Billionaire also says platform has 550 million monthly users generating up to 200m posts a day
Elon Musk has indicated that X, formerly known as Twitter, is preparing to charge all users for accessing the platform.
The X owner said erecting a paywall around the business would ward off the bots, or automated accounts, that have become a bugbear for Musk.
Speaking in a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, the Tesla CEO and world’s richest person suggested that X was going to charge its user base. Currently, Twitter only charges users for its subscription service X Premium, which offers perks such as a verified account checkmark and costs $11 a month in the US for iPhones and £11 in the UK.
Haha, no one is gonna pay to use social media. I don't use Twitter but you would never get me to pay for absolute garbage brain rot. I'm already on lemmy for that and it's free.
what is this clickbait bullshit??? I've seen multiple articles yet the wording is always 'floated the idea', but from the headline you could infer it's an official announcement.
It's an interesting thought, but he misses the #1 problem with online subscriptions- sign-up friction.
If you could just push a button and instantly be charged something, an awful lot of people would do it.
But when you go from $0 to $0.01, you will lose 99% of people, because most people can't be bothered to fill out a form, put in their credit card number, etc. Even if the amount of money involved is absurdly small, it's not the price, it's the friction.
Now if he integrates the app with Apple Pay or Google Wallet that will help, a little. But only a little.
I think it's bigger news that that fuck is meeting with that other fuck Netanyahu. What the fuck business do those two fascist scum have with each other?
It’s surprising that in all these years, nobody came up with this innovation to make Twitter more profitable but in just a short time period, Musk was able to figure it out. Goes to show why he’s the richest man in the world!
He needs revenue and this is a high risk, medium reward way to get it if he sees no end in sight on the advertising front.
And it's not like there's no way to make a subscription model work online, the NYT is doing it well. Lots of substacks and patreons are doing it.
But it's essentially launching a new company, with all the risk that entails. Subscription model flatly does not work with the network effects necessary for Twitter.
A Twitter where everyone has to pay, will not be worth paying for.
Right up front here, Musk is an absolute idiot, and wrong about almost everything. I am not defending him as a person, and I am not defending his specific plan here to have people pay monthly for their account.
However -- charging a small one-time fee for an actual account with the ability to post is a legitimate avenue to reduce bots. SomethingAwful forums have done this for a long time: an SA account is $10. Doing something like that (maybe not as high as $10), and grandfathering in existing accounts - that could work, because the main thrust would be using the fee as a bot-blocker.
Musk, however, just wants the money, and he's hiding that behind the idea of preventing bots with it.
Elon is an idiot who fcked around and found out with all his Twitter shenanigans, I enjoy watching him make a fool out of himself infront of the whole world now.
I am a hundred percent certain you could seriously damage twitter by seeing of the sprinklers(assuming they ate still installed) because there's no way musk's penny pinching didn't lead him to sell or not set up the special non conductive fire retardant