X will charge users ‘a small monthly payment’ to use its service

Technology@lemmy.world – 317 points – 10 months ago

Elon Musk says X will charge users 'a small monthly payment' to use its service | TechCrunch

X will charge users ‘a small monthly payment’ to use its service::X owner Elon Musk today floated the idea that the social network formerly known as Twitter may no longer be a free site. In a live-streamed conversation

I hope this is the one thing that he actually follows through on. Drive a stake through it already

I really hope so too. I’m tired of Musk.

We all are. He sucks so much and looks like a dollar store Kathy Bates.

I'm trying to figure out if that's more insulting to Kathy Bates or Dollar Stores.

I wish Lemmy had keyword filters.

Edit: hmmm... Maybe the slur filter will work. Let's try.

The beauty of the Fediverse is that many tasks like this can be done by the client, as opposed to the actual base software.

For instance, Lemmy can't actually block instances or "subs" (or whatever the equivalent is) on an individual level, but Voyager can.

On another point, as much as I hate hearing about Musk and Twitter, they are both very powerful, and both have an impact on the world. Especially if Twitter were to become an "everything app" (AKA Superapp)(which it hopefully won't).

True, but the clients are still in their infancy. Liftoff has no support for it as far as I know. Meanwhile, I have the luck of running my own instance, so if the filter fixes it, that would be great.

When I still used Twitter, I was very glad to be able to filter out Trump, otherwise I'd see half a dozen tweets about him per day. We're kinda heading there with removed on Lemmy now, and I really don't even want to spend the mental energy it takes to ignore it.

Edit: meh. Using the slur filter just replaces "removed" with "removed". Time to investigate some other clients I guess.

If you’re using Lemmy on iPhone, Memmy (application) provides this feature. It works pretty well

It probably won't, but it keeps Musk in the news.

So many articles about what he's pondering or what he might do

How about we read about it when something actually changes

I only suggest to do your part in down voting clickbait.

But people keep talking about it and upvoting it. Please just downvote the musk spam. This isn't even about Twitter/x, it's just musk rambling.

All the more reason to switch to Wayland.

This is fucking hilarious, the fact that this is so upvoted really tells you how geeky Lemmy is though!

I'd rather pay for X than drop driver support for my GPU!

What is wayland? How is it different than Mastodon if a Twitter replacement?

Both X11 and Wayland are competing display server protocols in the Linux ecosystem.

X11 is the old version that is now slowly abandoned in favour of Wayland, but still there are things like Nvidia with their proprietary drivers that run better under X11.

Hence the word play.

How does wayland avoid X fees?

There are no X11 fees, this is a joke about X=X11 and not X=Twitter

The X11 fee is having to contend with Xwayland for years to come

Not at all. That’s the joke.

5 more...

Can we just skip to the part where the servers get shut down? I'm so tired of hearing about this prick.

Nah, let's skip to the part where Musk tries to move them using cheap labour and a screwdriver.

Wait ... we already had that.

They will? Or they're considering it?

Two very very different things.

Not if the goal is to make sure their brand and Elon is in your feed again today and top of your mind.

A service that I have to pay for AND it harvests and sells my personal data? SIGN ME UP!

If Musk wants me to use his shitty crap site, I will be charging him a small monthly fee.

At this point i think hes just mad he had to buy twitter and is just destroying it now.

Yes please.

BURN IT DOWN !

Not a single actual quote from Elon in this article. Does anyone know what he actually said? Because the title states it as a definitive while the excerpts sound more like he was just floating the idea out loud.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” explained Musk.

I mean specifically the bit about "X will..." as if it is a fact.

Yeah that’s true. The headline is asserting something that I don’t think Musk has actually said he will do. On the other hand, I’m having trouble thinking of any random idea Musk has had that he didn’t attempt to follow through on.

Not if they're funded by deep pockets like with governments and corporations.

Thanks Elon, you're gonna make it really easy for me to eventually move on

I did that last night. The place has turned into cesspool anyway. My account was there just to watch the shitstorm develop but sure as hell it's not that interesting for me to pay anything to him.

Nail. Coffin. Good riddance.

This will hurt the site so much. People will leave.

Don’t interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake

So great idea!

I will believe it when I see it.

Let's not forget that more than half of its user base don't have access to online payment. so I don't know how they are planning on keeping them

If you can't pay you can watch some ads every time you login.

How is that going to allegedly stop bots ? they can be made to load the ad and then keep browsing ... just another attempt at raising revenue

just die already! ;)

Elon is certainly working hard to kill it.

Blue tick users: We are already paying a fee

Elon: Yes, but what about a second fee? Premium tweets? Twitter awards?

I don’t think they’ve heard of second fee, Elon.

Since I left Twit-X, I've been feeling no sense of loss. Perhaps, a little smug in fact.

The only way to fight bots is to charge users a fee? Gee, I wonder how all of these other sites do it. 2-factor logins, manual auth prompts, rotating passwords on suspected accounts.... a real unsolvable problem for the stable tech genius, I see.

It’ll get rid of bots…. And most other users

The idea isn’t to get rid of bots. It’s to make money off them.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

X owner Elon Musk today floated the idea that the social network formerly known as Twitter may no longer be a free site.

In a live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, Musk said the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” for the use of the X system.

But since Musk took over the platform last year, the company has been pushing its users to subscribe to its paid subscription product, X Premium (previously Twitter Blue).

X doesn’t disclose how many paid subscribers it has, but independent research indicates X Premium hasn’t attracted a majority of X users.

Platformer last year reported that Musk was weighing the idea of putting all of Twitter behind a paywall, in fact.

The larger conversation between Musk and Netanyahu today focused on AI technology and its regulation, though the topic of hate speech on X came up.

The original article contains 498 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I’ve deleted my account way before Elon bought the company and haven’t been back since. When I was super active on Twitter which was many years ago and they said I had to pay a small fee every month I would have stopped using it right away. I don’t see the benefit of having social media and I sure as shit won’t pay for any of them. I’m in my 40’s so maybe it’s just me or my age but I can’t imagine anything on those platforms that would be worth a dollar a month.

Sounds like he’s trying to recoup lost revenue and I can’t imaging this is going to work out well for them.

"Let's make the content creators pay to make their content for us" has been the dumbest trend in the past few years

I use it to follow some art accounts but they usually also have a 2nd account somewhere else like DeviantArt or Pixiv.

Also the Progressbar account just tweeting how far along we are in the year.

Nothing of high value is lost.
No meaningfull comments were written like on Reddit, nobody uses it like imgur or gfycat so what purpose does it fill except doom scrolling?

Right now it's an idea, but Musk's ideas tend to become reality more often than not. I already stopped Twitter, they do this I'll be gone for good.

This is one of the least insain ideas and that's saying something

they need to do way instain with ceos> who kill thier own prodduct becuse the product cant frihgt back it was on the news this mroing a ceo in ca who kill his three prodduct. they are taking the three prodduct back to nationalization too ceo to rest my pary are with the end users who lost their social media; i am truley sorry for your lots

What?

it's an old copypasta. 2007, so it even predates the Navy Seal pasta.

And people will still insist on remaining there. I'm convinced Musk could shut down the site tomorrow, and people would continuously refresh until it somehow reappears.

Look, we can hate Twitter and Musk all we want, but (a) the headline is absurdly false and (b) charging small amounts from every user instead of having an ad-funded business is probably the most honest and fair way to have a healthy internet and I for one would welcome the change. If Twitter becomes paid-only and removes all advertising and tracking (that's the the big if) it can find its way to become the only sustainable and (dare I say?) ethical social media network around.

I strongly believe that a lot of the decline in the quality of civic debate and the increasing polarization of our society is unhealthy and can be traced back to the point where online media started depending on "eyeballs" and advertisers. (Don't believe me? Just check the headline and read the article, now see how it outright LIED in the headline to make you click). Every news media channel became more and more tabloid-like in a desperate attempt to keep their viewership numbers, quantity over quality became the norm and everything became a "market audience" segmented to perform well to specific editorial guidelines.

To have meaningful change and actual progress, we need to have a healthy media that is focused on pursuing the truth. The current landscape is just a popularity contest. If people are able to vote with their wallets and if they become more than just a number , the people holding the megaphones will win more by paying attention to us than by treating us as cattle who can be milked out.

charging small amounts from every user instead of having an ad-funded business is probably the most honest and fair way to have a healthy internet

I agree, but wouldn't you think it's far more likely that they would charge small amounts from every user AND have an ad-funded business?

This is why I am not holding my hopes up for Twitter, but I do believe that the Fediverse can work because we can have many different small service providers that would all compete for its customers, and not having ads would be definitely an advantage.