Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 181 posts

Re: X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

#131

Post by mgiannopoulos »

zappb wrote: post #112
slg wrote: post #19

>Musk said “It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.” With so many of these billionaires and CEOs it is becoming impossible to tell whether they are transparently lying or complete idiots. Just admit you need the revenue and you want people to put a card on file to lower the bar for future financial transactions. Charging for a service doesn't eliminate bots, it just shifts the financial break…

So bots just need to earn more than a dollar per year in revenue to break even? That’s every scam bot in existence!

They will also require a unique card number and a unique phone number. What is the cost of these?

Re: X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

#132

Post by mgiannopoulos »

throw2022110401 wrote: post #116
zappb wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So bots just need to earn more than a dollar per year in revenue to break even? That’s every scam bot in existence!

It's even better than that, for just $1/year they can get their bot accounts certified as a "real human".

I doubt they will give a blue check to these accounts.

Re: X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

#133

Post by mgiannopoulos »

iamdelirium wrote: post #6

This is going to kill engagement. 90% of people don't care enough to pay for that and any sort of barrier will lower engagement. Twitter/X is going to be use this as a way to fight spammers and bots but those accounts never had a problem paying or using stolen money.

This is for new accounts only. Not existing ones.

Re: X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

#134

Post by dragontamer »

hcurtiss wrote: post #129
dragontamer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally buy Filipinos to do this for you for like 5-cents per account. Maybe 1 cent, account creation never was an issue in today's bot / astroturf meta. Hell, for like 5 cents/account, you probably can get Filipinos to post enough legitimate traffic about innocuous topics to look like a human before being turned into an astroturf bot. IIRC, the typical Filipino baker makes $5/day. They literally can make more…

It seems like they could also limit the number of accounts per credit card. 10,000 credit card numbers are not easy to come by. And all of this is creating a pathway for law enforcement. I’m skeptical it’s as easy as you say.

Why would Twitter reject $10,000 coming out of one credit card?

The economic incentive of this model is backwards. A person paying $10,000 for 10,000 bot accounts is a bigger source of revenue than a $1 normie.

Re: X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

#135

Post by inversetelecine »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #63
skyyler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well, here is X trying to make a product you pay for. No, this is an attempt to have it both ways. To do data collection / data brokerage and ALSO charge users for the service.

For sure. There's no way they'd break even at $1/year per user, let alone turn a profit, unless they're also running ads for those users.

I wonder how much of that $1 they get after payment processing fees and such.

Re: X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

#136

Post by dragontamer »

gls2ro wrote: post #130
dragontamer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone running a TwitterBot through an LLM or other AI tool is paying far, far more than $1/year. This $1 'fee' monetizes and benefits bot-accounts more than anyone else. ------ Let's say I setup 10,000 bot accounts for $10,000/year total. Will I really be banned from Twitter? Or will I be treated like the high paying customer that I truly am? Is $10,000 expensive for a marketing team pushing a new product? Sounds li…

In my mind this is not about spammers not having the money to create 10k accounts. but about how many CCs would they put for 10k accounts? If you have 1000 accounts with the same CC it does seem to make it a bit easier to say maybe these 1000 accounta are bots. but let me tell you what Musk can do to actually let bots run: allow crypto payments :D

One CC.

Only Twitter will know that the 10,000 accounts are bots. It'd be up to them to ban, but why would they ever ban a high-paying customer who is paying literally 10,000x more than the typical user?

Re: X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

#137

Post by dgfitz »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #16
skyyler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Well, here is X trying to make a product you pay for. No, this is an attempt to have it both ways. To do data collection / data brokerage and ALSO charge users for the service.

Exactly this. I would be entirely supportive of a model where a social network (not social media) was established with modest annual fees with the condition that the usual privacy violation and targeting and engagement hacking wasn't going to happen. But that's clearly not what this is.

You mean like this?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723

(app.net)

Re: X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

#138

Post by eviks »

pard68 wrote: post #4

I know people are down on the-social-networking-platform-formerly-known-as-twitter, and I have no skin in the game, I gave up on social networking about a decade ago, but I think this is the model to beat. Forever the FOSS world has said, "if you do not pay for the product, you are the product". Well, here is X trying to make a product you pay for. I do not know their new policy on tracking/ads/spying but even if the…

The other saying "if you pay for the product, you are still the product" has also been said forever, and that hope re no tracking /ads isn't grounded

Re: X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

#139

Post by RamenJunkie_ »

lysp wrote: post #94
iamdelirium wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the people remaining are addicted to/like Twitter. But this is the equivalent of imposing a sin tax on it and it will cost Twitter engagement like sin taxes lower alcohol or smoking. It will probably lose them even more money as their primary income is ads and lower engagement will drive advertising incoming even lower. Like all of new X/Twitter's changes, it doesn't seem to have any foresight or insight into th…

> Yes, the people remaining are addicted to/like Twitter. I remain because I still follow a lot of people on Twitter (news/tech/journos). There is not one single place that still has a majority of them apart from twitter.

They basically all have substack newsletters, just move there

Re: X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

#140

Post by hcurtiss »

dragontamer wrote: post #134
hcurtiss wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they could also limit the number of accounts per credit card. 10,000 credit card numbers are not easy to come by. And all of this is creating a pathway for law enforcement. I’m skeptical it’s as easy as you say.

Why would Twitter reject $10,000 coming out of one credit card? The economic incentive of this model is backwards. A person paying $10,000 for 10,000 bot accounts is a bigger source of revenue than a $1 normie.

You think they’re making money on $1 per account? Processing fees will eat most of that. It seems likely to me they’re doing it to improve the user experience, which if that recruits more users will be worth much more to them than the 10,000 bots each paying $1/year.
Post reply on HN