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

fortune.com

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

#151

Post by dragontamer »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #148
dragontamer wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With what moderators? Twitter laid off significant amounts of their moderation team.

No one is going through account creation or double checking this stuff anymore at Twitter.

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

#152

Post by yankput »

It doesn’t surprise me that twitter engagement went down. It’s worse in every imaginable way (except for community notes, those are nice I guess)

What does surprise me is how little it decreased. The site is barely usable now and, the usage did not go THAT down?

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

#153

Post by mgiannopoulos »

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

Each account will require a unique credit card and phone number. https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1714513153407807835

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

#154

Post by eviks »

nova22033 wrote: post #145

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.”

This is the easy way! Charging $100 would make it even easier

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

#155

Post by dragontamer »

hcurtiss wrote: post #144
dragontamer wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you're avoiding the crux of the issue.

Elon isn't trying to solve the bot-problem per se, but is instead trying to solve Twitter's revenue problem.

You are basically arguing that Twitter needs to solve the bot problem to get all of its users back. That's... not really a direct solution or simple way to raise revenue. Its not very clear if say bots were cleaned up, that anyone would come back (or advertisers would spend more).

----------

On the other hand, if this is just a tacit acknowledgement that $1/year is the assumed "cost of doing botting", then the solution is for botters to pay $10,000/year for 10,000 accounts. This provides the *direct* answer to the revenue problem.

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

#156

Post by lo_zamoyski »

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.

Not really. It is laughable to think $1/year is paying for this service. If it is paying for anything, it is to reduce the number of bots and spammers on the network.

So no, it's not having it both ways. Paying a meaningful monthly fee would be.

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

#157

Post by Shawnj2 »

enragedcacti wrote: post #17
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…

Users that pay $8/month for X Premium still get served ads and have the same ToS for tracking/spying as everybody else, I don't think the $1 crew is going to fair any better

Yep. The problem is Musk. If the FSF launched a paid social media that required payment to cover sever costs and so it could be completely free of ads and tracking that would be one thing, but how much do you really trust Elon to do that?

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

#158

Post by wendyshu »

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…

How would you solve the bot problem?

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

#159

Post by jjudge »

inversetelecine wrote: post #135
spondylosaurus wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

~$0.67 cents without negotiated processing fees (ex: Stripe's rack rate is 2.9% processing fee + 30 cents per transaction)

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

#160

Post by dragontamer »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #150
dragontamer wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Do you think bot accounts won't make ad-revenue?

A MAU is a MAU, whether its a bot or not.

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