Astral Codex Ten

Twitter Blue

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Twitter Blue

Article

Twitter Blue is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 02, 2023 and September 18, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “sites could verify through payment - something like Twitter Blue”; “Twitter Blue was a dud”; “Twitter Blue was a dud, anecdotally I’ve been seeing lots more people using it lately”. It most often appears alongside Twitter, Ashlee Vance, Boeing.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: February 02, 2023
  • Last seen: September 18, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse
February 02, 2023 · Original source
If nothing else works, sites could verify through payment - something like Twitter Blue. Propagandabot owners could pay for one account, but not separate accounts for each of the thousands of people they want to reach. And if one account started messaging thousands of people, this would be suspicious activity that moderators could detect and remove.
Book Review: Elon Musk
September 13, 2023 · Original source
Although stories from this winter claimed that Twitter Blue was a dud, anecdotally I’ve been seeing lots more people using it lately. This could provide X with a revenue source independent of advertising and make them well-placed to survive any future chatbotpocalypse.
Inline links: chatbotpocalypse
Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
>> “Although stories from this winter claimed that Twitter Blue was a dud, anecdotally I’ve been seeing lots more people using it lately. This could provide X with a revenue source independent of advertising and make them well-placed to survive any future chatbotpocalypse.”
As for this I am fairly certain that's just Scotts twitter bubble. Twitter blue is still relentlessly mocked across much of twitter. An amount of accounts that find value in the benefits for outreach for content/business/whatever do exist - reluctant or otherwise. But that's not a significant enough demographic to rely on at its current cost. And the benefits it offers do not warrant higher pricing. For the average user blue still just is not appealing. For the most part it's relegated to the afformentioned accounts that highly value the benefits, or Musk fanboys/tech adjacent enough accounts. Which is fine, but feeds back into the central conceit of this whole micro-discussion: Musks successes can outperform Musks failures. The pipeline from his PR ability to twitter blue sales and thus an alternate revenue stream is so direct it feels like a contrived hypothetical built almost exactly to explore this topic.
The twitter bubble you inhabit definitely makes a big difference to your perception here! The vast majority of users in my niche of twitter have left, nobody has twitter blue; the site is just a fairly boring wasteland for me now, punctuated with the odd promoted Elon tweet which I have no interest in. I went from a decent amount of daily use to only checking it once or twice a week.