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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

#121

Post by freediver »

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

That is the main reason I quit paying for it. X is trying to sit on two chairs and that is just disrespectful of the user.

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

#122

Post by pixxel »

ElongatedMusket wrote: post #85
bccdee wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Twitter never had this much of a bot problem before Elon bought it, which is a big clue as to what's actually gone wrong: He laid off all the moderators and all the staff who were training the automated bot detection algorithms. Extremely formulaic spam which would have been instantly flagged a couple years ago just piles up in my notifications.

It absolutely had a bot problem before! What Twitter were you using?

Dismiss comments that start with ‘Nah.’

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

#123

Post by glimshe »

rurp wrote: post #104
glimshe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is how much value Twitter is adding to people's lives. Netflix costs almost 200x this proposed price and yet it has over 200M subscribers. We got so used to free, but we all know that there is no such thing as free; today the only source of income for many web companies is to sell your data. So what if it loses engagement, I'd rather pay a bit for Twitter than the status quo which is getting followed by…

But... Twitter users who pay will still be tracked constantly, see targetted ads, and run into tons of spam bots. But now they have to trust Twitter with their payment information for the privilege.

Just wait until an ad-free option costing a lot more. Netflix, Hulu etc also have cheaper ad-supported plans. Regarding bots, it will be progressively harder to run a bot farm if you have to pay fees.

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

#124

Post by oliwarner »

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…

Nah, this is two things:

Ostensibly it's a link to a real identity. This is something that social media always struggles with and money —any amount— always seems to be the leveller. Until bots can register their own credit cards, this helps prevent spam, abusive posting, account cycling and a host of other nasties.

But I suspect the true aim is getting a foot in the door. Once they've saved your card details, future billing gets super-simple. Activating trials of Blue and micropayments for small oneshot promotions, even silly little things like super-likes.

But they're not going to stop seeking advertisers and using what they know about you to link the two. If anything this just gives them more data points.

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

#125

Post by raincole »

bccdee wrote: post #67
stevehawk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love to mock Elon but even I am inclined to agree with him. It seems like the only other solution is something like Google's Web Environment Integrity thing, which scares me. The best/easiest solution is to make it more expensive for the botters to play the game,

Nah. Twitter never had this much of a bot problem before Elon bought it, which is a big clue as to what's actually gone wrong: He laid off all the moderators and all the staff who were training the automated bot detection algorithms. Extremely formulaic spam which would have been instantly flagged a couple years ago just piles up in my notifications.

> Twitter never had this much of a bot problem before Elon bought it

Nah.

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

#126

Post by rsynnott »

Freedom2 wrote: post #119
bathtub365 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp did the $1/yr thing a long time ago. Here is an article from 2016 about them scrapping it. https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/

This might be different though because this is led by Elon Musk, who has always somehow managed to come out well despite bad looking decisions, Like pard68 though, I have no skin in the game and have also given up on social media.

... "This bad idea is actually good because Naughty Old Mr Car is magic" is a _hell_ of a take. Perhaps companies should simply have their policies dictated by that octopus that predicted World Cup game outcomes.

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

#127

Post by rsynnott »

ElongatedMusket wrote: post #85
bccdee wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Twitter never had this much of a bot problem before Elon bought it, which is a big clue as to what's actually gone wrong: He laid off all the moderators and all the staff who were training the automated bot detection algorithms. Extremely formulaic spam which would have been instantly flagged a couple years ago just piles up in my notifications.

It absolutely had a bot problem before! What Twitter were you using?

> never had this much of a bot problem

... How did you read this as meaning it never had a bot problem? They're claiming that it had _less_ of a bot problem, which certainly _feels_ true.

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

#128

Post by earthnail »

slg wrote: post #73
tiffanyh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $1/ year , this isn’t a revenue play because after card and/or platform fees - it won’t amount to much at all. However, account signup will definitely drop considerably, because that’s a pretty big barrier for most users. So I’m actually inclined to say, this probably is a strategy purely to combat bots.

>At $1/year, this isn’t a revenue play because after card and/or platform fees - it won’t amount to much at all. It isn't purely about the $1 per year revenue. It is about having a customer credit card on file which reduces friction for every future situation in which the user is charged which increases future revenue.

A customer credit card is yet another barrier for bots. Since the finance industry is so strictly regulated, you can imagine that it'll actually be quite hard to get fresh credit cards for your bots at scale.

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

#129

Post by hcurtiss »

dragontamer wrote: post #70
hcurtiss wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a programmer, but it seems like they could make it non-trivial to automate the payment process. If I have to click 30 times per account, with a captcha, and wait a minute for the payment to clear, 10,000 accounts suddenly starts to become very expensive in terms of time/effort.

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.

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

#130

Post by gls2ro »

dragontamer wrote: post #23
amerine wrote: post #12

Not a x/twitter user much these days (mostly quit a long time ago) but I’m happy when companies put a minor barrier up to stop botting. So meh, good idea I guess?

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

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