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.
Why? This is not a one-off cost. You wouldn’t be paying for a product that you bought once and can be used indefinitely. Software needs to be maintained, data needs to be stored, bits need to transported, mods need to be paid for their ongoing work, etc.
Mind you, I am not talking about price levels of a Netflix or Twitter Blue subscription. I am talking about a much lower price point. $10/year would be more than enough for me to make hosting a large instance a sustainable venture, which would even let me keep my pledge of giving 20% of the profits to the development teams of the upstream projects.
I didn’t interpret the question as pertaining to ongoing costs.
Well, the discussion was about Twitter charging a subscription so I thought that was implied.
You are right though that having a system where simply paying to signup would already help alleviate some of the problems with spammers and bots.