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What Elon Musk’s membership scheme has done to social status on Twitter

This is very astute by Henry Farrell. I was gesturing towards this in my series of LSE Impact posts on post-Musk Twitter last year without ever managing to capture it:

But the problem, as Musk has discovered, is that kicking against the ticks is not a profit maximizing strategy, or a particularly good money making strategy at all. The number of people who are willing to pay $8 a month is reportedly underwhelming.

In part, this may be because there aren’t very many real perquisites that come with it – as best as I know, promises that blue ticks will see less ads have gone unfulfilled, like many other promises of Musk-era Twitter. In part, it’s because the social status isn’t worth as much any more. To the extent that blue ticks are status goods, they are debased when they are sold at a scheduled market price. They don’t tell observers that the blue tick recipient has been found worthy in some mysterious process. Instead, they convey the information that the recipient is willing to spend $8 a month to get their tweets prioritized. That is not even an ambiguous signal of high social status.

Indeed, it may be a signal to the contrary. Under the current status quo, people will be unwilling to pay for blue ticks, unless they simply want to get their tweets in front of more people than they would otherwise. Their willingness to pay will hence be a negative signal of the quality of what they have to say. The current system of verification, without unlikely and expensive oversight, will overselect on spammers and egomaniacs. Second, for just this reason, ordinary Twitter users will plausibly be less willing to pay attention to accounts with blue ticks than to accounts without them.

The risk to Twitter then is of a degenerating equilibrium in which ever fewer people pay attention to verified status, leading verified status to become ever less valuable. That’s too neat and simple a story – real life social dynamics are always much messier. But I don’t think it is entirely wrong either.

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/kicking-against-the-ticks

The epistemic decay of Twitter is obviously overdetermined. But maximising the visibility of low status posts, particularly in replies, surely plays a significant role in driving it. Remember in the mid 2010s when Twitter (belatedly) started prioritising ‘conversational health’? Musk has done almost exactly the opposite of this, illustrating how being a prominent shitposter does not equate to understanding the platform on which you are posting your shit. I’m increasingly persuaded from the (repetitive) journalistic books about the fiasco that he saw himself as having ‘won’ Twitter and therefore was best placed to ‘fix’ it. I suspect the ketamine and zopiclone haven’t helped either though.

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