Elon Musk may flip the switch to make X — the social network formerly known as Twitter — an entirely subscription-based platform. Musk brought up the idea of charging all users of X/Twi…
Elon Musk said he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee to be on the platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.
“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots," said Elon.
I can’t believe that this is the only solution he can think of.
Dealing with bots would be Elon Musk’s responsibility, considering he’s the only one profiting significantly from X, not us. Elon Musk steals our data and censors each of our posts, now he even expects us to pay to clean up the mess he created.
Plus, the problems with X go beyond just bots. The algorithm and programming decisions are negatively impacting user experience and manipulating people’s minds.
We want a town square where everyone is free to have & voice an opinion. I do not believe we have to pay ”a small monthly payment” for such a place, especially in a country that should value these freedoms & suppressing ideas.
Oh yes, certainly. Wow Mr Musk you’re such a genius and good decision maker, please start charging for Twitter. Please don’t listen to the naysayers and go ahead with the brilliant business strategy. I’m definitely not taking delight in your constant series of self-owns.
A monthly fee seems idiotic but yes please do it! Please!
That said I think a $5 signup fee on Mastodon or Lemmy that is not refunded if you get banned would seriously help stop bots. They only make pennies per bot and if you make their cost even minimally painful the economics fall apart.
If I had to pay to use a social media service, it would have to be something I found utterly necessary. I'm not a fan of the trend toward everything being a subscription, so if any service unexpectedly changes to a subscription based service, I'm far more likely to experiment with cutting it out of my life and routine to see if I really needed it to begin with. So far out of the hundreds of subscription service I've had over the last 15 years, I've resubscribed to only 10 or so, and out of those only 3 where because I genuinely valued the service enough to pay for it, rather then because I had gotten an offer for 3 months free, then terminated the account before I was charged for anything. Why pay a provider to use my data for profit and show me ads I have no interest in or desire to see? If I wanted commercials I would watch cable, instead of using a streaming service I explicit choose for not showing constant ads.
I would treat Lemmy the same way. If I had to pay, I wouldn't play. There are other options for my time, simple as that.
For those that are saying "no" because it's Musk: would you be willing to pay to your account on Lemmy, Mastodon, or any other social network that you happen to use?
Let me be specific: I am not asking if you donate or contribute to any server. I am asking if you'd sign up to a social network that required payment from every user as a measure to avoid spammers and to keep the service running.
I think this marks the true end of twitter. Undoubtedly, some people will literally pay to have ol' muskys thoughts shoved in their face and get their data collected, see garbage alt-right memes but if he fails, if he can't even make it a premium-feeling cult experience now... (which obviously his vision, but let's be real it's a longshot- he's only gonna be a clown) I don't see it lasting much longer.
lol. He is just stirring the pot. It’s what he does. I recommend ignoring him and just using something else. It is either going to sink or not.
Ex-twitter seems to me to be going in a disjointed “by the seat of the pants” direction. It’s like a kid playing with his new toy. “My toy, I make the rules and I don’t care what you think.”
The thing is, it technically is his toy. It is not a global square. It is a private company. I take issue with what has been going on, but my opinions are irrelevant to the situation.
I hate Musk because as an artist there are many artist on twitter (X) that I really like. One of it is Naoki Saito & Mika Pikazo and then some useful things likes pose maniac to help out artist to get pose ideas. A lot of Japanese makes oneshot or it's continuous story manga on twitter. The reason why I stay a little longer because of the artist of twitter but now I will slowly drift away on twitter.
Sorry Jovan Musk, from Calvin Klein! The answer is nooooOOOOOoooo. Old Twitter is dead. You killed it, and now you're trying to sell me its smelly corpse.
You couldn't pay me to use that cracker platform. I thought reddit was bad after they fucked over all the moderators, then comes xhitter with open pedo-nazis being boosted to the front page. Both are shit for the same reason and i'm never going back to either.
no I'm not willing to play for using twitter, I'll just delete my account.
as for the "it's the only way to combat the army of bots" comment - how is that the army of bots only became a problem after twitter became x? i never had a problem before but now my every tweet is liked by a kinsley, madeline, josephine, mia or layla. it's crazy.
oh, maybe that's one of the microservices they shut down
As I understand, even when paying you would still see ads and not get any benefits over what Twitter is at the moment whatsoever. I honestly cannot imagine the platform retaining many users after such a drastic step.
Twitter like so many other social media companies came into being with users as the product. As that fails (both because Elon is an idiot and because consumer knowledge has improved), these companies are finding that they never really had a sustainable business model.
Let the market work it out, as the overlords are so fond of.
I just want to comment on this part, if that’s ok. Town squares are inherently not free. Sure, everyone is free to come to it. But it’s still paid for by someone. Usually by people who stand to gain the most value out of it. This has always been my problem with Twitter and Facebook and their ilk.
There are wonderful examples of people trying different payment models and yes, most of them have failed. But let’s look at them for a minute.
App.net came out swinging at one point, with the idea of a (what was it?) fifty dollars a year payment model. It was a great idea. But it lagged because of a few reasons. Instead of keeping the $50 price point and using the extra money to allow for free accounts, the founders first dropped the price to $36 a year and then quietly raised VC funding, which went against everything they talked about and thus the community turned. Needless to say, the service was dead a few years after it came.
Before that there was WhatsApp. WhatsApp would randomly charge people $1 to $3 for download or subscription. Their experiment was wildly successful. If you could do MMS with just $1 a year from everyone on your network (or, heck, some random number of people on your network), what’s better than that? WhatsApp’s Achilles? Selling to Facebook. Now it’s unmoored from its founding principles. It’s growing. But for every one bespoke feature added, two features are added that push your data to Facebook.
Then there’s micro.blog. The pricing is simple - $5 a month and you get a blog and a social media handle. Right now, the founder hasn’t cracked down on accounts that paid once and are only using the social features of the network without being able to blog on it. It’s surprisingly successful, though niche. Will it fail? Seems like there’s enough runway since the founder is strict about no free signups. That town square isn’t free to join.
The fediverse is blowing up and so are standalone companies with their homegrown social networks like posts.cv and whatever Substack calls their social network. Also egalitarian European countries are launching their own mastodon sites to host a digital town square for their citizens. It’s a great time to be on social media.
But none of the real digital town squares are free. Nor should they be. Yes, a small monthly fee seems unnecessary. But Twitter isn’t a public good. It isn’t infrastructure. It isn’t paid for with our taxes. If the US Government launches their own mastodon site then you can absolutely comment on how important it is for this country to value freedoms. Till then, stop expecting private companies to not experiment with pricing models.
Also, Elon is an idiot and Twitter is dead. But that’s besides the point.
Even if it was free, I wouldn't use it. I'd rather not waste hours of my time in there. And yes, I had that opinion before Musk bought Twitter and renamed it to X (I actually left the platform exactly 24 days before the renaming, the same day that I left Reddit).
this is never going to happen unless musk looks for a reason to shut xitter down. like so many times before he's talking out loud what he's thinking right now, creating a massive migrane among the guys still running the site and everyone who is financially invested in it.
Why do I have to see the face of this idiot almost daily? I don't use that shit X and never will. What's the appeal? I even could understand TikTok somehow, but X/Twitter? Where's the informational value in these completely useless posts there?