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Elon Musk Says He Might Put X/Twitter Behind A Paywall
(www.forbes.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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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.
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?
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.
Those people are already paying though
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.
the whole plan stinks of a man that doesn’t understand the value of money to 99% of humans
no, it’s not JUST $13; it’s a streaming subscription, it’s a nice dessert, it’s a couple of drinks at a bar
Not only the value of money (he really thought people would pay $20 a month for Blue?!); he doesn’t understand Twitter. He’s never been on the side of Twitter that used to joke “Twitter is free!” whenever funny stuff happened on the site. There are whole parts of Twitter he’s never seen, and he thinks his very narrow use case of Twitter is THE way Twitter is used.
When the running joke used to be “Twitter is free,” no one is going to want to pay for it.
He surely doesn't understand the value of $20, like how Bill Gates guessed that a banana was probably $10.
He fundamentally doesn't understand what Twitter is/was or does. That's why this is like watching someone enter a race but keep tripping on their own shoelaces.
Nope. Like, he thinks there’s a huge bot problem on Twitter because he has to deal with bots because he’s famous and talks about crypto. Most Twitter users never deal much with bots so it’s not the big concern. But he does, so he thinks blaming bots for all Twitter’s problems is effective.
I bet he was shocked there was pushback for his API changes when it impacted accounts like the NY subway system, who used it to announce schedule delays. I bet I t never occurred to him people actually used Twitter for something other than shitposting.
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).
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.
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.
Shitfluencers, bots and corporate profiles
I would imagine people with huge followings and money to burn. Once the paywall is up, those huge followings are going to shrink fast.