Of the 300 likes, only 17 came from blue-check accounts, so verified accounts made up less than 6%, while unverified accounts accounted for over 94%. In the context of the Chinese internet, that really does look like “the silent majority”: plenty of people are watching, fewer are speaking up, and even fewer are willing to pay for verification and show their identities. I saw Teacher Li’s tweet too. Every Chinese user who liked it had an unverified account—not one of them even bothered to get verified. You think people didn’t see it? Clearly, they did. More likely, they saw it, liked it, and went right back to lurking. Verification costs money, requires linking a payment method, and means maintaining a public identity. A lot of people find that a hassle and see no need for it—but that’s exactly the problem.

You can subscribe through Alipay now, so the payment process is much shorter than it used to be. And the bar for creators is right there too: get paid in U.S. dollars by Musk every couple of weeks. The settlement cycle isn’t that long. But the reality is that jobs are hard to find and wages are low. Plenty of people complain about a lack of opportunities while not even bothering to open the door. When I studied economic cycles, I noticed a pattern: if money is sitting right outside the door and nobody picks it up, it’s probably not fake money—it’s that people don’t know where the door is. The same goes for now: subscription options, creator revenue sharing, and verification are all right there in plain sight, but plenty of people haven’t even worked out how to earn their first dollar. When you weigh the verification fee, the time investment, and the work of producing content against getting paid every couple of weeks, does the math really not work—or have they just not even started doing it?

People have been calling for altcoin season for so long, yet retail traders are still acting the same way: chasing highs when the market is buzzing, playing dead when it cools off, and always being half a beat late to the rotation. Look at the money sloshing around in BTC and a handful of leaders, while trading volume in long-tail assets hasn’t really picked up. Yet plenty of people are still waiting for “altseason across the board” to come knocking on its own. Where’s the door? It’s in payment rails, identity verification, creator incentives, and the places where information gaps are gradually closing. You can’t make it happen by shouting about it. If you see it differently, tell us why.