Ruining the perceived value of a (stupid) blue checkmark
How to destroy any semblance of trust and safety and probably get away with it
Well well well, look who is breaking one of the cardinal sins of Community Trust 101. And yeah, he will get away with it because he is… wealthy… and is petty enough to privately fund Twitter to ensure he wins.
But for the rest of us who do not share the “values” or priorities of billionaires, let’s deconstruct why the blue checkmark is now meaningless. And for what it is worth, I think Twitter should have created a program similar to this years ago. If you want to reduce trolling and bots, you create an onboarding that requires identity verification. Will it stop the fake accounts entirely? Of course not, this will always be a game of cat and mouse.
So why haven’t they tried it before? Because it slows your growth metrics. And when you sell your company’s soul to shareholders, you best be growing your MAUs.
But back to the elusive blue checkmark, whose seemingly straightforward requirements of being “authentic, notable, and active” proved to be a wee bit more complicated and secretive.
If you weren’t notably famous and managed to score that blue checkmark it meant something. Imagine the career path, the dedication, the audience building, until finally one day you are approved and LOL j/k now you can buy it for $8/month kthnxbye!
And here we are, the cardinal sin hath been broketh.
And that is…. 📣 you shouldn’t take existing perks away from your members 📣
Is Twitter a community? Kiiiiinda? Like a MLM is a business opportunity?
Technically, the new checkmark is not in the same league as the original. But as we all know, they were pretty indistinguishable in the feed which led to a really entertaining end of last week (the highlight for me may have been the American Girl parody account truth bombs).
And even if they’ve since made them more distinguishable in the feed, the perceived value is just like the company; practically bankrupt. Because the community members that Twitter cares about are the advertisers…and they are all recovering from being parodied by inviting Twitter to not live with them anymore.
In a real community, taking away a perk or putting an existing perk behind a paywall will have a similar reaction (hopefully with less parody accounts for your sake).
If you want to avoid a total revolt and exodus, consider coming from a place of generosity and legacy your existing members into continued access to whatever perk you are going to remove or add an additional charge to. And if you can’t for whatever reason, have a conversation about it before it actually happens and get feedback. Members will have a lot more empathy if you include them in what is happening, and may even have an idea that you never thought of.
Overall I give Twitter five out of five dumpster fires 🗑️🔥. If you know someone still working there maybe reach out and offer to look at their Resume.
Where does your brain go when you think about the lessons learned from this blue check drama? Chime in!
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