...
- My impression at the moment is that it's worth it for me to pay for Twitter, as I'm currently trying to increase my following by being a "reply guy" (i.e. focusing on replying to the tweets of people with more followers than me, in the hope that they or their followers will see my reply and decide to follow me as well). To that end:
- I suspect that the 'Verified' checkmark serves as a small signal of quality when I reply to a larger account. To use a term from game theory, it seems that paying for Twitter is "differentially costly", meaning it's a relatively small expense for someone like me who takes Twitter fairly seriously, but a relatively large one for lots of other people, especially people who don't take Twitter particularly seriously and thus might be more likely to make careless / thoughtless comments. So someone seeing a tweet from someone with the blue checkmark might subconsciously react to it with a gut feeling that there's a higher chance that this the tweet is worth paying attention to than if the person didn't have the blue checkmark.
- Tweets from paying users are apparently currently listed on top of those of unverified users, and so there's a degree to which even being "in the game" requires paying the fee, in the sense that my replies would have a far higher chance of not being seen if I didn't pay.
...