Thread by @ZenOfDesign

The last week on Twitter has been really an amazing string of WTF, even by the impressive standards of Elon. It's really funny when you put all the pieces together.

it's important to start at the beginning. Twitter's pretty broke.

(amusing thread)

Twitter is 'can't pay the rent' level of broke.

tech.co/news/musk-twit…

Twitter is 'we're being sued because we owe $500 million dollars of severance pay' level of broke.

mashable.com/article/twitte…

Twitter got into this position largely by deciding that getting people to subscribe to Twitter Blue was the future, and would be enough to make Twitter less dependant on Advertising. Remember when they made the hard switch to get rid of old legacy checkmarks? No one converted.

Blue checkmarks were viewed so terribly that Elon Musk forced them on certain selected celebrities -- many of whom then felt obligated to stress to their followers that no, they would not pay for this garbage website.

slate.com/technology/202…

Advertisers are, of course, still pretty skeptical.

vox.com/technology/202…

(Eagle eye observers may note that this rosie outlook may not match what Elon says in tech puff pieces)

bbc.com/news/business-…

But this shouldn't be a surprise as Twitter was basically treading water before Elon acquired it -- and immediately saddled the company with $13 billion dollars of debt, which require constant debt servicing (you know, interest payments).

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

(As an aside, congratulations to the banks who loaned Elon money. You figured out a way to make Twitter profitable, at least for you! Good for you!)

A huge part of the problem is that advertising has declined massively. You've probably noticed that your ads are now less likely to be McDonald's and Acura and more likely to be Cheech & Chong's gummies and various level crap.

https://t.co/hlsMQvWQtvwish.com
cnn.com/2023/02/10/tec…

Which made it all the more surprising when last week a bunch of blue checkmarked Tweeters reported getting informed they were getting big payouts from Twitter, in the $20K range.

When pressed upon it, Elon stressed that the payouts were based on ads that were served in replies to their threads to other verified members, stressing that content to free users was easy to manipulate.

I doubt Elon's advertisers are paying based on just subscriber views.

This is also funny because a core promise of Twitter Blue is that you won't see very many ads! So Twitter Blue went from the feature that would make ads unnecessary to one where Blue users MUST be shown ads in order to succeed!

Also, if you think this sounds like a pyramid scheme or an MLM... yeah, kinda does! It's a transparent attempt to goose blue subscriptions with the promise that you, too, could be getting $25K checks instead of being one of the greater fools shelling out $8/month.

Over on Bluesky, @ParkerMolloy noted that one certain blue check mark user with 1.8M users had not gotten a check -- and wasn't happy about it. Here are some screenshots she grabbed.

Despite being an unqualified garbage person, the esteemed Mr. Turd2 is an endless source of amusement to me, given that he constantly complains about being treated unfairly by Elon's twitter DESPITE BEING ARTIFICIALLY ALGORITHMICALLY BOOSTED.

money.yahoo.com/twitter-secret…

Another person in Catturd's circle of MAGA doofuses did a little research and discovered that, no, it wasn't a systematic thing, just checks sent out to a handful of handpicked posters -- mysteriously, posters that interact with Elon a lot.

As @TaylorLorenz reports, they describe this picking of winners and losers as a 'human review'.

https://t.co/Va0Gmkhl12washingtonpost.com/technology/202…

As Taylor reports, people who have worked at Twitter in the past and know the numbers at play know that this is all a PR stunt.

So who did Elon handpick for this program? Well, a high profile sex trafficker for starters.

Media Matters (@mmfa) did a pretty good roundup. Surprise, it's all of the right-wing dumbosphere that specialize in racism and homophobia/transphobia that Elon likes to interact with on a regular basis!

https://t.co/ui0vnWV3r7mediamatters.org/twitter/right-…

The message is clear. If you want to make money from Twitter, be a right-wing influencer who regularly takes a shit on marginalized minorities.

And now, Elon has announced he plans to double these payouts. But as you keep these promises in mind, remember.... Twitter doesn't have any money, and has no interesting new revenue pipelines coming.

All of this feels very much like a publicity stunt to try to keep their key influencers from leaving. But why would they feel the need to do that? Gee, that's a real puzzle.

/thread