Elon Musk Suggests He Will Charge All X/Twitter Users a Fee to Be on the Platform

UrLogicFails@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 348 points – Elon Musk Suggests He Will Charge All X/Twitter Users a Fee to Be on the Platform
variety.com

I'm not sure if this is technically Technology news, but I can remove this post if it's in the wrong community

Archive link: http://archive.today/3XM6s

Musk brought up the idea of charging all users of X/Twitter during a wide-ranging conversation focused on AI that featured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. “[We’re] moving to a small monthly payment for use of the X system,” Musk told Netanyahu, claiming that it is the only way to eliminate the problem of bots, as reported by Bloomberg’s Dave Lee.

Musk didn’t mention timing of his plan to charge X/Twitter users, nor did he say how much it would cost.

Musk, who also is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said X/Twitter ad sales have plunged 50% since he bought the company. “We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load,” Musk posted on July 15.

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This is one way to finally get rid of Twitter. I wonder if Spez is considering charging for Reddit?

It really feels like a lot of social media platforms are intentionally self-sabotaging themselves. I keep expecting them to die off every time something like this happens, but they appear to continue on regardless.

I think that social media sites actually dying off is actually impossible with enough inertia (even if their base decreases) and that's why they are emboldened to do such anti-consumer practices.

All this to say that I'm sure Steve Huffman has immediately started furiously texting everyone he knows about his new idea to charge for Reddit as well as a boosted version of Gold called "Alien Orange" or something.

Even if a social network loses 99,99% of the user base due to charging to use it, those left are the ones that see no problem paying to use it, so they are more likely to eat up some insane pricing, which would help recoup losses from a smaller user base. Basically whales.

I think the only way to try to kill a social network is by going full scorched earth on it. Remove all your comments, or change them to be an annoying copy pasted comment about why you're getting off the platform. And even then I don't think it is helpful, I did that with Reddit but was forced to leave technical posts intact because I feared I might prevent someone from solving their issue.

They see no issue paying now.

When there's no content left they'll eventually notice it's a shit deal.

It's the regenerative braking version of monetizing a website.

It seems silly to not have actual physical brakes on a car and to rely on electric inertia to slow down, it works well in practice. When the pressure starts being applied it may seem like the vehicle is not slowing down but the process of slowing down has begun.

Twitter has had financial brakes applied to it and you just got to wait a little while and it's either going to slow to a crawl and then stop, a new conductor is going to be put on board, or it's going to completely derail.

Maybe it's like when email scammers intentionally leave in tons of spelling and grammar mistakes. Anyone that notices probably wasn't going to fall for the scam, anyway, leaving only the weak after culling the strong.

I'm not completely sure what the point would be, other than leaving you with a propaganda tool without dissenting comments built in, an idiot echo chamber. Who knows, maybe that's worth the amount of financial loss he's caused.

Maybe he's trying to revert back to Minimal Viable Product while keeping only the dumb and bigoted.

Or maybe he's just not as smart as everyone thought.

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Reddit can still attract advertisers. Twitter, not so much.

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I hope he buys reddit next

I think he should seriously consider buying Meta so that we can watch it crash and burn just like Xitter. Facebook is the cancer of the internet and it deserves to go too.

Unfortunately, Twitter was only up for sale because it wasn’t able to effectively monetize. On the other hand, Meta has figured out how to make money hand over fist.

I think the easiest route to get Musk to own Meta is if we goaded him + Zuck into a pay per view fist fight over ownership of Meta.

Twitter was profitable in the years before covid. They made a net income of $1.2 billion in 2018.

They made a slight (compared to their revenue) loss during the pandemic, presumably because advertisers generally were willing to spend less, but they were still earning more than enough - simply cut a few costs and they'd be profitable again. Or just wait for the market to improve since from the sounds of it they had more than enough savings to ride it out (that appeared to be their plan).

They didn't sell to Musk because they were desperate, they sold to Musk because he signed a contract guaranteeing he would pay far more than the company was worth. If I owned a house that was worth a million dollars, and someone offered me ten million, hell yeah would I sell that house even if I wasn't really interested in selling.

So I mean, if this was in lieu of data collection and tracking, this is what more of the software world should actually do. Running platforms isn’t free, and making the user the product is a malicious and unsustainable solution.

That said, I certainly wouldn’t pay Twitter - I think I’d rather donate to a Mastodon instance, or pay for some other private alternative. Musk is awful for so many reasons, holds way too much power, and deserves no money of mine.

if this was in lieu of data collection and tracking

I guarantee this isn't in lieu of, it's in conjunction with.

Yup. You can see this kind of stuff happening with ads in things you buy.

There was a model of "ad supported" and "pay to own"

But some exec figured out you could do both and double dip.

There is no world in which things get more consumer friendly unless it's forced

That's actually a good point about how some services do require payment to provide safe service to their users. A very close to home example would be your local Lemmy instance. In order to run the servers and keep it ad (and tracking) free, each instance needs donations from their users. The same is true for Mastodon, as you mentioned.

The problem is, I would be shocked if Twitter actually provided a safer (or improved in any way) service. There are a other issues at play as well, but they all basically boil down to most users not wanting too give money to Twitter, and if they were ok with that, they would already have purchased Twitter Blue.

I would be shocked if Twitter actually provided a safer (or improved in any way) service. There are a other issues at play as well

One of those issues being the idiot child in charge. As long as Musk is running the place, there's no such thing as safety for the users.

I would love if there was a platform where they charged a very small amount monthly eg. I £1/€1/$1 in exchange for not using my data for anything. I love lemmy but I'm entirely at the mercy of the instance maintainers and there is no guarantee my data won't be used

It's always going to come down to trusting someone though right ?

Even with a larger corporation who tells you they don't sell your data, it would only take 1 employee to see the opportunity to sell 1 billion email addresses or something.

Also in the fediverse your data is pretty much freely available to everyone. Instances need to publish the list of users who have upvoted a given post or comment. Anyone so inclined could build a profile of comments and posts you've liked from freely available data.

Lemmy still feels a bit wild - with lots of instances springing up in the last few months and not really any time for admins to demonstrate their attitudes to different issues.

Mastodon is a little more mature though, I've been at fosstodon.org for a few years now. The admins there are regular participants in the community. I think I'm on the "Elon" tier in their patreon - $11 a month.

This, I think, is actually the worst part about Lemmy. Instead of having more control and privacy you have less because everything is out in the open. Which is terrible for the users and could also have a chilling effect on the platform.

What's worse is that this is never really communicated to the users.

I can understand your position but I don't see it that way.

I think lemmy is a fairly early iteration of the fediverse and it's still finding its own format and associated culture.

For example, maybe more people will start using multiple accounts, or use accounts only for a few months before discarding them.

A lot of redditors treated accounts like some kind of alternate self, to be manicured and maintained indefinitely, which might not be the right move in the fediverse.

Also, a lot of things aren't really communicated to users on most platforms. The information is there if anyone cares to invest even the briefest moment in understanding the fediverse

But isn't interoperability of instances kinda the main selling point of fediverse? If you really end up having multiple accounts across the site that seems like a drawback to me, not something to hope for. Besides, having "one self" is not a bad thing either. I'd rather have people use one account on which I can consistently see their views or behaviors or having tons of alts to hide behind and switch as the general opinion shifts. You can't really have a proper community if it's just smoke and mirrors of alts and throwaway accounts.

Perhaps, but all of these points rely on a subjective definition of what a community is, and I think that's still emerging in the fediverse. A Facebook community is different to a reddit community which is different to a lemmy community.

I fucking dare him to follow through. Please do it. Don't wuss out Elon!

Anyone who hasn't abandoned the platform by now deserves whatever they get.

Sounds like a great idea!

I mean, not for Xitter, but for the internet as a whole it would be amazing!

So, I am starting to really believe his goal is to just drive a stake into the heart of twitter.

Either that, or he is trying to prove a point regarding something.

I don't think there is any possible way, he is so dumb as to make all of these horrible decisions regarding twitter.... This has got to be destroying twitter by design, on purpose.

I mean, seriously.... he has done literally everything that you SHOULDN'T do. Fire the majority of the company. Destroy over a decade worth of very good branding. Alienate all investors. Alienate the user base. Piss off the remaining users more. Drive away advertisers....

FFS, the dude has a company that sends rockets into space, and previously, the world's premier electric car company... What in the hell is his odd obsession with choking the life out of twitter, that has been costing him money left and right due to absolutely horrible publicity.

Please remember that SpaceX and Tesla have entire teams dedicated to handling Elon and reversing his decisions. Twitter did not have the infrastructure required to handle the sheer level of stupid that is Elon Musk.

If he wanted Twitter to fail, he could have just unplugged all the servers and be done with it.

No need for him to change the policies so much everyone would leave, break his internet persona, and then declare Xitter bankrupt.

No, I believe he bought Twitter in order to manipulate the US presidential election by spreading propaganda from what he considers a "left-wing bubble". But because he has no idea how to run a social media, he is failing to keep it together and by now is throwing stuff against it to see what sticks.

He owes a lot of money to banks, etc, for the company.

Explicitly closing Twitter would make him liable for destroying other people's equity. Accidentally destroying twitter while pretending to drastically fix it, while pretending it's failing against his will and his taking measures to save it, is the only way to kill it without being on the hook for it.

I doubt he won't be on the hook for the billions he got as investment no matter how he destroys Twitter.

Haven’t you heard the story about that one time when he literally unplugged a bunch of servers? He also had zero regards to the proper protocol for moving hardware like that.

Yes, but he didn't do that with every server sadly

It was a good start. Elon should pull that same stunt with all the data centers he owns.

He's a stupid man. But he's also sitting on mbs dick, so he does what daddy says

He's probably losing money on it.. So, it makes sense for him to kill it, before he digs a deeper hole.

That being said, he's an engineer who seriously got angry at cave divers when they told him his sub sucks.

And I'm willing to bet many of the crappy design decisions for Tesla are made by him too

So, possible he's an idiot, but, equally possible, he's trying to kill it in a subtle way which won't instantly drive all traffic to a competitor

I know it is a popular sentiment that people should migrate to Mastodon, but I personally think people will migrate wherever the people they follow migrate to.

With this in mind, I suspect Bluesky will be the platform to usurp Twitter; but with Twitter chasing off all their users in the near future, it may go to whichever platform is readily open at the time.

I'm very curious to see if Bluesky or Spill open up when Twitter closes the door on its users. If not, Mastodon may have a shot at being the next large platform...

The biggest problem with Bluesky is it's owned by another musk.

He's not great, but that's an exaggeration

Until it isn't. The platform is still single-tracked through an unaccountable billionaire.

I wouldn't say the owner is anywhere near musk-like, however it is still centralized. The system seems to be setup to allow fediverse-like federation in the future, but right now the only instance is the official Bluesky instance.

Dorsey more of a proto-Musk IMO. He went off to an island to live with cocaine and guns. He only came back recently to create another social network because he hates Musk’s guts. (Edit: I guess I was wrong, and he doesn’t hate Musk)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure the guys fucking insane, but I also don’t think he’s as bad as musk or as hell-bent on destroying democracy. He’s just interested in making money to buy more cocaine and islands and guns.

Dorsey is a best pal of Musk's

Are you sure? I know they used to be super friends, but I thought they had a falling out.

Thick as thieves.

Hmm.. either they made up, or I’m thinking of something else. I’ll take your word for it.

Anyway, the rest of what I said stands. Dorsey may be bonkers (check out that Vice interview from a year or two ago), but he’s not even in the same league of evil bastards as Musk. He may be completely a self-interested billionaire, scumbag, but he’s not a literal fascist with Musk’s track record, nor is he actively stoking neo-nazi activity while personally interfering with an ongoing war in favor of our country’s greatest and longest-standing enemy.

I think you’re giving Jack Dorsey a bit too much credit by calling him another musk.

Edit: Although… he kinda was “Musk before Musk” if you know what I mean. Like I first said: proto-Musk.

Is bluesky up yet? I'd assume everyone will just go to bluesky anyway.

Yes, but it's invite-only. Either you join the wait-list and get lucky, or someone gives you an invite (members get an invite to hand out to friends every 10 days or so). Amusingly this has resulted in a large chunk of blüski being furry and LGBT, due to how tightly knit the communities are. I know a lot of the furry discord servers I've been in regularly have people openly offering invites, whereas most of the non-furry servers seem to be completely unaware of how active it is or that it even exists (my experience is that blüski feels way more active than Twitter due to it not giving preferential treatment to Elon shills; you're far more likely to have random people seeing your posts).

From what I can tell, it's still on the invite system; but I haven't been keeping a close eye on it. I figured if it opened up, I would hear about it online.

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Spock: Twitter is dying.

Kirk: Let it die.

That would finish off Twitter instantly.

He's not THAT dumb. Right guys?

....right??

I don't know. Every time I think that there's some level to which no sane human being would stoop, this guy manages to surprise me. And not in a good way.

Musk is an absolute idiot. But I'd rather pay for a system than have it mine me for data. I'm guessing he wants to do both though. Because that's what he does with Tesla cars.

He should totally do it and charge per post as well.

Use unitys model and charge per view, "Your post got 200k views, start paying up! 1 cent per view"

why does he look like that

He's had a fair bit of cosmetic surgery over the years. Things like hair plugs to jaw fillers

You mean like an idiot who paid billions of dollars for a company only to ruin it in less than a year?

I really hope this happens. It already was dying, but this would be the final nail in the coffin for the stubborn users who are still on there for some reason. Clearly Twitter Blue has been failing.

He's too much of a pussy to actually do it, we all know this.

Quick, tell him that on Twitter! Maybe he'll actually do it and we'll finally be rid of his godawful grandstanding.

Bro, it's a cesspool and I wouldn't get on x even if someone paid me, I'm happy to see it burn to the ground

So what is a tweet supposed to be called now? A Xext or something?

In all seriousness, it's just called a post now. Elon threw away the incredible brand recognition of "Tweet," the noun/verb that every tech company wants. It's like if Google stopped wanting people to use their name as a verb and just go with the generic "search" term.

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I want to charge Musk every time he makes another asshole announcement about running one of his companies into the ground. Just fuck off, dude.

If you had a nickel for every time musk edged a promising platform closer to worthlessness and destruction you'd have a mother fucking shit ton of nickels.

Like... a cavalry charge? Infantry? Rhinocerii?

I had been thinking “charge” in the financial sense, but now that you mention it, a bunch of rhinos would be much more entertaining!

Imagine thousands of people not succeeding in crashing a megacorp on purpose, and then one rich guy crashing it just by being stupid

One of the richest people in the entire world wants still more money. Tell me again how "trickle-down economics" works?

Ok, I loathe the man, hate the shit show he's made TwitX, think he's a clown, generally hate billionaires, etc. But this is kinda a really stupid comment.

Hi @ripcord, we have one rule on Beehaw - "Be(e) nice". In the future, please be respectful of other users when posting in Beehaw communities. Thanks!

You're right, I could definitely have written this in a more respectful, constructive way.

No, see, it's like an inverted pyramid, and the little our overlords permit us of the product of our labor trickles down to them, you see.

He's the wealthiest man in the world. That doesn't mean he has a lair full of cash and just wants more. People really struggle to understand the difference between wealth and money in the bank. This isn't about hoarding money just for the sake of it.

I understand the difference, but he's collecting stuff just because it's shiny. He's short of cash because he has no impulse control, and I fail to see why he shouldn't fail the same way other people who overextend themselves fail.

What makes you think he's short on cash? Wealthy people don't store their wealth in cash anyways. The money is tied to the stocks of the companies they're running. That's why he needed to lend the money for twitter too; he doesn't have that kind of cash, but people are willing to borrow it to him because of his wealth.

If you just had read the article you'd see that they have lost 50% of the advertisers and are losing money. This isn't about wanting more money just for the sake of it. No company can exist if their finances are on the negative.

You aren't going to tell me Musk doesn't have some cash laying around.

Is he just supposed to pay for the running of twitter out of his pocket or what? It says there they've lost 50% of advertisers, and are making negative profit. That isn't sustainable. The purchase of twitter has cost him 40-something billion, and still keeps costing him even more. It's not about just wanting more profit, but to atleast break even.

Moving to a user supported service IS a good way to cut down on spam and wrest control from advertisers...

...IF you do it before you destroy all value, branding, community and cultural relevance

As so many others have said, this move at this point sounds like he's trying to finally end this fiasco.

On one hand, I'd love for it to finally die, but those toxic communities will simply move to a new site and do the same thing they did on Twitter. Like ants.

On the other hand, a lot of people have grown their business through Twitter and have relied on it. Most other sites don't have the same functionality and large number of people that make it so easy like Twitter.

So I guess I'm on the fence about Twitter dying.

Frankly I do not understand Twitter. Never been a member. Have looked at linked content sometimes but it always looks like a bunch of short meaningless thoughtless content. So I think Twitter has 0 value.

The people that seem to like it are those that want to be "the person" people follow or those that want to follow "the person". Both are kind of offensive behaviors as far as I am concerned.

Have looked at linked content sometimes but it always looks like a bunch of short meaningless thoughtless content. So I think Twitter has 0 value.

I mean, that was the original point of twitter. Jack Dorsey took Facebook's status updates feature and made a whole website about it. You'd follow people you knew in real life as well as famous people you liked and then could see short updates about their life and their interests. Most of the very first tweets were just innocuous little updates. 50cent said he was in Turkey. Warren Buffet said he joined the app. A bunch of random non celebrities posted messages about what they were cooking that day.

Twitter effectively ran this concept into the ground when it 1) removed the character limit (it was originally 140 chars), and 2) added thread reply features.

The amazing thing to me is that people actually care about that. Obviously a lot of people do. I cannot fathom it. It is just not me. Kind of confirms I made a good choice by ignoring Twitter.

I don't use Xitter, what functionality does it have that's not stupidly easy to implement? As far as I can tell the only thing that Xitter has is a userbase - and when they drive them away they'll have nothing [but debt].

A new platform has the potential for better moderation and better design to keep those unsavory elements in check. Since Musk has made himself the enemy, the only path forward is for Twitter to die. Nothing good will come from it as long as he is in charge.

It's a prisoner's dilemma thing. People have had ample time and opportunity to move to mastodon, but as you say Twitter is still where the bulk of eyeballs are, but that only remains true if everyone's too afraid to leave it.

I still have a Twitter account. Checking in to see who is still advertising.

"Knees over toes guy".. some personal trainer thing?

Google pixel with comments turned off

Some ethereum outfit...

Youtube advertising football stuff with comments turned off

Amazon music advertising s9me podcast

ESPN sport center

Shrug

Yo knees over toes guy slaps, I’m a huge fan and have been since the pandemic.

I definitely fell victim to the marketing but goddamn if his workouts haven’t helped my knee pain!

How can he slap?! 😫

In all seriousness, though, what's the angle? Building musculature to support joints? Or is it some sort of weight lifting reference?

Don't quote me on this but I believe his thing is what the handle says; knees over toes. It used to be considered to be bad for your joints doing exercises such as deep squats for example, but his belief is that it's the exact opposite. He used to have really bad knees himself, and couldn't really play basketball like he wanted to, but by doing these exercises he was able to strenghten his knees to the point they no longer cause issues for him. The main exercise he's recommending is pulling a sled backwards. He tells about Finnish lumberjacks who used to drag logs backwards like this and how they had super strong knees.

Fuckin do it, Elon. Double dog dare ya.

I think most people that have checkmarks will.

Especially, the people in social media/politics that talk about the elite/wealthy class.

Of COURSE Musk is buddying up with Bibi. He's really leaning hard into the evil persona.

Ok. This one might "finally" kill the platform because normal customer wouldn't want to pay for access.

People won't pay for something that used to be free... OTOH, neither will bot farms.

Either case will end Twitter, so I say go for it!

And the "platform" thus charged, charged right off to another.... 😂