X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features including the ability to tweet, reply, quote, repost, like, bookmark, and create lists, according to a source familiar with the matter. This change will go live today for new users in New Zealand and the Philippines.
Roughly 20 minutes after this story published, X’s Support account confirmed the details, writing that “this new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver.”
Starting today, we’re testing a new program (Not A Bot) in New Zealand and the Philippines. New, unverified accounts will be required to sign up for a $1 annual subscription to be able to post & interact with other posts. Within this test, existing users are not affected.
This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver.
And so far, subscription options have proven to be the main solution that works at scale. — Support (@Support) October 17, 2023
The company published the “Not-a-Bot Terms and Conditions” today outlining its plan for a paid subscription service that gives users certain abilities on their platform, like posting content and interacting with other users. This program is different from X Premium, which offers more features like “Undo” and “Edit” for posts for $8 a month. Given the company’s tumultuous reputation under Musk, some users have voiced their hesitancy to turn over their credit card info.
X owner Elon Musk has long floated the idea of charging users $1 for the platform. During a livestreamed conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month, Musk said “It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.”
Shortly after the announcement, Musk tweeted that you can “read for free, but $1/year to write.”
“It’s the only way to fight bots without blocking real users,” Musk wrote. “This won’t stop bots completely, but it will be 1000X harder to manipulate the platform.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino was asked last month onstage at Vox’s Code Conference about how going to a full subscription model on X will affect revenue, something that is now going live to users today. Yaccarino answered at the time, “Did he say that or did he say he’s thinking about it?”
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The very fact that you're requesting payment info already makes plenty people think twice. Specially in the light of the brand changing from Twitter to X - if you're clueless about the change something "smells off".
On the other hand for a lot of bot owners this is absolutely no issue. You shouldn't be popping up a whole bot army, but instead only a handful of well coordinated bots to astroturf the shit out of the platform.
In other words the idea might have the opposite effect - keeping potential new human users out, but allowing the bots in.
This is exactly right… A lot of bots already pay for blue since it promotes them and prevents them from getting blocked/muted so easily
$1/bot/yr will be nothing to bot farms
In other words the idea might have the opposite effect - keeping potential new human users out, but allowing the bots in
The galaxy brain shit here is that I suspect the bot problem actually doesn't concern Musk in the way he claims. If he can make it seem like there are fewer bots (because of these policies) while at the same time not actually getting rid of them, the engagement level stays up and the advertisers are happy in their ignorance. Bots are better users: they're not fickle, they don't go to sleep, they can be reliably expected to be posting more regularly than normal users. The trick for Musk is convincing everyone they're gone.
The further I think about this, the more that it makes sense. The $1/year would even help to sort in the "right" type of bot (that wouldn't be affected, unlike disruptive mass account creation), while still allowing them to claim that they're getting rid of bots.
Bots don't click on ads and buy stuff though. I'm pretty sure anyone buying ads are going to be measuring this.
Yeah his plan is to turn it into WeChat/QQ. Starting its payments because he’s gonna try to do PayPal again, this time his way. Nothing insidious or revolutionary.
I can only approve of people paying for services they use. It isn't free to run. But there are several things to consider:
- $1/year is very low, transaction fees for accepting that amount of money are high
- It's a low price for successful bots
- Doesn't remove ads (take money from subscribers or advertisers, not both, also print media)
- Doesn't give you better control over your experience. The paying customer should be the one being listened to
- This is Elon Musk's twitter we're talking about, how long until he changes his mind again?
Another surge on mastodon? Countries, cities, public organisations should put up their own mastodon like EU, BBC and Germany have.
I was more thinking it's to test the waters.
A buck is affordable to most everyone who has the means to access Twitter.
Of course next year it'll be Twitter++ subscriptions for 20 bucks a month, as they phase out the 1 dollar tier.
I never cared for Twitter, and watching Musk's spin on it has been hilarious as someone with a long history in corporate IT.
Pre-edit: At the moment I'm refusing to refer to it by a
tween edgelords name~ Musk's name for it.Dutch government put up an instance as well; e.g. this is the handle of the agency for road and waterworks. @rijkswaterstaat@social.overheid.nl
There's a separate one for the city of Amsterdam as well
Doesn’t remove ads (take money from subscribers or advertisers, not both, also print media)
Tell that to all the advertorial content from e.g., the fossil fuel industry on The New York Times. Print news has been accepting money from advertisers while charging users since before internet ads were a thing. They just hide the ads in more insidious, corrupt ways.
My point exactly. Why do we get ads on something we pay for with money?
I can only approve of people paying for services they use. It isn’t free to run. But there are several things to consider:
I don’t mind paying for services, but I now have 20 different services. Each one is trying to extract the maximum amount of money out of me while giving me a minimum in return.
I also accept that those services are not free to run, but realistically, these companies aren’t just trying to cover their operating costs, they’re trying to further line the pockets of executives and shareholders.
And its never enough for them. I could give Twitter $100 a month and they’d still sell my data for a few extra pennies. I could give YouTube an unlimited supply of servers and bandwidth and they’d still show just as many ads.
We will never get the cost living under control until this corporate greed is addressed because no matter how much money we pay people, there’s an army of psychopaths ready to milk them of every cent.
So fuck em. They can have an extra dollar when they can prove it will actually end up in the pocket of an employee. Otherwise, the richest man in the world can fund his own little reactionary pet project.
I would also welcome decent micropayments (maybe digieuro?), so that you wouldn’t need to subscribe, but could pay 0.045€ for something without it being unfeasible because of fixed transaction costs.
That’s incompatible with corporate greed. They will look at a billion transactions for $0.05 and start thinking “What if each of those was $0.50? Or $5.00? Or $50.00?”.
Without a regulating force (such as laws or consumer power that isn’t just neoliberal lies) , it will always grow to absorb every available dollar it can.
And realistically, charging people 0.045€ for the service they actually use won’t make them nearly as rich as charging people $50 each month for the $3 dollars they use.
They’ve already done the maths to prove it. It’s why it’s never happened.
And $1/yr today could easily be $10/yr next year and $100/yr after that… all depending on what the Musky Man feels like on that day.
The CEO learning this at the same time as we are
That's legit probably what's happening though.
I mean I get what they're trying to do, but I feel like the people successfully making money with spam/bots will not really have a problem with that fee.
That's because reducing the bot problem isn't actually what they're trying to do. They're trying to patch the gaping hole in revenue that advertisers left in their exodus
Bots aren't a "problem" for Twitter unless the advertisers think there are more of them than there are real users. But if you can convince advertisers that you're reducing bots, while also not actually reducing bots, you've got a winning formula. Bots are reliable posters, they contribute a lot more than a regular user, and they make high-engagement tweets/posts/tweex that end up getting a lot of views, aka advertising opportunities.
Sure, but bots aren't why advertisers pulled out of Twitter, and replacing the revenue that advertisers used to provide is the main motivator behind this change. Any other justification or claim by Musk is just his typical PR bullshit that people still seem to lap up like it's the word of god
Insightful, thx.
At it's peak twitter had 500million users. in 2022 twitter made 4.5bil in profit. Typically a 1% signup rate for a new paid service is considered really good and there is no way that there are still 500million users. Seems like it's just a drop in the bucket.
Personally I think it's yet another attempt to intentionally dismantle the company.
Twitter made 4.5 billion in revenue, not profit. They likely weren't making profit yet, but either way we're still not privy to the company's exact profit before or after Musk's takeover, and therefore aren't privy to how much this charge would affect their margins.
Personally I think it's yet another attempt to intentionally dismantle the company.
If Musk wanted to dismantle Twitter he'd just shut it down. He owns the thing, he doesn't need a secret plan to fuck it up he can just do it. He's just flailing around trying to patch the holes in his $44 billion fuck up and leaning into his alt-right image of it
there is no way that there are still 500million users.
It's surprisingly hard to get a count of users. They're not a public company any more, so don't have to product quarterly earnings reports any more (which usually show the number of users). Just from the first page of Google results for "Twitter number of users", some sites say they have 237 million users, some say 372 million, some say 528 million (way too high), some say 396 million.
Whatever the case, they're the smallest major social media site. Even Pinterest is larger :)
Why does he not just start his own X branded bot farm to help keep Xittter afloat?
So an army of a thousand twitter bots will cost a thousand dollars a year? That seems shruggable.
Yeah, users that have bots already pays for it, now Elon Musk will need to pay their developers to avoid fake cards to be used by bots which will cost him much more money, and the result will be fewer users joining Twitter as not everyone puts their payment info that easily.
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That's the easiest task for a criminal!
Ain't no way I am giving Elon Musk $1.
Do you use Twitter?
I don’t. And haven’t since the moron took over. I can’t wait until everything he touches fails. Even if that means SpaceX.
I prefer to hope that he loses SpaceX. They are legitimately doing cool new things that we honestly need. But they can do that without Elon's involvement and he doesn't need to profit from it.
Nobody uses Twitter, since it doesn't exist any more. X.
he can pay me $1 for a taste of deez nuts.
lmao don't sell yourself so short! Charge him $8 monthly for Nuts Blue
you're right i've got a premium product on my hands
Great! More will move to Mastodon.
Probably not though. Common people don't understand Internet. Nor does politicians or journalists. What else is on Twitter? Advertisements?
I think it’s time we made a bunch of twitter alternatives and don’t mention Mastodon. I think we are approaching this the wrong way. Instead push instances as if they are separate alternatives themselves while having them federated.
Common people aren’t the ones who drive adoption of a platform. It’s the younger population - particularly those in their teens and twenties. Everyone else just follows their lead. Mastodon isn’t a challenge at all for that demographic. It isn’t anymore complicated than email - something that their seniors mastered easily. They just need an incentive to do it. And Musk may be providing it.
Can we stop posting about every crap decision X makes? We're just generating free publicity for it at the moment
It died months ago, and at this point, news outlets are the ones keeping it relevant.
I'll do my part to promote Mastodon every time this happens.
Mastodon and Lemmy have reached the critical mass needed to sustain itself. Let the people discover it themselves. No need to invite them in.
From any other company who runs a social media company with a spam problem, I’d say this is an interesting solution. You can identify some bots and sock-puppet accounts by PCI. For Musk’s twitter, I’m not exactly trusting it, it feels like enshittification is in full swing.
I wonder how this will affect diversity of opinion on twitter, since I feel those already critical of twitter won’t be as likely to spend a dollar
And I’m a little skeptical that this will dissuade botting, since 1$ is nothing
And I’m a little skeptical that this will dissuade botting, since 1$ is nothing
It depends how many bot-hours you need to earn a dollar back. That's prohibitive for a lot of dragnet-type internet activities, which run on tiny tiny fractions of a cent.
With any change on the site formerly known as Twitter, there are 3 lenses to examine it through:
- Reducing the massive financial loss that Musk will almost certainly take
- Amplifying the voice of the far-right
- Stroking the ego of the man child who owns it
This is probably mostly 1. He’s looked at the number of users and said “what if they were dollars?”.
But like you say, there’s probably a bit of 2. Reactionaries are more likely to hand over a dollar for a Truth Social with outside their choir to abuse.
It probably won’t dissuade bots and astro-turfing, but it will make it pay-to-play, with the richest welding the most influence. That’s definitely 3 since by any other metric besides money, Elon is average.
Soon Elon will pay users to keep using Twitter. Haha
Isn't he pretty broken right now? Twitter cost him a lot, and the money he has is mainly the capital he has (his companies).
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Yeah, that might be the wrong phrasing. Perhaps he meant Musk is cash poor, which isn't being broke.
Yeah, sorry. I still need to improve my English! He got a big debt with banks to buy Twitter.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/22/elon-musk-twitter-debt https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-twitters-cash-flow-still-negative-ad-revenue-drops-2023-07-15/
S’aight :) gotta make sure we can understand one another.
Thanks, very kind.
Do you mean cash poor?
There are still new users signing up for shitter?
Not anymore
Ok, but how will this help them get more users? Because I can easily see how it will make them less users.
Due to the low amount, I’d say this is more about combating botting atm
Is botting the thing losing them money?
I think Elon is the thing that's losing them money
reminder this is $1 philippines which is like $56 usd
Most of that going to get eaten by transaction fees. Is Elon still involved in a transaction processor?
there's a conspiracy theory - use the fee as a way to normalize paying X for things and then pivot to paying through X for things until it's the fascist super app of elon's sweaty fever dreams.
I don't think that's even a conspiracy theory, I think it's obvious that's what they're doing.
Even for what they offer now; if you already have your payment details registered with "X", then it's a much easier decision to make about paying for a blue tick or editing rights or whatever else.
Yep. Obviously he can go ahead and claim now whatever he wants about this move being all about combating bots but it seems fairly obvious to me that this is not about that. Getting access to registered users payment info is just one more way to loop people into their system and keep track of who.what.where type of users they have. Charges and platform uses for buying marketed products on the platform is just a hop
skipclick away at that point.Bots meanwhile will continue to do what they always do; $1 a year to register in is nothing. They will also most likely be able to do this via a one time only use type credit card where user info is irrelevant.
Honestly don’t think it’s an insane idea. Not sure how effective $1 would be against bots, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the idea makes sense: basic and low friction to deter a large amount of spam. Maybe it’s $5 a year or whatever.
Of course there’s an equity issue for those who can’t afford this, especially if it goes mainstream and every online thing requires similar and we get Netflix -> Cable all over again.
But here on the Fedi I can see the idea working if applied to some instances that have set up the governance (eg co-op) and services (committed moderators) for it to make sense.
I think it would be cool if being an admin and moderator could genuinely be a side hustle or more without sucking away at someone’s passion.
i agree completely, and i've said it before, a small fee goes a long way to stopping spam and the bad kind of shitposting. It's barrier that a lot of actors, good and bad, can climb, but they'll be at least someone who can't or won't.
thing is, twitter has already eroded so much trust and relevance that i think for a lot of folks this might be the last straw. we'll see - much like the reddit rebellion it's hard to tell how many folks will actually quit from the noise alone.
For the fediverse i'm not certain at all. on the one hand many of us want the fediverse to grow and become more diverse. Fees are a barrier to entry. but i also agree, as you say, that mods and admins deserve something for their trouble - especially since their job is a lot harder on lemmy.
i hate to say, but maybe discord has it right? monetize cosmetics and stuff? i really don't know. Disclosure i am nitro subscriber, mostly for the emoji.
I'm not really on discord (occasionally have gone on there) … but generally the whole fedi, IMO should probably be taking notes from them because they've obviously done a few things right which also seem to be exactly the things the fedi definitely doesn't understand.
On the small subscription fee for the fedi, I think it would work best for specific instances. Here, decentralisation is a strength (again), as the small instance/community approach is well suited as the alternative to the large-with-a-small-subscription model and should provide a diversity of options for different kinds of people.
As for Twitter, right now a bunch of takes are floating around about how dumb the fee is (at least on masto, which has a huge bias against twitter) … while some will definitely leave I do wonder whether it actually makes sense for a lot people. How many principally lurk and would prefer their feed were "better" and are willing to be on a platform that requires the subscription for this? I wouldn't be surprised if down the line we here takes from people who don't pay but stay on Twitter because they like the feed better.
