Random Updates

What I’m Thinking About and Working on Right Now

I’ve realized recently that I have a lot of five minute chunks of time, but I have virtually no hour long chunks of time. Those that I do have, I get by waking up super early and burning up my cognitive ability for my afternoons. So, here’s where I’m at and what I’m thinking about. I’ll also talk more about my economic paranoia.

This was mostly written while my son watched Arriety as I cooked him breakfast.

Thoughts on Twitter

I think Twitter is slowly converging on a future that I want and Community Notes is working as well as I hoped. Elon is a big fan of Notes so it seems like they’re going to breathe lots of life over that product line. However, there are a couple big things they need to execute on and couple things they need to change.

They NEED to make the browser injector and allow the Notes community to note articles that aren’t on Twitter. That’s the critical piece of technology of in your face technology that’s going to allow that thing to explode and change the whole media economy. I’m more and more convinced people seeing that functionality would make them evolve the right back end architecture.

My plan for the Index right now is that whenever I can finally take a week off —things are wild, still— I’m going to build the browser injector piece, the honest headline piece, and do some rudimentary product demo video then find a way to post it on twitter and substack notes. During some of my five minute chunks of time on ChatGPT I’ve already started to built out some of it. Changing headlines and building a demo is a feasible thing to accomplish in a week and I could do it pretty cheaply. My whole exit plan for this would be to gain a crumb of Elon’s attention —or anyone on the substack team, really— and force him/them to just take it. I like my job but I’m waking up to the fact that for all my weird psychological issues —which are real, by the way— I’m probably one of the best humans currently alive to do this kind of a thing so maybe I could talk my wife into me going to work for Twitter or Substack or may I just need to start my own company. I have to know that someone is going to execute my specific product roadmap even if that someone is me.

They are doing the verification piece all wrong and I think they might collapse the whole network. I mean Jesus Christ. One of the things I’m most thankful for in my life is that my grandfather tried to live out a magic hobby vicariously through me and made me learn a bunch of tricks. It gave me a good appreciation for how people actually work and how wonky all of that stuff really is. I think Elon sees everyone as a sane rational actor.

One of my favorite people —because she tries to appear mean, but is secretly nice— is Katie Herzogg. She was a legacy Blue Check. She lost it and refuses to pay the $8/mos. If you were thinking about this purely from a rational perspective, of course being able to have priority access to your 100K+ followers is worth $8/mos. Of course. I mean, have you even done a financial spreadsheet? People would slit throats for those kinds of ad costs.

The problem is that if you’re a legacy blue check, a person from whom Twitter has derived enormous value even if it’s just by posting things that are out of touch that causes other people to dunk on you, it’s an insult. You’ve provided content that has value and the company is asking you to pay for it.

What they should have done was build better status symbols. And a lot of this has to do with nudges. Here’s what I would have done.

-Default every legacy blue check into the subscriber mode, but with some caveats in case they were in a country you can’t legally pay. I’d default them into it but if they weren’t actually set up/legal/compliant whatever I’d have the UI display “Hey, we’re just holding onto $XX.00 for you right now. Click here to complete your enrollment to get access to it. We will cancel this after XX months and refund your subscribers if not or as soon as we know you can’t accept this.”

Their subscribers get top priority in the replies, which is a thing they’re already getting theoretically but now they are beating out other verified people. Also, if you subscribe to someone that should also count as your verification so it’s a pure value add. Now you get to make money, your subscribers can feel they support you, and Twitter gets a share of the revenue. And you know whoever gets the money is a real person because they have to register a checking account to accept it at some point.

Now for this hypothetical person to not buy in to the new verification system because they feel insulted they would not only have to succumb to the insult, they would have to walk away from money on the table from people who like them and think they’re great. That would put them in a position of alienating their own support base by refusing. And some dumb asshole in the whole base of your subscribers if you’re actually liked it doing to support you.

-Anyone who has subscribers is automatically blue check verified and the more subscribers you have the more magical your blue check gets. Say with every order of magnitude for 10, 100, 1000 etc. People love merit badges and sashes and all that bullshit. For the one time cost of some blue check art you’ve now bought them into your scheme. Now you don’t want to look like the dumb jerk who only has one paid subscriber but a hundred thousand followers. Substack is already doing something similar.

You also get what you want on the culture side, which is to tear down the spirit behind what blue check twitter used to stand for, which is someone standing on a box in the town square declaring themselves to be the king of the world, but who nobody actually really likes, and who is just spouting nonsense all of the time.

I suspect you’d find that a lot of people with a lot of followers and a legacy blue check have almost no one who would actually pay to listen to what they say. That’s a telling signal. I also bet there are a lot of people who do have supporters and that’s a signal too. Carrot and stick. Never accept one without the other because that’s how the universe is built.

This is why it’s not the right move to just seize your enemy’s lands. That’s only the starting play. You have to win over the hearts of their people and make them hate their previous ruler. You have to exorcise the idea of what that ruler used to mean. Deleting the blue check won’t kill the spirit of the blue check. So instead, you create better status symbols.

Then on top of this I’d built a whole ratings game. Here’s your badge for having a great story according to the notes community. Here’s your badge for being a comedian who made a lot of people laugh. Make getting a stupid bit of clip art on your profile feel like winning the Oscar. In fact, all Oscar winners get the little statue. Boom.

The Business Verification pricing model is also terrible. It costs $1,000/month to have that gold check. This is the wrong model. You want everyone to be using this for their business. You want everyone giving that square badge to their employees. You want Twitter to be the place for prestige and reputation building. You say “Yeah, you can do $1,000/month for your gold check, or you can pay $100/month as long as you verify 10 employees and then after that it’s $10/month per employee extra.” This is where you start to make fuck you money.

Let’s just play this out psychologically. If you’re S&S Roofing Supply, $100/mos for ten badges is all you need and hey you get to show people you’re a legit roofing company. You definitely wouldn’t have paid $1,000/month but for ten badges for your sales reps to do searches for affluent people who don’t do manual labor themselves then yeah that’s a legit marketing cost with some actual pay back. But if you’re the New York Times who is balking at the $1,000/month? Just play out the conversation.

“Well, I don’t understand. I mean it’s only $100/month. We’re the prestige newspaper of the entire world. There are local pizza companies who are paying for this and we don’t have it.”

“Am I not worth $10/mos to you?”

Do you know how vain writers are? I am kind of a writer but I’m a self-hating writer who is *sigh* employable. By the actual, not pretend poverty of my upbringing, I had to learn how to actually do things. Every fucking person who has ever had a help wanted ad in the NYT is going to want that square badge. And they would fight and kill to get it. Suddenly that $1,000/month is now a lot more than that.

But you also respond to that pressure and have a deal worked out where the NYT can pass on a former employee badge, or a lesser something, and that can stick to the person’s profile who is dying to get one… so long as that person is also a paid Verified account.

Under that kind of a pricing model the NYT would probably end up paying tens of thousands of dollars a month and keep getting nickeled and dimed by their own employee base to get the badge.

It looks like as of me going to publish this that Elon has already targeted the feature for one time paywall bypass for articles. This is the supreme value that Twitter verified should give people. It’s like a “best of news” news subscription where everyone wins.

I know I’ve sent some messages that way and I think a few people are reading who are influential so hopefully this gets out to someone.

ECONOMIC DOOM

I no longer know how to feel but I’m waiting for some banks to collapse from commercial real estate loans so until that happens I’m still holding where I’m at. I don’t predict the market will collapse totally unless China makes a play for Taiwan or Russia has an incredible victory in the Ukraine. So, I bought some bitcoin and put it on a wallet on my phone so I’m holding the keys. Same amount as last time. I have no idea what timeline this will all play out over or if someone does some fancy debt restructure or if AI flips the whole play board.

We are living through wild times but we will get through them.

Next part of that short story should be out soon’ish. I’m tweaking the next part but it’s all drafted at present. That said I may chuck and rewrite one of the halves.