Pay to play
I’ll be the first to admit that I care about Twitter too much. It’s an almost 17-year obsession that I sometimes wish I could quit. But I can’t and I stubbornly won’t.
Unlike previous years when I worried I spent too much time on Twitter, I worry now about the moment when it will finally go completely off the rails and become unusable or maybe simply no longer worthwhile.
There is a solid chance that when this month ends, I will lose the blue check verification mark I received over a decade ago. A while back Twitter CEO Elon Musk declared that the verification marks were unfairly handed out and that he was changing the system. Instead of verifying anyone, he’d let people pay for the mark. It was a disaster with people paying to impersonate people and companies.
Musk rolled it back and then rolled the Twitter Blue system out again with better verification. He still, though, has not wiped out impersonation.
Not much of what Musk has done on or to the system has made it a better social media platform, though he insists it’s better, more trustworthy, and even fun.
It can still be, but Musk has an ax to grind and, increasingly, he’s using Twitter to make the case that there was some sort of mass suppression of opinion (mostly right-wing) on Twitter and has released troves of internal documents to make his case. Everything I’ve seen of them fails to be the smoking gun Musk insists it is, they’re just people making tough, sometimes wrong and sometimes right, policy decisions.
Musk and his team keep messing with the algorithm to make the platform fairer for suppressed voices, which seems to result in making it less useful for all voices.
Recently he promised to open-source Twitter’s algorithm because he assumes everyone wants to see that and can understand what it means and how it might be used to over- or under-share certain kinds of content. Of course, there are very few people on Twitter who could read or understand the aglo. Most people just want Twitter to work and be fun, informative, and useful - again.
Over the weekend, Musk announced that the Twitter you see will have a new way of prioritizing Tweets based on:
“1. People you follow
2. Verified accounts
3. Unverified accounts Verified accounts are 1000X harder to game by bot & troll armies. There is great wisdom to the old saying: ‘You get what you pay for.’”
“So that haves and have nots you sought to end with pay-for blue checks is about to be reinforced with pay-to-play.”
To be fair, the first element of Musk’s plan makes sense. Yes, I follow people for a reason, and I want to see those tweets first. The second two is where I have the problem.
Verified people’s thoughts should be no more valuable than unverified ones. There are a lot of unverified users on Twitter, which has always been the case. To me, their Tweets are no less important or interesting than verified users.
But what really gets me is that this is not a play for more truth and insight. Musk simply wants everyone to pay to use Twitter and, if they do not, there’s a good chance their Tweets won’t be seen.
So much for the town square. You are a valuable part of it if you have change in your pocket. If not, go shout in the hallways and see who hears you.
People on Twitter accused me as a legacy verified account of being upset because now anyone can get verified. Honestly, I’d rather everyone was verified, but for free. I’ve long argued for the end of anonymity online because too many people hide behind digital masks when they attack other people.
There’s also this idea that verified accounts were handed out to celebrities and elites. The reality is that Twitter verified celebrities because they were at risk of impersonation. Did Twitter give out too many verifications at one point? Maybe.
Still, the idea that I’m an elite is laughable. I certainly didn’t grow up rich and can still remember my mother handing the cashier food stamps. “Elites” is a term thrown about to mean a lot of different things that I won’t get into here. My point is, I spent years on the platform before I got verified and didn’t hold back until I did. I felt I gave as much as I got to the Twitter I loved.
It seems clear that when Twitter Blue becomes the law and people like me lose their Blue Check we will now be forced to pay if we want to maintain any relevance on the platform. Can I afford $8 a month? Yes. Do I usually pay for something where I am as much a contributor as a consumer? No.
I’m not entirely sure what comes next for Twitter or my place in it but it’s pretty clear that it’s not about to get better.
What to save
My wife is wrapping up a massive photography project which required her going through not only a massive digital collection but dozens of boxes of pre-digital-age photos. At the end of it, she determined we needed to reorganize and consolidate the prints.
Sure, someday we may digitize them all but even the act of organization has raised some troubling decisions.
There was a time when photo processing companies automatically gave you doubles of everything. They did this because they assumed that you might want to share pictures of, say, your children with the grandparents. Now we just send them a file or, better yet, create a shared online system and auto-feed pics to a digital frame in their home.
Also with the extra photos, we have the negatives for all of the images. It’s a lot of physical stuff and as we prepare to move it all into nice, neat plastic boxes, my wife raised the possibility of discarding the duplicates and, yes, even the negatives.
Once I got over the shock and horror of her suggestion, I started to realize she is probably right. What do we need doubles of any photo for, especially when we can scan them and make a million copies? But what about those negatives? That’s the unprocessed version of the photo and, with it, I could create a new version of the image.
I could, but I won’t - ever. The thing is you need a special scanner or an expensive app to scan in old negatives and, generally, you won’t get anything better than a good scan of the print. When pressed, I just can’t think of a good reason to save them. But the photographer in me, the one who grew up in a dark room with all those chemicals, thinks, “No, this is wrong. Negatives are precious.”
I really don’t know what to do. Do we keep the doubles? Do we save the negatives? What would you do?
Moon shots
Recently I wrote about how Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra’s incredible moon photo capabilities are part real and part art. In other words, they create an image of the moon and do not actually deliver a true photo of the celestial object.
Part of the discussion revolving around this, though, has been about why photograph the moon in the first place. It does not change, and one really good photo of the moon looks as good as another.
I do not agree. The moon, to me, is no less a subject for photography than a person. It’s not just the photo of the moon alone, though, that qualifies as a sort of challenge to me, too, it’s the orb in context. The best moon photos are ones alongside an iconic building like the Empire State Building or a beautiful bridge.
It’s the same reason why I take so many photos of the Empire State Building. The building doesn't change but as a subject, it can be seen in a multitude of contexts: in the rain, with a head of fog, in front of striking sunlight where you can only make out the iconic building’s shape.
I will find a billion ways to take photos of the same thing and every once in a while, see a beauty I haven’t discovered before.
As for what Samsung is doing, it’s an image creation technique that, as long as you know it’s such, is no less useful than a painter using a different brush.
That’s all for now.
Be good to each other.