Tag: signups
Twitter Blue nets 28 signups so far since legacy checkmark purge
The removal of legacy users’ verified checkmarks finally happened on Thursday and the aftermath was unnerving for the platform. Early results culled from independent researchers about a day after the legacy purge showed that Twitter Blue only netted 28 new subscribers.
This is disheartening news for Musk’s subscription service, as the purge was the billionaire’s attempt to force verified users to pay for Twitter Blue. This strong-arm tactic has looked destined to backfire spectacularly ever since it was announced. As covered on Mashable before, celebrities like LeBron James and Stephen King have been very vocal critics of the move. The purge even provoked the ire of big-name shitposting accounts like @dril, who set out to block anyone who has a checkmark now.
Travis Brown, an independent researcher who has been keeping track of Twitter Blue subscriber numbers, relayed the news on Twitter Friday. He noted that of the 400,000+ legacy accounts, only 19,469 were subscribed to Twitter Blue, and after the purge that number increased to 19,497. While Brown does not have direct access to Twitter Blue subscriber data, his methodology has been reliable in the past.
Brown commented in the thread that anyone with an API account can verify his numbers, and he also explains how he gathers such data. Brown had earlier used his API access to confirm that legacy verification really has been purged from the platform.
For context, Musk had originally planned to purge legacy checkmarks on April 1. That did not happen, but when the purge did finally move forward this week, some users discovered a glitch that revealed that legacy users’ badges weren’t actually removed, they were just hidden by the UI.
It seems this issue has been fixed. But technical glitches and coding shortcuts are not uncommon since Musk took over last October. Possibly as a result of laying off 80 percent of his full-time staff, Twitter has experienced a deluge of weird bugs that have done everything from allowing copyrighted movies to be played in full, to outages of almost the entire platform.
The legacy checkmark purge is emblematic of Elon Musk’s Twitter ethos: the billionaire CEO seems to have misconstrued the former value of blue checks to Twitter users, and seems to believe that value is monetary. In reality, having been introduced after former Major League Baseball player Tony La Russa of all people threatened to sue Twitter, verification once existed solely to stop impersonation on the app. It morphed into a status symbol, and then that status symbol became available to anyone with $8. Now the blue checkmark is associated with Musk’s fans: largely NFT/crypto grifters and right-wing influencers.
In other words, Musk appears to have mistaken the past prestige associated with ID verification for something that can be commodified. But it now looks like that bubble has burst. With legacy accounts having had their checkmarks removed, and the platform’s only ID verification system now saddled with stigma, the platform is facing a bad impersonation problem — a complication that spurred major advertisers to back out of Twitter in previous months.
Back in March, Brown found more than half the accounts subscribed to Twitter Blue have less than 1,000 followers, revealing an unwillingness by the platform’s power users to buy into the service. In an apparent attempt to circumvent this, Musk has effectively made verification free for a very small subset of influential users, personally paying for the verification of a few celebrities, including Lebron James, Stephen King, and William Shatner.
So in a weird twist of irony, verification isn’t cool anymore even though the coolness was what was supposed to convince people to buy Twitter Blue in the first place. The subscription numbers may not be cool for Musk’s bottom line, but maybe those 28 new subscribers feel pretty fly right now.
Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions Announced, Testing Signups Now Open
Twitter opens early access signups for organization verification
Twitter is now accepting signups for those who to be among the first to access the verification for organizations program. It was previously known as Blue for Business, the company said in its announcement, along with a link to the sign-up form. Organizations will have to submit their names, Twitter usernames and websites to be considered for the waitlist. They also have to indicate their size and the expected number of affiliated accounts. If you’ll recall, Musk previously announced that the website will roll out a feature that will give organizations the capability to identify accounts that are actually associated with them.
His announcement came after a rather disastrous launch of Twitter’s paid verification system, which gave rise to a bunch of verified trolls impersonating companies, celebrities and other high-profile personalities. This upcoming feature is meant to help address the issue and ensure that users claiming to be part of a specific organization are who they say they are.
We will soon launch Verification for Organizations, formerly known as Blue for Business. Today, you can apply for early access via our waitlist here: https://t.co/wNdVPXHQRq
— Twitter Business (@TwitterBusiness) January 13, 2023
Musk also announced back then that the website will offer checkmarks in different colors: gold for companies, grey for government and blue for individuals. That will make posing as a company or a government agency difficult for random users. The company ultimately had to pause Blue’s initial rollout due to the influx of impersonators before relaunching it in December with an $11-per-month price tag.
Twitter will publish its “tweet recommendation code” and will make tweet and account status visible “no later than next month,” Musk has revealed, as well. Presumably, that means users will know if they’ve been shadowbanned and their tweets aren’t showing up for other people. “Transparency builds trust,” he added. In addition, he announced that the website is moving the bookmark button to the tweet details page and is fixing its image auto-cropping feature next week.
Twitter new user signups at an ‘all-time high,’ says Elon Musk
A month after completing his takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk says new user signups are at an “all-time high.” On Saturday evening, the billionaire shared a slide deck that details the current state of Twitter and his vision for the platform. As of November 16th, Twitter was adding more than 2 million new users per day over the last seven days, according to one of the graphs Musk shared. He added daily signups are up 66 percent compared to the same seven-day period in 2021.
Slides from my Twitter company talk pic.twitter.com/8LLXrwylta
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2022
Musk said user active minutes were also at an all-time high, with Twitter’s userbase averaging nearly 8 billion active minutes per day over the last seven days as of November 15th – representing a 30 percent increase from the same period last year. He also used a graph to claim hate speech impressions recently decreased.
Even if the data Musk shared is accurate, what it means is very much up for discussion. For instance, the graph about hate speech presents, at best, an incomplete picture of the situation. For one, note that the small print states the data only covers tweets in English. Second, there’s evidence to suggest Twitter recently stopped enforcing its hateful conduct policy as it applies to targeted harassment of trans people.
Just as important is the data Musk decided not to share. Not a single graph offers insight into Twitter’s financials, yet according to multiple reports, Musk recently told employees the company was losing so much money that bankruptcy was “not out of the question.” A more recent report suggests Twitter has lost 50 of its top 100 advertisers since Musk took the platform over.
On early Sunday, Musk told Jordan Peterson he sees “a path to Twitter exceeding a billion monthly users in 12 to 18 months.” Meeting that goal will require Twitter to dramatically increase signups. Assuming the company continues to add 2 million users per week, that’s only 104 million new users by the end of one year. Twitter has approximately 450 million monthly active users as of 2022.
The Division Heartland beta signups are live for the free to play game
Ubisoft has shown off a gameplay tease for its upcoming free game Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland at the Ubisoft Forward event. The Division Heartland beta signups are now live, giving players a chance to get their hands on the next game in the post-apocalyptic shooter series. Heartland is a co-op game that sees players once more step into the shoes of a trained Division agent, this time answering a distress call from a rural community in Middle America.
Heartlands creative director Keith Edwards explains what fans can look forward to as they arrive in the small town of Silver Creek. Featuring “streamlined survival gameplay and a beautiful new world to explore,” players will go up against The Division’s usual range of hostile factions in the wake of the Dollar Flu outbreak.
For those wanting to try out the game for themselves, Ubisoft is planning upcoming closed beta tests ahead of the game’s release. You can sign up now on The Division Heartland website for a chance to be invited to the closed tests, though there’s no date yet for when they’ll be taking place.
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