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’m not willing to use it now, for free… not sure if this plan will incentivize me to join up.
According to Musk and his cronies, it may incentivise you?
I’ll tell you next week when I stop laughing.
I’m not opposed to paying for services I enjoy/find value in, and from companies I don’t dislike
Twitter does not pass these guidelines
I wasn’t even using it when it was free!
I don’t use Twitter for free
Me too. But I have no problems with them penalizing the idiots that still remain.
I’d be willing to pay to stop hearing about twitter at this stage.
This is the Way.
At this point, I have to conclude that Musk is actively trying to kill Twitter.
I think he, accurately, determined that it was a sinking ship. He got as many employees to leave as possible and is now trying to get as much money as possible from the service before it dies.
It wasn’t sinking before he sunk it. It was losing money, but not that much… then instead of making intelligent, reasonable changes, he stuck them with a ridiculous amount of debt, slashed and burned the work force, and scared off half the advertisers.
I mean it had repeatedly lost money for years, I honestly don’t think anything could have said it. I am not at all defending Musk, I just think the platform was doomed with our without him.
Twitter was not in danger of going bankrupt before. They are now due to Musk’s actions and financial setup. They did actually make decent profits (over $1B) in 2019 and 2018. The previous organization could have made modest cuts and improved efficiency to become profitable… also they were paying good salaries to over 8,000 people, and more advertisers and users were benefiting from the platform than are now. Musk’s destruction of the company was entirely unnecessary.
I suspect the majority of people who would pay for twitter already are.
And it’s a laughably low amount.
Someone posted a few weeks ago that it’s like 60,000 people who are blue checked and not getting it for free.
That’s still a lot of suckers.
I’m not even willing to use it for free 💀
I’d be willing to use it if I get paid though. 10$/month and I’d even post something once in a while.
Twitter ad sales have plunged 50% since he bought the company
Can’t imagine why… Nope
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“lower tier pricing for premium members” sounds more like they’ll introduce another, cheaper Blue-like subscription rather than a mandatory fee
Eventually everyone needs to pay for using X. Migrating already
Oh yes, certainly. Wow Mr Musk you’re such a genius and good decision maker, please start charging for Twitter. Please don’t listen to the naysayers and go ahead with the brilliant business strategy. I’m definitely not taking delight in your constant series of self-owns.
I’d really love if we could all convince him to make it like $20 a month to make sure no gross poors are still there afterwards either and watch all his sycophants idiot followers realize they are also to poor for that and it end up completely empty.
And while you’re at it, screw me In the ass! I bet that 1/2 inch will feel great between my ass cheeks! Fucker.
I wouldn’t use twitter if they paid me
I would pay them for a product that suppresses all news about Elon musk so i dont have to read about him every other day. Now that’s a growth market.
I hate twitter!
Use mastodon.
Twitter has just gotten worse and worse!
Use mastodon.
If only there were some other platform!
…
Here’s the thing - you don’t need either of them
and you don’t need lemmy/kbin either, but yknow we like it
what’s your point?
Could be they ment
I’m not addicted to Lemmy, I can quit any time I want.
Weirdly, I think you both have excellent points. And yet I’m here. At this point I’m almost not sure why
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Whilst I mostly agree with you, what I use Twitter for, and now Mastodon, is to get real-time updates on projects and events. I follow projects like Asahi Linux (where devs post updates from their personal accounts), or various service providers or trending hashtags to get real-time updates on events, such as say an M365 outage, a zero day vulnerability, or a natural disaster (eg: earthquakes). Sure, there are other sites as well that report on events, but these sites mostly get their updates from Twitter (and not having an account on it would exclude you from participating). Thanks to Twitter, I’ve been able to interact directly with developers, netsec folks, organisations and just randoms from across the world - all of which, has been convenient to do so via a single platform. It’s kinda hard to replicate that sort of interaction across other platforms.
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I mean… You don’t need Lemmy either yet here you are.
Use Firefish too! It’s better designed than Mastodon and SO cute.
let’s not pretend mastodon is a viable alternative at this time. sure, it’s not an ad-algo-hellscape yet (meta will change that tho) but you’re at the mercy of whatever powertripping admin you have to deal on the instance you’re on. unless you tune into the echo chamber most instances are, you’re not going to have interesting conversations. it’s very slow, has barebone features and there is a lack of actually interesting oc posting people on the masto side of the fediverse.
I feel like these comments are from folks who haven’t really used it. The traffic on your specific instance isn’t really the point most of the time. And the fact that you can find another instance easily if the guy in charge of your instance is an asshole is a pretty huge feature. Who runs the other instance of Twitter you can move to?
You can migrate your account and followers/following lists until you find an instance where the admin isn’t a “power tripping asshole” - and I’m not convinced that’s a widespread problem in any case.
The Mastodon interface is kinda barebones though still not as bad as I think you are describing, but I migrated (gasp) my entire mastodon account to firefish.social, which federates with Mastodon, with a couple of clicks, and the interface and features there are really great. (And there are also multiple firefish instances to choose from in case the admin becomes an power tripping asshole)
But most importantly:
unless you tune into the echo chamber most instances are, you’re not going to have interesting conversations
Why wouldn’t you be following people from the broader fediverse? The federated feed on firefish (and on most instances I’d think) scrolls by so fast I have to pause it to read anything. There’s plenty being posted. Certainly no less comparatively than I see on kbin/lemmy, and it gets better continuously.
I’m all for using what you like and avoiding what you don’t, but this is like an infomercial-level criticism of Mastodon, like when they spend 45 secs showing you how hard it is to scramble eggs and cook them without their forty dollar gadget.
i’ve been on two instances since last fall: one mastodon, one pleroma.
on the mastodon one i found out by accident, that i was “shadowbanned” from it’s own public timeline. inquiring why this happend, the mods didn’t told me. when i asked then that i would like to know what i did “wrong” and if they could lift this, they said “no”. i deleted my account after that.
the pleroma one was even worse because literally on day one i was zerged by some american internet rightwingers because i posted something they didn’t agree with. i deleted my account after that.
what do you suggest, how many times should i move/delete my account until i found an instance that at least gives me the twitter treatment instead of just doing random policy?
I mean, I already recommended firefish.social, but you are under no obligation to try it. My point is that your experience is very much not typical I think.
In any case, if you plunk “left leaning mastodon instances” into your search engine of choice that would probably work, but you could also try a popular instance which would address several of your concerns. If firefish doesn’t interest you with its various improvements to the UI, why not just go for the original and (I think) biggest - mastodon.social.
The microblogging side of the Fediverse definitely has a cultural problem: people keep thinking that the instance that they join should be an indication of what “tribe” you belong to, and this can be worse that high-school politics. The only way that you can truly avoid issues with power-tripping admins is by running your own instance, but even that doesn’t help much when there are some instances around (cough mastodon art cough) that seem to love the drama and play the “everything I don’t like is literally hitler” game.
Anyway, if you are still looking for an alternative: I have a small, professionally managed Mastodon instance that has the simple goal of offering a reliable service at an affordable price.
on the mastodon one i found out by accident, that i was “shadowbanned” from it’s own public timeline.
I’m not sure that’s actually possible for a mod to do on Mastodon. Did you make your posts “unlisted” by default by accident?
mod/admin/whover was behind the support mail address told me, that someone made a complaint about my account (they refused to tell me what the problem was) and that they unlisted/shadowbanned me from the servers public timeline.
It works “well enough”.
unless you tune into the echo chamber most instances are, you’re not going to have interesting conversations.
I don’t get this. I’ve had many interesting conversations with people on Mastodon. And there are a number of interesting people I follow.
there is a lack of actually interesting oc posting people on the masto side of the fediverse.
This is a problem solved by more people joining… And from my POV Mastodon is far more stable and mature than Lemmy is. I’ve had better conversations there without being swarmed by tankies and ultra-partisans as well.
Perhaps you’ve chosen bad people to follow?
I refused to use this cancerous hellsite long before its ‘fall’ what makes you think I want to use it now?
I’d be willing to pay $100/month for it. Please charge at least that much!
Pay no attention to the fact that I used it once for like a week 15 years ago. That’s only because it was too free!
Hello poor people, it should at least be $1000!
I wouldn’t be willing to use if I was getting paid.
