48
votes
Elon Musk thinking of charging money for Twitter
@Dave Lee:
Elon Musk revisiting an idea apparently floated privately in the past -- charging *everyone* to use Twitter. A lower tier than premium. "We've moving to a small monthly payment for use of the X system," he just told Benjamin Netanyahu, saying it's only way to stamp out bots.
I don't believe he would get sympathy in any case. Schadenfreude seems more likely.
They probably do have trouble with bots, and it's also an all-purpose excuse.
If they're smart about it, they won't charge money just to have a read-only account, or the number of accounts will go down a lot, which would affect things like follower counts. Deleting abandoned accounts isn't good for vanity metrics.
As someone who still occssionally visits Twitter I can tell you that bots are not just a bogeyman anymore. All posts are liked the first second they are posted by porn bots. I get multiple followers daily, from spam accounts. It's gotten ridiculous. So hopefully he does this, so that I can finally kick my Twitter habbit fully.
Porn bots sound profitable enough to just eat the monthly payment. I wonder if the intent is payment source tracking with anti-fraud tools to catch multiple accounts... After all, one porn company would be paying for multiple bots.
Conveniently enough, it also composes a database of real life names etc. for, say, openly LGBT accounts, anti-R(ussia|epublican) ones, human rights activists, whistleblowers...
Yes, but the problem has become /worse/ post-Elon, not better. Both regular spam, but more importantly, spam that uses the Blue payment gate.
Take this article about sextortion scammers on Chinese Twitter. This problem has gotten worse because of Twitter Blue, not better. It scales better too, as you can pay for one account with Blue, instead of needing a million accounts to spam.
Like a broken clock being right twice a day, I actually think he’s onto something here: Charging for online services could eliminate a ton of the internet’s biggest problems. Not that anyone will pay for fucking twitter, lol.
It turns out that someone will pay for Twitter. They'll pay $44 billion+ for it in fact.
This time, he's right?
Bots/spam/multiple accounts are a very known problem whenever you offer a free and easy to authenticate service. One of the easiest ways to at least limit bots is to charge a small fee for each account. Suddenly the 1000 bot army i could probably spin up with half a year of practice (if not less) is financially out of my reach. You'll still have actors who can afford to deal with the cost, but it changes the math heavily.
If I were making a twitter alternative, i'd probably do the same. The issue for twitter is that it's expected it'll be free, and that's what they've built their niche on. Anything elon does isn't affecting the userbase numbers heavily (advertisers is a different story), but this is the one thing that absolutely will.
Not even remotely a fan of him, but this is what I've been suggesting twitter do for much longer than Elon's been around, and I think there's merit to it. The hit is going to suck and the number is going to be hard to balance, and worse now they have more direct competitors who can suck up those who jump ship. Still, might be a good move.
Sorry about the twitter/elon post. I feel like he'd be the type of person to actually go through with this though so that's why I'm posting it here.
Ngl, my visceral reaction to this topic is that Elon is getting too much attention here on Tildes.
This is a tweet from a random person about what Elon allegedly said he might do, right? That's not exactly newsworthy, and I'm skeptical that it'll generate the kind of in-depth discussion we value.
I really don't mean to single you out. Maybe it's just me. Does anyone know if we can filter our feed by tag?
The link you are looking for is here, you can also find it on the sidebar to fully filter a tag out of your feed. I use it a lot.
I've finally had enough of hearing about Elon Musk and X/Twitter, and just utilized that link for the first time.
The source link posted is a bad source link for this, but this isn't just something rumored that he said.
Here's the source video, since it's an Elon Musk thing it obviously originates on Twitter/X.
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1OwxWYaypapGQ
34:40 is about the start of where he says this.
But to save the people who don't want to visit X, I cut part of it that has him saying this.
https://youtu.be/JNvLyTGmm1M
He equivocates a bit, and obviously his word isn't worth much so who knows if that means he'll actually follow through on it, but this isn't actually a matter of whether he said it or not, the OPs link just isn't a good source link.
Thanks for the excerpt video!
If you indeed just want to protect from bots by increasing the cost of creating bots then you don't have to charge all users monthly.
A one-time payment of $5 would be enough as it proved to be for Metafilter (https://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi)
Even better - a security deposit would do the trick. If the account is banned for policy violation - the security deposit is not returned. But any user could get the security deposit back if they want to stop using the system.
This way you increase the price for negative behaviour without creating barriers for all users.
You can see it as a way to compensate your moderation efforts.
Of course you should not create perverse incentives where you ban accounts to simply increase your revenues. For example, it should not be tied to moderator compensation.
Advertising revenue is one way to ensure alignment of incentives - the long-term value of regular users should be higher than the security deposit amount.
Honestly, on a platform the size of Twitter, I don't see fees deterring bots that much. Corporations and governments will just add that to the budget plan.
Is there a way to change the link I posted? I got it from a different tweet and didn’t know where it actually came from
I'm not sure, but if you find out, you can also use this link
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/18/elon-musk-says-x-will-charge-users-a-small-monthly-payment-to-use-its-service/
Some might find a little better as the headline is a little more definitive than "thinking of charging money" and from a little more authoritative of a source. I uploaded the clipped video as unlisted to limit exposure as I wanted to limit the risk of getting copyright struck, so I only did that for convenience sake of users here who wanted reassurance that he actually said it but don't want to visit X to see it.
I suspect it might be a Deimos only thing to be able to swap a link. It's really not a big deal though, your source link wasn't wrong or misinformation, just the circumstances and context seemed to open a window where it may have made it easier for some people to get the wrong impression from it.
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/19/musk-x-twitter-charge-all-users-monthly-subscription-fees
Seems substantiated.
For better or worse (worse) we're seeing the fallout of every terrible decision made to Twitter/X echoing among other major software companies, so I think these are worthy of discussion. If one out-of-touch tech billionaire starts charging for API calls, whatever. That's an eye-rolling bit of noise. Now if multiple companies start charging, that's just a facet of the modern corporate technology landscape and worth analyzing.
The posts may be repetitive in nature, but each one has pretty lasting fallout in our tech ecosystem
Thos isn't charging for API calls -- Twitter already does that, afaik -- this is paywalling the entire site. Essentially making it "members only".
Oh I meant that as a general example, not this specific incident
ah okay makes sense, carry on then lol
They didn't in the old days. Kinda the point.
Honestly, the more I hear the more apathetic I get. I honestly never used Twitter much for anything other than entering contests that required retweeting so maybe I'm just not invested but the more I hear about reddit the less I care there too.
If the X-change didn't just outright kill Twitter, is it actually going to die? Are people just institutionalized enough to consider paying? Is it a better business model? If we can charge for the NY times for long form articles, why can't we charge for memes and shit post threads on Twitter? Who even cares at this point? Honestly, who throws a shoe?
All that said, this is a telephone game style tweet as others have pointed out. If it gets enough bad press he can just claim he never said that and otherwise it works to subtly build support for him charging. It's a non-issue though because anyone using Twitter today would either absolutely pay for it to not lose their 'audience' or leave it in a heartbeat for another free service.
Changing the name to X is at worst a cosmetic change. Actually requiring people to fork over cash is a much more consequential change. Think of all the news sources that embed tweets in their articles. Why would they continue that if their username can't access the content? They'll migrate to something else and the userbase will follow.
The source link posted is a bad source link for this, but this isn't just something rumored that he said.
Here's the source video, since it's an Elon Musk thing it obviously originates on Twitter/X.
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1OwxWYaypapGQ
34:40 is about the start of where he says this.
But to save the people who don't want to visit X, I cut part of it that has him saying this.
https://youtu.be/JNvLyTGmm1M
He equivocates a bit, and obviously his word isn't worth much so who knows if that means he'll actually follow through on it, but this isn't actually a matter of whether he said it or not, the OPs link just isn't a good source link.
Fair enough, thanks for the context.
I wish I was the same and didn't care at all. I just want it to die already so that I can stop hearing about it, and stop hearing about whatever nonsense Musk gets up to. But it's literally impossible to escape stories about it and him - and I'm also tired of getting links to Twitter where I can only see the post and not replies or anything else which makes whatever got shared kind of useless half the time.
It's a first world problem of course, it's just irritating is all.
The best time to start charging everyone for Twitter would have been right when he bought it and there was still some uncertainty over whether it would go downhill. People would still think having a Twitter is important to stay up to date on current events or to stay relevant.
Everyone understands that X is not good and not getting better now. People are more incentivized than ever to cut their losses.
Maybe charging for Twitter is meant to distract people from talking about how Musk sabotaged Ukrainian military operations by turning his satellites off.
Musk makes unpopular decisions and reverses them days later.
Musk is know for saying extreme things to manipulate crypto and stock prices.
some additional context:
from NPR today: Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu to meet Elon Musk amid antisemitism controversy
"antisemitism controversy" is a very NPR-ish way of phrasing it...
from CNN a few weeks ago: Elon Musk blames the ADL for 60% ad sales decline at X, threatens to sue
Musk has been harping on some "Jews control the media" bullshit that is absolutely fucking deranged even by his standards.
I don't think the timing here is a coincidence. this "maybe I'll start charging everyone for use of Twitter" announcement smells like a calculated move to generate news coverage that is about something other than "Elon Musk has been spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories that were so bad he had to meet with the Israeli Prime Minister to try to patch things up".
Moved over to Bluesky recently, like it much more. Seems like the majority of the furry fandom has moved over so it doesn't feel like any loss in content.
Do it you fucking coward
Generous to call it 'thinking.'
Who even uses Twitter anymore?