Just fucking do it.
Maybe then other media will finally stop reporting shit like
“Person Z said Y on X (formerly Twitter).”
Elon Musk Says He Might Put X/Twitter Behind A Paywall
Submitted 1 year ago by Voyager@psychedelia.ink to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
toastus@feddit.de 1 year ago
squiblet@kbin.social 1 year ago
It’s annoying enough when they report what someone famous said on Twitter but the articles about what a bunch of random unknown people posted on Twitter (often phrased as if they represent a community) are even worse.
paddirn@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Headline: “People are outraged about !”
Source: 5 random tweets I found that are mildly mocking the thing.
FLX@lemmy.world 1 year ago
In my language we also have this “X (formerly Twitter)” shit, it’s like these fucking stringers got it shoved down their throat by the marketing/lawyer team
jonne@infosec.pub 1 year ago
Yeah, it’s crazy how much influence Twitter still has on the media conversation. Nothing that happens on Mastodon ever makes the news because journalists haven’t been able to figure it out.
Jaysyn@kbin.social 1 year ago
This is a great idea. Do it!
ohlaph@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes please. Do it.
aquarisces@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Please kill it harder
carl_dungeon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think it’s a great move Elon, charge $100 a month base price to keep the riff raft out, and then offer packages going up to $10,000 a month that allow people to post. I really, truly, seriously think you should do this!
PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
He said creating such a system is “the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots
Lol the fucking “bots” again.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
The thing is that the bots aren’t going to lower by much when he does that, since the majority of bots on there are his own.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It does seem like it, considering how many inactive accounts follow him
BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world 1 year ago
He’s still raging because the “bots” were supposed to get him out of having to purchase the company on wildly unfavorable terms. He’ll ride this excuse along with the whole business straight into the ground.
Asudox@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Great idea. I definitely support this decision.
sebinspace@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do it.
You won’t.
No balls.
heliumlake@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Who in their right mind would pay for a dying social media platform? This reeks of desperation from a man trying to convince himself of his own supposed public image.
Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The requirement to create an account to view replies/threads is a show stopper for me and it has somehow made Twitter even more useless. It barely had value when it was freely legible but it’s not worth sharing data with them to get festering garbage in return.
Yet he thinks people are going to pay for it?
We live in a world where social media and communication are commoditized as fuck and people refuse to pay premiums for shit they can do for free elsewhere. How is Twitter going to compete with Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Reddit, and Facebook when it’s arguably the worst choice, objectively the least feature rich, yet the only one that costs money?
notapantsday@feddit.de 1 year ago
Yet he thinks people are going to pay for it?
The people who produce the garbage will pay for it and maybe a few journalists who want to report on the newest pile of garbage, trying to create enough outrage to generate a few clicks on their shitty “news” site.
squiblet@kbin.social 1 year ago
He's seemed oddly desperate for money not only about twitter, but also how he's the 1 or 2 wealthiest person in the world yet feels the need to run crypto pump-and-dump scams and game the stock market.
Gradenko@lemm.ee 1 year ago
When he first came up with the idea for paid twitter he legit thought he would get millions and millions of sign ups. He thought he was going to rake in so much quick and easy cash. Obviously he was wrong but it’s totally in his character to double down and be convinced that this time it will totally work. I mean, he’s a genius, it has to work.
PupBiru@kbin.social 1 year ago
the whole plan stinks of a man that doesn’t understand the value of money to 99% of humans
Niello@kbin.social 1 year ago
Dude thinks he's a genius (he's not). This is the problem when you only look at the outcome of something without factoring what caused it (lots of luck including birth lottery and the effort and talent of people around him in this case).
jballs@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I think the biggest problem at this point is how much Twitter has replaced a core part of how journalism used to function. Back in the day, if a company/organization/famous person/etc was doing something of note, they would write a press release and send it to news organizations, who would then decide how to cover (or not cover) the story.
Now, shit just gets tweeted out and a good chunk of journalism is just putting a few words around that tweet and calling it news. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow and no clone immediately popped up in its place, modern journalism would collapse.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.
ripcord@kbin.social 1 year ago
You could ask the same about paying for verification. But a very surprising number of people did that.
I agree with your core point in general, but the reality possibly is "lots of people". The vast, vast majority of people appear to have stuck with TwitX because that's where the people are. People aren't moving to other places because the people aren't there. A jillion organizations, "influencers", wanna-be "influencers", etc are still there because of inertia that surprisingly hasn't run out.
And a whole bunch of idiots have paid for the blue checkmark because they are desperate for attention and think they'll get more views that way. In many cases they're right.
This move, I think, would be more likely to motivate people to move or avoid the platform, but it's ridiculous to me how many people are left after all the other bullshit (including requiring logins, dropping blocking, all the right-wing propaganda and terrible recommendations in general, Musk's behavior, at least a handful of people dropping the platform, etc).
He may be losing money and advertisers but holy shit are a bunch of people still there.
curt@kbin.social 1 year ago
I would imagine people with huge followings and money to burn. Once the paywall is up, those huge followings are going to shrink fast.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Shitfluencers, bots and corporate profiles
alienanimals@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Literally every single day we have idiots doing Musk’s PR work for free.
Downvote Musk spam. The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring his businesses stay in the 24 hour news cycle.
PlexSheep@feddit.de 1 year ago
I just like watching the service formally known as twitter burn.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Nothing like a daily dose of schadenfreude to make everything else seem brighter and nicer…
azulavoir@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Literally every single day we have idiots telling us that we aren’t allowed to enjoy news articles.
Downvote “Downvote Musk spam” spam. The lemmy user doesn’t need your help ensuring their comments stay in the 24 hour news cycle.
alienanimals@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Uh oh, sounds like a musk fanboy got upset by spam. I’m glad I could help you understand how everyone else feels.
twisted28@lemmy.world 1 year ago
While I certainly agree, Twitter is where the #MeToo movement was born. Twitter was probably the only media not controlled by billionaires until now. A movement similar to metoo but shaming billionaires is Americans only hope
dragontamer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
not controlled by billionaires
Uhhh… Jack Dorsey?
chrishazfun@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Oh thank God, then we can all finally move on and stop talking about it.
I don’t hate what Twitter used to be. I never engaged with it much myself, but it was a fantastic tool for progressive organizations to network and mobilize, and the loss of that will genuinely hurt us all.
But at this point, that tool is already on life support. Better for it to die outright so that people find a new way to do those things x rather than this endless half life it’s now trapped in.
GreatGrapeApe@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I suspect the intention was to kill it because of how it aided people in organizing. Musk like many techbros does not want people organizing because then they might he able to divert the money he needs to build inefficient tunnels under the ground that could be used to feed and educate the masses about why Teslas are poorly assembled cars.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Sorry, but I really hate this argument. It buys into the bullshit mythology that Musk is some kind of evil genius and not just an egotistical moron.
The fact is that Elon went to court, at great expense, to try to get out of buying Twitter. It was a stupid mistake, and one that he was desparately trying to undo, right up until the last moment. To claim that this was part of his genius plan would be like saying that a good first step in planning a murder is to call the cops and tell them you’re planning a murder.
He got into his mess because he’s a sad divorced loser whose trans daughter won’t speak to him anymore, and rather than do any soul searching about it he blamed Twitter for turning her into a “communist”. He got sucked into the manosphere bullshit about how all the “woke” Silicon Valley companies are “censoring” people, tried to strongarm Twitter into changing their policies on hate speech by threatening to buy out the company if they didn’t accede, tried to make the threat credible by tendering an actual offer that was, incredibly stupidly, far above what the company was worth, and then went all surprised Pikachu face when the shareholders of a company that has literally never been profitable said “That sounds great, we’ll take it.” Now he’s just doing the best he can with a bad situation, after every legal move he could come up with to escape that situation failed ( did you know he’s even suing the lawyers who won the case for Twitter against him?).
It’s also important to understand that Elon took Twitter private. That means its profits (there aren’t any, there never have been) flow directly into his pocket, and it’s deficits flow directly out of his pocket. This isn’t like with Tesla where he’s a CEO of a publicly traded company, and get can get paid big bucks even when they lose money.
If Twitter loses money, Elon loses money. And in order to raise the capital he needed to buy it, he had to take out significant loans. In order to pay the interest on those loans he’s been liquidating large amounts of his Tesla stock (which forms the bulk of his compensation as Tesla CEO), which is tanking the Tesla stock price, which further reduces his capital.
In all this debacle has lost Elon somewhere in the region of $200 billion dollars in net worth. There is absolutely no universe in which he is personally sacrificing that kind of capital just to kill a social media platform, and even if you still - against all reason - believe this was an evil scheme to kill Twitter, it’s painfully obvious that they (whoever “they” are) could have done it for a LOT less than $200 billion.
All the changes he’s made to Twitter since buying it are driven by two basic motivations; because he’s a bigot who loves the adoration of other bigots, and because he genuinely thinks these are good ideas. Twitter is called X now because Musk has been trying to make X.com a thing for his entire adult life, to the point where its exactly what got him pushed out of PayPal.
There’s no grand plan here. He really is just that stupid.
whitecapstromgard@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Dew it!
Hiccup@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
He could’ve spent money building his own Twitter and leave us be but instead he had to go and waste 44+billion to cause harm and damage and destroy a company with employees making a living. It goes without saying he is just such a shit, vile and evil person.
GreatGrapeApe@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I suspect he bought it to destroy it.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Like the investors that gave him +10 billion are going to like that.
bert@lemmy.monster 1 year ago
“mission accomplished” and what not.
Smacks@lemmy.world 1 year ago
God I hope his checkmark followers gaslight him into doing this
iHUNTcriminals@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Stop feeding this guy.
realitista@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Yeah he just says this shit to stay in the news cycle.
TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This isn’t about some random 4chan troll. One of the wealthiest people in the world, now owner of a platform that hundreds of millions of people used to communicate can’t be so easily ignored. That acquisition was itself an example of how he can insert himself into public discourse regardless of whether people care about him. A lot of the people now lamenting the decline of Twitter, especially the ones who rely on it for their career, didn’t even use to think about this guy.
snek@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Why do the most pathetic of people make the news so often?
jet@hackertalks.com 1 year ago
He literally designs everything he does to get as much attention as possible. He’s not saying he’s going to do it, he’s saying he’s going to think about doing it. It’s an outrageous thing, so it will get attention.
Personally I would love for him to put up a paywall. Kill x now. Mastodon needs another boost
joel_feila@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do it DOOOOO IT DOOO IIIIT DO IT DO IT ~read in Lucy’s voice
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Lucy from Charlie Brown, or I Love Lucy? I can see both characters saying the line in very different ways
kamenlady@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Lucy from Twin Peaks
ComradeBunnie@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Lucy Barker from the musical Sweeney Todd.
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
just putting it behind a login screen was catastrophic by itself… just saying
Mdotaut801@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Stop posting Elmo articles. Let him rot. He wants this publicity.
BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I am sick of seeing this guy everywhere just like everyone else… but don’t you get just a little bit of pleasure out of watching him fuck this up at every single turn?
banneryear1868@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do people call him Elmo cause of the Sesame Street character, cause I can’t think of a more opposite personality
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
It isn’t the personality, it is more the same amount of brain cells and the same competence in running a business.
HeavyDogFeet@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I pray thing bumbling moron actually does it.
Binthinkin@kbin.social 1 year ago
Twitter is dead in 2024 if not by the end of the year.
Fafner@yiffit.net 1 year ago
Do it, you cuck.
jenniebuckley@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Good, then all the actually normal people will leave and Elon will have his echo chamber
alphacyberranger@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do it…The ring commands you to do so.
yoz@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Hes worth 200 billion. God! I cant believe someone can actually have that kinda money and people in some part of the world can’t afford a meal. If I had 200 billion , I would create X2 , will be called xtwice, just for shits and giggle. May be that’s what he’s doing.
Dr_Chocolate@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Certainly gives him a good way to limit social media as we approach the new election cycle.
reverendsteveii@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
At a press conference today, Musk was quoted as saying:
Look at me. Look at me. Please, God, I need people to be paying attention to me and validating me all the time. Ever since I fucked it up with my hot goth gf I’ve been an absolute mess of transparent attempts to remain relevant. I tried to gain your approval by doing what I guessed would be cool guy shit like going on stage with Dave Chappelle and yelling at you small people about how rich I am. I did the meme thing with the fake money and the fun monkey pictures. I spent billions evading your blocks on Twitter. I give up. You don’t have to love me. No one will ever love me. But I need you to always be looking at me.
Musk then produced an acoustic guitar and began to play a cover of Matchbox 20’s “Push”. According to reports, the entrepreneur who used his slave-generated wealth to build a private space program was on the verge of tears as he sang the line “Don’t just stand there/say nice things to me/cuz I’ve been cheated and I’ve been wronged”.
sdrawk@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Please do! Then we can post pictures of “X marks the spot of Twitter’s grave”
Aidinthel@reddthat.com 1 year ago
I can’t get over the fact that this is the guy who was supposed to be some kind of tech genius.
rtxn@lemmy.world 1 year ago
He was never a tech genius. Maybe fairly competent in some areas, I’ll give him that, but his main shtick was coming up with spectacular and insane ideas (who doesn’t like rockets?) and having enough emerald money to pay engineers until they could come up with solutions that work.
Fisk400@feddit.nu 1 year ago
So basically he is any eight year old with emerald money.
Telodzrum@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The emerald mine is a red herring, he didn’t actually get any significant (on this scale) wealth from it. He was just lucky to be on the PayPal team at the right time and that’s where his fortune got its real start.
Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world 1 year ago
He repeatedly is stumbling into the same fucking roadblocks tech companies have struggled with for a decade or more, and he’s walking through even worse thought processes when there’s mountains of data and analysis and proof on what does and doesn’t work.
It’s like rewatching a train wreck in slow mo, but for some reason there’s extra explosions added in.
How people thought, let alone still think, he’s some sort of tech genius is absolutely beyond me.
squiblet@kbin.social 1 year ago
It was a bunch of marketing hype all along, apparently. The more he's revealed who he actually is the less most people believe that he's really good at much of anything besides hype and being pretentious. The past decade of fawning news articles about how he's the smartest and most hard working person in the entire world are even more nauseating now, in retrospect.
Hiccup@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
I believe he’s only good at wasting money and destroying livelihoods. With 200 billion he should’ve fucked off somewhere as he’s clearly not useful for anything. Even Zuckerberg and Bezos have their value.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
That is what he pays his internet meme troll group to spread, yes.
kescusay@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Well, he’s got emerald-mine money to throw at problems, and he’s been lucky. Money and luck are a potent combination, and can stand in for actual talent and skill in a lot of cases.
He’s also had a good eye for tech investments in the past, though he seems to have lost that recently. For example, he co-founded OpenAI. (Sold all his stake in it to Microsoft before it hit the big-time, though.)
So… luck, money, and a history of investing in or founding tech companies that become at least moderately successful off the talents of others. Of course that’s going to give him an enormous ego and make him think everything he touches turns to gold.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
supposed != fact
darth_helmet@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Charging users to use a web service that costs money to run isn’t exactly rocket science, it’s how the web should work.