Social media platform X could go behind paywall | Hacker News Reader

Social media platform X could go behind paywall

bbc.co.uk

21 pointsmellosouls27 comments

Musk isn't exactly popular nowadays, so it is risky to say anything that looks like condoning him, but if I abstract away from his person, the idea isn't wrong and I wish it would succeed.

Our current standard of service "everything in tech should be free and paid for by ads" is pathological on so many levels.

First, it turns us users from customers into product, and the corporations are free to ignore our grievances or to deny us actual support.

Second, while programs scale well and you can service the whole humanity with a few server rooms, this isn't true about the non-tech part, e.g. moderation, just enforcement of policies etc. These are human-heavy and expensive, and their cost cannot possibly be borne out of ad revenue alone.

Third, by relying on ads for money, the networks have a huge incentive to develop intentionally addictive products. The more time you spend on the network, the more ads you see, ergo the more valuable you are for the business. We ended up with virtual equivalent of the opiate crisis, the algorithms do their darndest best to polarize us and keep us online.

That said, people after 25 years of free services would probably rather run than accept payment, and Musk as the face of this change does not inspire many either.

SomethingAwful forums had a $10 signup fee 20 years ago, so this wouldn't be a groundbreaking development. As it is, there are private paid Discord channels aplenty.

Musk is talking about paywalls to deter bots, that's it. You've appended positive externalities to this, but I haven't heard him say anything about not monetizing the "user as product" business model.

It's been nearly a year after the paid tiers were set up. Realistically do you think New Twitter is going to last long enough to set the example you're hoping for?

"Realistically do you think New Twitter is going to last long enough to set the example you're hoping for?"

I am afraid not. We are stuck in a thoroughly entshittified equilibrium. Everyone expects such services to be free and suck.

To be fair, and I'm not saying it lightly because I despise Elon Musk, his rationale for pushing Twitter Blue in the first place was to reduce reliance on advertising revenue, so it's definitely a thing in his mind, even if it's not the main driver for a paywall.

Ads suck but paying won't make them go away. They are now spreading like a cancer and being forced into products that people were already happily paying for before because the search for additional revenue is unstoppable from publicly traded companies. At best paying will reduce the number of ads you see while making your data more valuable for advertising and tracking purposes by proving you have money and verifying your identity, resulting in you being targeted as a valuable mark. Companies will still be able to pay to be verified and create astroturfing posts and outright ads on the platform and now they will know where to focus their efforts because you will have a target painted on your back and your location is for sale.

The sooner X rots into obscurity the better, it will make room for a new product that's still loved by its creators and perhaps even nurtures a less superficial culture within its community.

I certainly hope that we won't be burdened by yet anothet "hey, it's free, and we will only turn your personal data into a product and invade your privacy and polarize and harass you algorithmically to keep you attention away from everything else but our outrages of the day" network.

This model has produced so many pathologies that it is time to retire it. Entshittification of such services is pre-programmed.

I am eager to see this happen, due to how useless the site has become to a non-user. People still share tweet links around saying "this thread has x..." when you can only see the singular directly linked tweet with no context or replies.

And you can no longer search for anything without a login, making it really irritating when twitter continues to be used as a primary source of info or updates for a company.

That new product is unlikely to happen if VC or any kind of billionaire are involved. Heck, Bluesky actually taking off a bit is an accident.

Please. Then X will end up in a slow decline into obscurity. Next, FB and Instagram needs to go.

WhatsApp is silently filling the void that Twitter has created. They introduced channels now and there are millions of followers using it already. Add WhatsApp to your list too.

At this point every app of Meta is becoming more or less same. People who have large number of followers are the ones getting followers on other Meta platform. New users still struggle on each of these platforms to gain followers.

Hoping a new platform emerges that will level up the playing field.

Telegram groups as well.

Two options: either it will stop showing ads (in that case, interesting) or payments are used as an easy way of ID verification.

Earlier they were rumoured to require ID verification so I think it's that. Musk seems vaguely anti free speech in practice plus he might think getting rid of bots will help raise value for advertisers.

Tired of being the product? Now you can also pay while being the product!

>vaguely anti free speech

He's all for free speech- for the voices he agrees with.

Not any worse than pre musk twitter.

I might agree in a way. Back then there were anonymous accounts, now there won't be but also Overton window is wider (I reported a Nazi non-sarcastically posting Hitler meme in race related topic once and Twitter's response was "all is OK"). You can say whatever you want but beware that it can be traced to you through your payment (so, self censor)

But what I would hate is paying for the privilege of seeing ads. I'd have to quit...

Don’t know that the window is wider exactly, if anything communists are getting banned more than before. It’s certainly shifted right, though.

I am seeing many ads in simplified chinese, fwiw. Never once pre-Musk, so this is big. I think the opposite, it's cozying up to CCP and wants to be unblocked in China. Big market. Second biggest for Tesla, too. He won't risk both by alienating the party. When values are up against financial interests...

The window has gotten a lot narrower on the left, or on criticism of Musk or billionaires in general.

I seem to have missed the pronouncements of pre-musk twitter that they were "free speech absolutists".

Musk was never a free speech absolutist. He claimed he supported 'legal speech'. Which turned out to be a big fat old lie. The guy is a state actor. People like that are never for free speech and lie all the time.

Also, to be fair, there was time before musk ( like 10 years ago ) when twitter and much of social media had some semblance of free speech. I don't think that era is ever coming back.

I like the old twitter. The good thing about them was that unlike Musk they didn't try to create an image of being super pro free speech, they just didn't care to the extent possible.

Even a $.1/month charge would probably be a death sentence right now, but I believe something drastic will have to be done to verify people's identity on social platforms in the coming years. LLMs are indistinguishable from humans at this point, it's only a matter of time before Reddit, Hacker News and others become completely unusable due to bots, if they aren't already. Even worse than unusable/annoying is being subtly manipulated. I'm shifting away from these platforms to X because there I can follow real, well known experts. I can still be manipulated by the replies of bots, but it's easier to separate the information from the people I follow and others.

Good news! There is a way to distinguish people from bots... Reality.

Yes talking to people face to face. Nothing on the internet will be verifiable anymore.

Good luck.

If only there was a way to coordinate everyone at once to say “we’ve had enough” and to switch all at once. But it seems people are trapped in the network effect of platforms they hate because leaving Twitter means losing followers.

That's only a problem as long as you have followers, and care about that.

Platforms like Twitter/X depend on network effects: more users = more value to users.

But the reverse is also true: the more users leave, the less value to remaining users. And thus, a lower threshold for them to also leave.

Once a critical point is passed, a platform can die real quick.

Even thinking of going paywall-only suggests ad revenue is through the floor. Bit rich to make this about bots when most paid-user comments at the top of threads read like automated self-promotional ads.

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