Here’s a quick round up of the features you will find on the live platform if you check in recently.
One of the most visible interruptions when you login just recently, is Twitter offering you the ability to exchange your profile picture for an NFT. You are able to set an NFT to your account’s profile picture, connecting up your crypto wallet to the account at the same time. At the moment Twitter only supports JPEGs and PNGs in static format and NFTs that have been minted on the Ethereum blockchain. So, although it’s pretty limited at the moment, we are guessing that there will be more to come down the line. The main problem for us exploring this new feature here in the UK is that access to Twitter Blue labs is required to connect to a crypto wallet and this isn’t available to the UK audience yet.
What would be the purpose of using an NFT profile picture? Well, we guess that it’s for flexing purposes – a bit like hanging a Picasso on your office wall; if you’ve got it, you may as well show it off! If you are an NFT owner or creator you could also advertise your NFTs for sale or for rent via your profile, switching them out in your profile pic spot to advertise them at auction, or to show off parts of your portfolio. In the gaming world NFTs are traded to reskin weapons, skins and avatars, and so static NFTs in profile pics could pave the way for more interactive purposes further down the line.
Hooking up your crypto wallet to display your NFT could be an ulterior motive to enable accounts to be used for transferring cryptocurrency between people as a way of monetising the Twitter platform. We suspect that Elon Musk’s influence can be felt here, especially since he has offered to buy Twitter outright and is a well-known Cryptocurrency fan.
Twitter Blue is a new type of account from Twitter and it has so far been launched in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Twitter Blue is an opt-in, paid monthly subscription which allows you to access “premium features on Twitter”. It remains to be seen what sorts of features this subscription will include and whether or not it is worth signing up for it. To be the first to know about Twitter Blue when it is available in the UK you are encouraged to follow the @TwitterBlue Account for more information. The above mentioned NFT profile pics is one such early access feature, so it’s reasonable to suspect that it will be more of the same sort of thing – a test ground for future general release features.
Having witnessed the devastating effects of a Twitter storm, how damaging hashtag boycotts can be on brands, and the bullying that often goes unchecked by Twitter, this new down voting feature is an interesting move by Twitter. Twitter have often maintained that they are keen to uphold ‘freedom of speech values’, regardless of how far from common decency these interactions get, and how close to breaking the law they go.
So this move employs the crowd mentality of Twitter communities to encourage the community to submit more signals for policing the platform. If you spot a comment that doesn’t contribute to a conversation, or is clearly an act of trolling or thread hijacking, you can now down vote the comment. Down votes get registered anonymously and so your identity is not revealed.
There is already the ability to report comments, posts and accounts to Twitter, but these features often hinge around reporting hate crimes, illegal or offensive content and similar. A down voting system introduces more nuance.
Each comment reported under the current system gets viewed in isolation and therefore the complaint is not often upheld if the comment has been authored cleverly, needs to be read in context of the wider thread, or in context of local colloquialisms. We have had trouble with the word ‘gammon’ for instance, which means something in the UK, but means a type of meat product in offshore countries who do the moderating. Down voting may well start to tip the balance a little in flagging certain accounts as troublemakers if they pick up a lot of down votes with their interactions on Twitter. This could pave a way forward for helping combat trolls who make it their life’s work be disruptive.
To go and see the down vote in action, go and find a Twitter thread and click onto a comment to see a downward facing arrow to the right of the palette of buttons under each comment. A simple one-click on the arrow registers your downvote.
Whilst editing your profile, you might have also spotted the ability to turn “Tips” on. Tips is a feature rolled out last year that allows you to take small sums of cash donated by your followers on this platform. Twitter rolled out professional accounts last year, and also the ability for your followers to subscribe to newsletters that you put out on the Twitter-owned Revue platform. This kind of thing is aimed at helping people monetise the time and effort they put into Twitter curation, and the Tips feature is aimed at content producers to help them fund their activities.
It might be that you have fans that want to send you money just for being you, and we’re pretty sure there will be plenty of Twitter accounts that will fall into this kind of category. We signed up for Tips in order to put this how-to guide together to help you understand whether or not you’d like to do it for your brand too.
The first thing to do is click through on your ‘edit profile’ to turn on Tips. You then get taken through a simple form to hook up a payment mechanism.
Cryptocurrency are two of your options – which feeds into the crypto wallet theories already outlined earlier in this blog. You get the option to add your Bitcoin or your Ethereum address, There is also an option to hook up a Wealth Simple account (this is a Canadian-based service and they have recently pulled out of the UK, so no use to us on this side of the Atlantic), you can also cook up a Cash App account, a GoFundMe account (handy for charities who want an extra mechanism for fundraising) or a Patreon account.
To enable us to continue to set this up for this blog, we set up a Patreon account, which can be found here:
https://www.patreon.com/DestinationDigital
We can’t promise that we’ll ever put out any content on this platform, but if you want to become a patron of ours, then by all means go ahead!
Once you have entered the details of the payment account you want to use on Twitter, click save and then you will see at the top of your profile a new dollar notes icon up there. People who visit your profile can now send you cash direct, just for being you.
So there we go. We will sit tight now and see if anyone actually sends us any cash, and if they do we will report back immediately!
We hope that you found this article useful. Take a look at the other social media help articles we’ve put together:
We’re sure there will be additions to this list, so maybe bookmark this page if you found it helpful.
If you’d like help with social media management, please email us on info@destination-digital.co.uk or give us a call on 01629 810199.
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