascot

Platystemon posted:

she asked what kind of handle i was looking for on my cai dao

i said that i thought it was appropriate to have a chinese-style of handle on a chinese-style knife

this was not the right answer

and to be fair, yeah, it was a stupid reason, use whichever works better in your hand (which happens to be the traditional handle)

quiggy posted:

hello this is from several pages back but the dc metro is good, actually (well, mostly)

signed, a queer dc resident

Isentropy posted:

queer Toronto resident, these light rail units are good actually