Elon Musk said he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee to be on the platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.
“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots," said Elon. I can’t believe that this is the only solution he can think of.
Dealing with bots would be Elon Musk’s responsibility, considering he’s the only one profiting significantly from X, not us. Elon Musk steals our data and censors each of our posts, now he even expects us to pay to clean up the mess he created.
Plus, the problems with X go beyond just bots. The algorithm and programming decisions are negatively impacting user experience and manipulating people’s minds.
We want a town square where everyone is free to have & voice an opinion. I do not believe we have to pay ”a small monthly payment” for such a place, especially in a country that should value these freedoms & suppressing ideas.
I just want to comment on this part, if that’s ok. Town squares are inherently not free. Sure, everyone is free to come to it. But it’s still paid for by someone. Usually by people who stand to gain the most value out of it. This has always been my problem with Twitter and Facebook and their ilk.
There are wonderful examples of people trying different payment models and yes, most of them have failed. But let’s look at them for a minute.
App.net came out swinging at one point, with the idea of a (what was it?) fifty dollars a year payment model. It was a great idea. But it lagged because of a few reasons. Instead of keeping the $50 price point and using the extra money to allow for free accounts, the founders first dropped the price to $36 a year and then quietly raised VC funding, which went against everything they talked about and thus the community turned. Needless to say, the service was dead a few years after it came.
Before that there was WhatsApp. WhatsApp would randomly charge people $1 to $3 for download or subscription. Their experiment was wildly successful. If you could do MMS with just $1 a year from everyone on your network (or, heck, some random number of people on your network), what’s better than that? WhatsApp’s Achilles? Selling to Facebook. Now it’s unmoored from its founding principles. It’s growing. But for every one bespoke feature added, two features are added that push your data to Facebook.
Then there’s micro.blog. The pricing is simple - $5 a month and you get a blog and a social media handle. Right now, the founder hasn’t cracked down on accounts that paid once and are only using the social features of the network without being able to blog on it. It’s surprisingly successful, though niche. Will it fail? Seems like there’s enough runway since the founder is strict about no free signups. That town square isn’t free to join.
The fediverse is blowing up and so are standalone companies with their homegrown social networks like posts.cv and whatever Substack calls their social network. Also egalitarian European countries are launching their own mastodon sites to host a digital town square for their citizens. It’s a great time to be on social media.
But none of the real digital town squares are free. Nor should they be. Yes, a small monthly fee seems unnecessary. But Twitter isn’t a public good. It isn’t infrastructure. It isn’t paid for with our taxes. If the US Government launches their own mastodon site then you can absolutely comment on how important it is for this country to value freedoms. Till then, stop expecting private companies to not experiment with pricing models.
Also, Elon is an idiot and Twitter is dead. But that’s besides the point.
Bla bla bla. Muh Adam Smith, muh invisible hand. If there are ads, it should be free. Dumbass.