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

141–150 of 181 posts

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

#141

Post by dragontamer »

hcurtiss wrote: post #140
dragontamer wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its easier to make money from 100 users willing to pay $10,000 each, aka $1 million/year in revenue, than to recruit 1,000,000 individual users.

Bonus points: bots want the blue-checkmark to look more legitimate, so bots are also more likely to pay $8/month for the blue checkmark. The actual revenue is going to be far higher in practice when you consider that any bot-farm / astroturf will obviously have some blue-checkmarks + an army of normies in some kind of mix.

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

#142

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#143

Post by shipscode »

skyyler wrote: post #10
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…

>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.

Sounds like Musk got inflationpilled.

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

#144

Post by hcurtiss »

dragontamer wrote: post #141
hcurtiss wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its easier to make money from 100 users willing to pay $10,000 each, aka $1 million/year in revenue, than to recruit 1,000,000 individual users. Bonus points: bots want the blue-checkmark to look more legitimate, so bots are also more likely to pay $8/month for the blue checkmark. The actual revenue is going to be far higher in practice when you consider that any bot-farm / astroturf will obviously have some blue-che…

Somebody with some actual experience/authority on the subject:

https://x.com/troyhunt/status/1714529503823953990?s=46

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

#145

Post by nova22033 »

LOL

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-text-messages-revea...

In another April 14 message, angel investor Jason Calacanis messaged Musk: “You could easily clean up bots and spam and make the service viable for many more users — removing bots and spam is a lot less complicated than what the Tesla self driving team is doing.”

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

#146

Post by throwaway4aday »

minimaxir wrote: post #35
huytersd wrote: post #2

I’ll never use this crap but $1 a year is smart. People will sign up for it because it’s nothing and that gives twitter a foot in the door for price hikes later.

A decade of App Store user behavior refusing to pay $0.99 one time for an app vs. using an app for free tells a different story.

99.99% of app store apps are not worth $0.99 and are easily replaced by free web based alternatives or the built in apps

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

#147

Post by cmrdporcupine »

dgfitz wrote: post #137
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Yeah I never claimed such a thing is a viable business model. Esp in competition with free (but not actually) mass scale Twitter, FB, etc.

I think you'd have to offer something entirely different that is not in "competition" in any way by not being "alike" at all, but still filling some similar needs.

I personally have never enjoyed Twitter or the kind of service it offered, so would never consider paying for anything which looked like it really. Though I guess I do donate to the Mastodon instance I have an account on, but that's more of a philosophical thing than anything to do with subscribing to a service. I barely use it.

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

#148

Post by throwaway4aday »

dragontamer wrote: post #136
gls2ro wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

the change is to require payment for all new users so they won't be paying more than anyone else other than the old accounts that got grandfathered in. They won't ban them if they pay but they will derank their posts and if they do allow a group of them to sign up with the same CC then they can punish the entire block of them if they start spamming with any of the accounts. It also allows for permabans based on CC or other identifying info making it more difficult to create a new botnet. It's not a perfect solution but it does add friction. There will probably be ongoing changes to make it even harder for bot accounts.

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

#149

Post by 93po »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #21
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…

No. He ruined the product in every way then said “pay”. There’s nothing to pay for anymore. Let it burn.

??? How is twitter any different from a casual user perspective?

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

#150

Post by throwaway4aday »

dragontamer wrote: post #141
hcurtiss wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its easier to make money from 100 users willing to pay $10,000 each, aka $1 million/year in revenue, than to recruit 1,000,000 individual users. Bonus points: bots want the blue-checkmark to look more legitimate, so bots are also more likely to pay $8/month for the blue checkmark. The actual revenue is going to be far higher in practice when you consider that any bot-farm / astroturf will obviously have some blue-che…

you honestly think they make less than $1 in ad revenue per account per year where this calculation would make any sense?
Post reply on HN