I asked your advice, and I took it. This is what happened next.

Quick recap for those who missed it: A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a short article about whether or not I was going to pay Elon the $8 for my Twitter Blue Check. …Uh, X? X-Twitter? TwiX? My TwiX Blue Check.

If you’re interested, click the link and you can read all the pros and cons I listed. I went into the ethics of it as well as the morality (there’s a difference), and then the cost-benefit analysis. And finally I confessed I was stumped, and asked for advice.

Which turned out to be, “Sounds like you need to try it to find out if it’s going to be worth while. It’s only $8, so why not?”

That made sense, so I went, “Why not?” and signed up.

How It Started

It took a couple of days to get going. Apparently part of what you pay for is the time it takes them to make sure the check doesn’t bounce. (See what I did there? Clever, huh?)

During those days, I did my normal routine: Stop in a couple times a day to see if someone talked to me, respond, put up my links, and so on. My baseline was 1 link click per month, 340 Followers, and 400 Impressions per day. Once a month ago something random I said took off and got me a few thousand, but that was soon over.

Then, about mid-morning on August 1st, the magic check mark appeared.

By 11AM, when I logged in, I was at 2000 Impressions. Nothing new, nothing unique, just a blue check. I posted a link to one of my News Updates and went on with my day. By 4PM I was at 4700 Impressions, 4 link clicks, and had 2 new Follows. I hung out and TwiXed a bit (Dude! That’s fun to say. I wonder if people will start doing it now?) and then signed off for dinner. 6175 by end of day, which I discovered comes at 8PM.

Right. Evidently the algorithm is in fact stacked in favor of the fortunate Blue Check few. Makes sense. That’s what I would do if I were trying to force a bunch of self-promoting artists and would-be influencers to pay me for a boost: I’d create an artificial constriction on their traffic and offer to take it away for a small fee. It’s blackmail, or rather extortion, but it’s cheap enough considering I pay $10 for a Meta ad that doesn’t actually do anything.

The Next Day things slowed down measurably. 4148 Impressions, but on the other hand I was up 13 total Followers, so not a total loss. I wasn’t very active, but I still replied to most of the people who talked to me and chimed in on the odd conversation.

By bedtime, TwiX thought it was the 3rd, and I had 1000 new Impressions. In the morning that had doubled; by noon, one of my random comments had 2500 by itself. Unfortunately, the new story I’d linked out at SciFi Shorts only got 6 Impressions and one Click. Social media does not function sensibly, it seems. End of day: 18056 Impressions, 4 Followers, and 3 Clicks on my articles. Meh.

Day 4: 15k+ Impressions by the time I woke up. That random comment about eating pie really took off. Wow. Semi-active; 35242 Impressions by bedtime. Cool, but I’d need 17x as many daily to qualify for ad-share, so not all that cool.

Day 5: 13094, but somehow I managed to be up 50 Followers by the end of the day. I spent a while conversing with people, and it helped.

Day 6: Did a “Yes or No?” post with a picture of pumpkin pie flavored ice cream sandwiches. By bedtime, somehow it had 269 Likes and 6k Impressions. 16957 total, and I appear to have accumulated over 150 Followers.

Day 7: Very active; achieved very little. 23k Impressions, but a high rate of Engagement, according to the Analytics page.

Day 8: Under 10k, and I was highly active and interactive. I feel cheated somehow, but then I look back to a week ago and realize it’s still a marked improvement.

Day 9: I worked through the night on writing projects and kept up with my Twitter correspondence in between paragraphs. It worked out well on both fronts; I composed a 1300-word contest submission and wrung 11k Impressions out of TwiX. Slept a few hours, then got back to work. Benevolent inattention has brought me to 28952 by this writing, 4:20 PM. EDIT: 41,436 by EOD.

Summary

It’s now Day 9 of the experiment. I’m regularly getting five digits in Impressions per day, and it’s rare that I don’t pick up a couple of Follows. My links are being Clicked fairly regularly now, hitting a new record of 26 today from across six TwiXes. That’s a fair improvement from one in the preceding month.

So far, so good. I’m not on track to get ad money from this, but my stories at SciFi Shorts are getting a ton of traffic. We’re about to see just how well my TwiX-relevant TNFN article will do. No donations yet, but what the hell; the month is young.

I’ll let you know on the next update of the Great Blue Check Experiment.

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