If that doesn’t finally kill off Twitter, I honestly don’t know what will.
Elon Musk Says He Might Put X/Twitter Behind A Paywall
Submitted 1 year ago by Voyager@psychedelia.ink to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social 1 year ago
jonne@infosec.pub 1 year ago
His Saudi investors are going to be stoked he lost them billions and killed the platform they bought into so they could influence US politics.
squiblet@kbin.social 1 year ago
Just getting rid of it is a way to influence US politics, and their domestic politics. Oligarchs don’t want people organizing politically on Twitter.
xkforce@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This supports the model that he’s intentionally driving the platform into the ground.
Although I would not at all be surprised if he really is that stupid.
FireWire400@lemmy.world 1 year ago
After Twitter’s dead he’s gonna reveal that it was all a social experiment
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m supposed to be the random idiot here, Musk.
Stop stealing my shtick.
ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Your username suggests that you’re merely a random idiot, not the random idiot
sethadam1@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Relevant username
Taako_Tuesday@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Given how he’s been doing things recently, you can expect a paywall to be added by next week sometime
Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I switched to Bluesky a few weeks ago and it’s so much better than Twitter. It’s a smaller number of people but the vibe is generally positive (plus half the posts aren’t ads).
Honestly it feels like Twitter did 10 years ago.rbos@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I’m skeptical that that vibe will survive open registration, much less the planned federation model, but I’d be happy to be surprised. As it stands, it looks like just another billionaire-generation wealth extraction vehicle.
Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah I think Mastodon is a more future-proof alternative but the lack of any kind of algorithm and tiny userbase is a big problem.
I’m sure Bluesky will get a bit shittier over time but at least it’s not being run into the ground by a megalomaniac like Musk.
cley_faye@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I stay on twitter to read content from people that are hard to reach. This get my account flagged as spam and locked every other day. At this point, using the service is considered spam in itself, so it’s no wonder he want to end it.
InvertedParallax@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Please?
obinice@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Good.
The sooner Twitter dies, the sooner we can see which alternative rises to fill the gap.
spiderman@ani.social 1 year ago
mastadon obviously
1bluepixel@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’d love that, but the celebrities are very much signaling Blue Sky.
Endorkend@kbin.social 1 year ago
I'm afraid not, the general people will and already do use Threads.
deanimate@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Musk: Twitter is already pretty fucked since I took over but I want to finish the job…
Treczoks@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Good. How soon?
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What a wonderful idea!
kraftpudding@lemmy.world 1 year ago
At some point you got to start believing that Musk is still pissed they forced him to but twitter, so now he’s trying his best to destroy it.
reverendsteveii@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
You see, I always thought that he bought Twitter so that he could have a parallel equivalent to that thing where the president can send a message to every cell phone instantly. You’ll notice that one of the first things he did was make himself block-proof. He still shows up in your feed, even if you blocked him. That was actually what caused me to leave Twitter, though his later decisions have validated that. He’s even floated the idea of getting rid of blocks altogether. He’s slowly making Twitter unpalatable to anyone who isn’t part of his white supremacist genius entrepreneur cult.
zoe@infosec.pub 1 year ago
dude got duped while overpaying an extra 20B$ for an app and now wants to redeem the losses on top of the users: makes all the sense
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Coming next week on Proof That We Don’t Live In A Meritocracy News:
Elon Musk says he might rename X to 🍆💦.com
And indeed anything else that keeps his odd shaped face in the news.
FLX@lemmy.world 1 year ago
““the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.”
He’s able to think, and he’s all alone thinking and coding twitter all by himself
What a hero
squiblet@kbin.social 1 year ago
He’s the only person who really knows anything about websites. Well, tbf he did fire practically everyone at Twitter that wasn’t an H1B programmer or network engineer.
Blaubarschmann@feddit.de 1 year ago
Why is it even so damn important for him to get rid of bots that he has to take these extreme measures and make the X experience for everyone so bad? Or maybe it’s just always the same excuse to justify his stupid decisions
Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world 1 year ago
As someone else pointed out, his entire perspective of Twitter is skewed by his own usage. His following and crypto bs have resulted in all of his tweets being bombarded by bots trying to get attention. It severely impacts his ability to use Twitter, and he’s been disillusioned into thinking this is everyone’s experience of the platform.
When you look at it from such a narrow perspective, I’m sure yeah, bots are a pretty big issue.
FLX@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I guess his goal was to kill it since the beginning, or since he was forced to buy it.
He sees his employees as political enemies
And now that normal people are gone, most those still here are bots and people influenced by bots so maybe he think the “vast army” is growing but its just the proportion that grows.
eran_morad@lemmy.world 1 year ago
How fucking grand would it be if this cunt bought fox “news”?
jazzkob@lemmy.world 1 year ago
good, let it die
WindowsEnjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I would pay as much as I need to. I can’t live without twitter!!! ^/s
Polar@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Do it. All creators I like will finally jump ship, because there’s 0 reason to post about your new video, merch launch, etc. to only paying members.
LarryTheMatador@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
He seems to say one outrageous thing a day to assure hes always in the media cycle. Its quite transparent. Anyone care to speculate why this is? Is it just core trait narcissism or is there a bigger plan?
squiblet@kbin.social 1 year ago
Getting press and attention is basically all he’s good at. No wonder he loves trump so much… they’re basically the same person. He did parlay that trait into making Tesla more of a success.The downfall is when he actually tries to do anything besides get attention in the press.
LarryTheMatador@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
People with narcissistic personality disorder excel at always keeping the attention on themselves and sucking all the oxygen out of the room as well…wait…
SecretSauce@lemm.ee 1 year ago
*Oh no! * Anyway…
MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Elon Musk and Twitter destroying each other is the best long term storytelling I’ve seen in a long time.
Imagine paying money to post dumb thoughts on the Internet. Ha.
Steve@communick.news 1 year ago
Granted he’s backing into this stupidly, and I can’t imagine he’ll do this right.
But the basic idea of transitioning away from the ad model toward a user funded model is a good move.
I’d go with something where people can create accounts and follow others for free. Then posting rights cost $5 per year. With an additional $5 for every 5000 followers you get.
That way X can monotize people with hundreds of thousands and millions of followers. At that level, accounts become businesses on their own. A few promotional posts would easily pay for the account.
Heresy_generator@kbin.social 1 year ago
But the basic idea of transitioning away from the ad model toward a user funded model is a good move.
There's some wishful thinking. This isn't going to be a "transition away from the ad model," this is absolutely going to be about adding revenue in addition to the ad model.
That way X can monotize people with hundreds of thousands and millions of followers. At that level, accounts become businesses on their own. A few promotional posts would easily pay for the account.
Those are the accounts that bring value to Twitter to begin with; you're suggesting people should be charged for the labor they're giving Twitter that drives traffic to the site. They already realized how unbelievably stupid it was to try to demand money from those accounts with the Twitter Blue roll out, they quickly backtracked and gave Twitter Blue for free to accounts with over 1 million followers. Many popular creators are willing to provide content for someone else's site for free, very few are willing to play for the privilege. Twitter isn't the only game in town; if they start to charge people based on high follower counts they'll leave.
Steve@communick.news 1 year ago
Those people are all (directly or not) making a living off their free accounts. There is some value to them using X instead of … Y. It’s perfectly reasonable to ask them to pay extra.
ArugulaZ@kbin.social 1 year ago
That's cool, I was done with it anyway.
Clbull@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That is the point where I’d well and truly delete my account.
Elon Musk’s buyout to me was an elaborate Twitter shitpost which went horribly wrong when their board forced him to actually go through with the deal. But if Musk thinks I’ll pay money to use The App Formerly Known As Twitter, he’s having a laugh. My profile have a grand total of 33 followers and almost all my posts only get interacted with by phishing scammers and spam bots pushing OnlyFans pages. I’d be better off just writing my thoughts into a Notepad file since nobody’s going to read them anyways.
Not sure why X is like this. It’s honestly been a problem with Twitter long before Elon Musk bought them out and it almost feels like I’m shadowbanned on the site for whatever reason. Twitter to me is a site that’s only useful if you want to follow a celebrity and it’s for that reason that I never felt a need to subscribe to Blue .
Part of me wanted to stick around to the bitter end with a cup of soda and bowl of popcorn, because I thought it’d be entertaining to watch Elon Musk piss away sixty billion dollars, drive Twitter to the ground and then attempt to sue the ultra rich tech oligarchs who sold him the site. But this is just fucking depressing.
X is one of several reasons (the other being dating sites) why I well and truly subscribe to the dead internet theory.
squiblet@kbin.social 1 year ago
That’s how Twitter was for me 2009-2016. I posted about programming, sysadmin stuff… zero engagement… posted photos about my travels, art hobbies, hiking, random observations, current events… pretty much nobody ever said anything about them. I had a successful nice web app from 2008-2012 and we started a Twitter for announcements, got 8,000 followers, but I doubt it brought us any new business.
eestileib@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I have met real people and had real sex from dating sites, they’re way more useful than X.
Clbull@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah… no.
Online dating from a straight male perspective fucking sucks. I have tried using various apps for the past decade to find someone to little luck.
Ten years ago, back when you didn’t need to mutually match on every app to send a message, the cycle went: message lady, 99.99% get ignored, 0.009% get ghosted after first 3 messages, 0.0001% have an actual conversation.
Maybe that convo will lead to a date. Over half of my dates in my early twenties led to her making excuses to bail early and blocking me afterwards, and I don’t even understand why.
On an incredibly rare occasion have I found a relationship from online dating, but that’s fallen apart.
Nowadays, nearly all of the sites that I used to use had been bought out by Match, including OkCupid, POF, Tinder, Hinge, and a few other major ones. These apps have been enshittified to be little more than Tinder clones in both functionality and price. Other apps are owned by Bumble and are just as bad. On all of these apps, I seldom get any matches and those I do are either phishing scammers or throwaway accounts plugging an OnlyFans page. All except Okcupid which is a strange anomaly.
On Okcupid I have about 70 matches. I was given a month of Okcupid by Customer Support after having problems with a Turkish lady harassing me. Long story short, we switched to Telegram, I took twelve hours to reply to one of her messages and she went nuclear on me to the point of making multiple OKC accounts to send me abusive messages. I found out all these matches I had were African, Indonesian or Filipina ladies using the app to spoof their location and find a Western husband - and the means to a spousal visa to get into my country.
Falsifying your location to match with people halfway across the world is blatantly against Okcupid’s Terms of Service, by the way. But they don’t give a shit. Profiles which I reported weeks ago still haven’t been banned.
Sniatch@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes please!
kokesh@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think pretty much everyone now ses that he is not as smart as people thought. But doesn’t have any sense of self-preservation? He invested so much in Twitter, just to run it into ground by suicidal moves. Everyone uses Twitter? No, no more embedded tweets in all the sites. Ok, someone still uses it? Let’s start charging. WTF?
zerbey@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I don’t care what he does with it at this point.
lily33@lemm.ee 1 year ago
As much as people here laugh - because yes, I get that it’s very unlikely to work - I actually think this would be better for users than the ad-based model most social media use now.
BruceTwarzen@kbin.social 1 year ago
I think it would be better because it will die out in a month
son_named_bort@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Who says they would get rid of ads?
Mane25@feddit.uk 1 year ago
If it were a new platform and somebody wanted to try that I’d at least watch what happens, but Musk has burned through too much credability.
Papanca@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I honestly can’t figure out what he is thinking: is he trying to kill of twitter because he doesn’t care about it, or does he honestly belief that this will make good money? I feel like i’m watching a bouncing ball in a small room, you never know which way he goes next
mx_smith@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I heard that he killed off Twitter because they were supporting Ukraine, and daddy Putin doesn’t like that.
Papanca@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I heard something like that too, he seems a very nasty guy