Out of Elon Musk’s first working weekend as chief twit, news that sent shudders through the Twittersphere: The blue verification badge that assures tweeters that you’re you and I’m me could soon cost $8 per month (down from the initially reported price of $20, per The Verge) to be displayed on one’s account, as part of a revamped Twitter Blue subscription. According to The Verge’s report on Sunday, current verified users would have 90 days to start paying once the feature relaunches—or risk losing their checkmark. So of course, Twitter users flipped out, particularly those with the most to lose in terms of both online cachet and the risk of digital imposters.

The Twitter blue check is a defining feature of the platform. It’s always been free, though not exactly accessible; the uproar around losing this particular arrangement of pixels by one’s handle should honestly be web3’s easiest entry point for getting the rest of us to understand NFTs. Holding the badge hostage is exactly the kind of middle finger Musk’s legion of fanboys and trolls hoped their fave billionaire would give to the snowflake bluechecks, but even if this turns out to be a stunt (or gets further negotiated down via whatever live focus-grouping Musk seems to be doing), this opening salvo already reveals how little Musk seems to understand this $44 billion website that he just took the tags off of.

Here’s the presiding rule of engagement on the internet: If the platform is free, you are the product. (As Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s 1973 video “Television Delivers People” put it, “It is the consumer who is consumed.”) You, a user of Google’s “free” search engine, or Facebook’s “free” website, or any number of free-ish Amazon services, should already know this, how every crumb of data we leave behind on an average meander online is getting neatly swept up behind us and Rumpelstiltskinned into advertiser gold and finer-tuned algorithms. (When I worked at BuzzFeed during its peak quiz era, readers often theorized whether all those “free” personality quizzes were us secretly gathering a tonnage of market data to sell to advertisers—to which I say, as a non-retired non-millionaire: lol).

When it comes to social media platforms, the same goes for each like, tweet, and unit of digitized input we toss down the well. None of what we “make” on these platforms is really ours, and we users have tacitly agreed to this under the condition that being there in the first place and generating our various little plumes of digital noise helps further our own personal agendas (to look popular, to earn an income, etc.). Each of the major platforms have, at particular points in their growth and maturation, devised ways to incentivize these content creators (both of the individual type and the institutional) to come do a little churning within their respective walled gardens: Who could forget all those splashy reports about Facebook paying publishers a lot of money to host journalism and videos on site, or how Twitter, for a while, had a morning news show produced by BuzzFeed?

Across YouTube’s and TikTok’s respective creator programs (as well as that of their competitors’), this was the dominant strategy: Pay certain super-users to stock your site full of content, then charge advertisers to access the eyeballs then amassed. (Then, claim strenuously that you’re not a publisher yourself, per se—but simply the gates to the carnival, not entirely responsible for whatever antics actually go down). In the age of subscription content platforms like Substack, you simply cut out the advertiser and help your Pro-deal recipient charge for the content themselves (you, the platform, of course, get a cut for yourself along the way).

The platform-creator relationship, as a result, is fraught by design of both parties’ competing intentions: Platforms want to construct a bricked-up compound where we might live, eat, and breathe Amazon Prime air, while users/creators try to capitalize on the platform’s access and distribution to build their livelihoods—which end up contingent upon the shifting sands of said platforms’ whims. (See: Etsy hiking up sellers’ fees, OnlyFans trying to ban adult content, Instagram forcing Reels upon us so thirstily that even the Kardashian-Jenners were in open revolt.)

Which brings me to my issue with Twitter: There’s no equivalent Twitter Creator Program, or Twitter Instant Articles, or Twitter Pro deal. Contrary to how your digital-media friends seem to spend their days, you as a Twitter user can’t really professionally tweet, or be incentivized to do so comparable to the scale of other platforms’ economy of super-users. (There is a Tip Jar feature and the Super Follows stuff, I guess, but do you know anyone who’s paying their Hype House rent with that?) The majority of Twitter’s super-users—out of the verified accounts, journalists are reportedly the largest and most active—are here tweeting for free, with not so much as a good SoundCloud click-through rate when the odd missive goes viral. We’re all just kind of here because it’s where everyone else is, making stuff that’s occasionally educational or entertaining for everyone else. It’s Twitter’s job, we all understand, to make its money off this resulting tonnage of content.

For our troubles, a free verification badge offers both an assurance of trust in who it is we’re interacting with, as well as perhaps the only worthwhile incentive that Twitter can really give to its power-tweeters. To revoke this feature and charge the price of a Hulu subscription (where we pay for other people’s content), Elon, is a fundamental misunderstanding of the value of Twitter as a content platform—sort of like charging your online serfs for the shears and sickles required to harvest your digital kingdom. (Also, have you met journalists? This is not a target market with the discretionary spending budgets you have in mind, bro.) The mere suggestion of a squeeze to our figurative and literal investment on the site will alert your loudest, most valuable creators to the exit door—especially once the next BeReal or Discord achieves critical mass.

If Twitter wants to be less like an advertiser-dependent Facebook, more like a subscriber-based OnlyFans, then it needs to invest in creator monetization (read: falling out of your chair to offer up a bajillion features to keep the people tweeting) before it can think to scoop up a subscription fee of its own. If Twitter wants to compete at the scale of YouTube and TikTok, it needs as much inexpensive content as possible, which it has to create incentives real or imagined or badged in order to get. And, perhaps, an engineering miracle re: a potential Vine resuscitation (that you…pay to watch?) You can’t have it both ways and expect creators to pay for the pleasure of creating value for your tech platform—much less charge them for being oneself online. That’s the whole joke, man. We already don’t really want to be here anyway.