X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features | Hacker News Reader

X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features

fortune.com

103 pointsdanso176 comments

>Musk said “It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.”

With so many of these billionaires and CEOs it is becoming impossible to tell whether they are transparently lying or complete idiots. Just admit you need the revenue and you want people to put a card on file to lower the bar for future financial transactions. Charging for a service doesn't eliminate bots, it just shifts the financial break even point a little. If that is truly the only solution Twitter has, that is a huge indictment of his and his team's intelligence.

EDIT: To expand on why this clearly isn't targeting bots, this only applies to new users. It therefore does nothing regarding all the bots currently on the platform. It is clear that they don't want to chase off existing users which applies to both real users and bots.

I love to mock Elon but even I am inclined to agree with him. It seems like the only other solution is something like Google's Web Environment Integrity thing, which scares me. The best/easiest solution is to make it more expensive for the botters to play the game,

Attestation of personhood would be another possible solution. Might even be more effective given the cost of each new key ($10+).

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attest...

I'd way rather pay a dollar.

Nah. Twitter never had this much of a bot problem before Elon bought it, which is a big clue as to what's actually gone wrong: He laid off all the moderators and all the staff who were training the automated bot detection algorithms. Extremely formulaic spam which would have been instantly flagged a couple years ago just piles up in my notifications.

It absolutely had a bot problem before! What Twitter were you using?

Dismiss comments that start with ‘Nah.’

I've never seen a good quality comment starting with "Nah.", where did it come from and why did it become viral?

> never had this much of a bot problem

... How did you read this as meaning it never had a bot problem? They're claiming that it had _less_ of a bot problem, which certainly _feels_ true.

Does the difference matter, when the place was completely infested already before?

It was never a problem for me before and it's a problem for me now. That difference matters immensely to my experience of the platform.

> Twitter never had this much of a bot problem before Elon bought it

Nah.

> Extremely formulaic spam which would have been instantly flagged a couple years ago just piles up in my notifications.

Yah.

There are for sure other bot management strategies out there (Web Environment Integrity is strictly hypothetical for now, iirc) but the problem is that those strategies cost money, and often quite a bit. Which, I guess "pay $1 to sign up" is _also_ a strategy that costs money, but that cost gets passed to users :P

Honestly though, $1 almost seems too low to be effective in that regard, at least relative to the specific risk/reward of Twitter. For a small forum or something, sure... but if you were interested in running automated Twitter accounts, and you knew for sure that you wouldn't get caught, $100/year to run 100 accounts is absolutely worth it so long as those accounts bring in some kind of money via whatever scam/spam/promotion crap you're running.

It must shift it by a lot, right? I would think the cost of a twitter bot would be in the neighborhood of a fraction of a cent/year.

A bot on its own doesn't cost Twitter much directly, but enough bots costs Twitter users.

I mean for the botters. $1K vs <$10 to run a thousand bots for a year should have a dramatic effect on the risk/reward ratio.

Ahh, got it. Yeah, I suppose it could be a notable increase in the per-bot cost. Though considering each Twitter account typically needs to be "legitimized" with a phone number, it might not actually be that much of a multiplier.

And on top of everything, the bot problem seems worse than ever in the past year. I'm noticing it more even despite spending less time there because the top replies to large accounts are all so worthless now. I have to imagine the problem is even worse for people spending more time there.

> Just admit you need the revenue (...)

Here's a reminder that Forbes reported that Elon Musk's Twitter is spiraling into bankruptcy, and things are so bad that Musk is even unable to pay rent for their offices.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/07/03/twitter...

At $1/year, this isn’t a revenue play because after card and/or platform fees - it won’t amount to much at all.

However, account signup will definitely drop considerably, because that’s a pretty big barrier for most users.

So I’m actually inclined to say, this probably is a strategy purely to combat bots.

>At $1/year, this isn’t a revenue play because after card and/or platform fees - it won’t amount to much at all.

It isn't purely about the $1 per year revenue. It is about having a customer credit card on file which reduces friction for every future situation in which the user is charged which increases future revenue.

It’s not staying $1 forever. You subscribe and then they boil the frog with upping it to $2, or higher

> after card and/or platform fees

> It is about having a customer credit card

It's interesting that you mention platform fees, because if this subscription plan is available in the App Store, then Twitter wouldn't have your credit card on file, Apple would.

Indeed, if new users get a paywall in the app, then I think Apple's rules would require the subscription to be available in the App Store.

A customer credit card is yet another barrier for bots. Since the finance industry is so strictly regulated, you can imagine that it'll actually be quite hard to get fresh credit cards for your bots at scale.

It’s not there are services they are available to everyone they aren’t even illegal or grey market. Amex and citi offer em

They’re going to enable purchases directly off of the platform and probably a user to user payments platform because that got Musk rich in the past and why wouldn’t he run it back?

>With so many of these billionaires and CEOs it is becoming impossible to tell whether they are transparently lying or complete idiots.

Why not both?

So bots just need to earn more than a dollar per year in revenue to break even? That’s every scam bot in existence!

It's even better than that, for just $1/year they can get their bot accounts certified as a "real human".

I doubt they will give a blue check to these accounts.

They will also require a unique card number and a unique phone number. What is the cost of these?

> EDIT: To expand on why this clearly isn't targeting bots, this only applies to new users. It therefore does nothing regarding all the bots currently on the platform. It is clear that they don't want to chase off existing users which applies to both real users and bots.

Existing bots can be slowly banned off. The problem with bots, on any platform, is their ability to just make a new account instantly.

How would you solve the bot problem?

I know people are down on the-social-networking-platform-formerly-known-as-twitter, and I have no skin in the game, I gave up on social networking about a decade ago, but I think this is the model to beat. Forever the FOSS world has said, "if you do not pay for the product, you are the product". Well, here is X trying to make a product you pay for.

I do not know their new policy on tracking/ads/spying but even if they do that stuff still, they are making a way for competition that doesn't. I think this is good.

>Well, here is X trying to make a product you pay for.

No, this is an attempt to have it both ways. To do data collection / data brokerage and ALSO charge users for the service.

Exactly this.

I would be entirely supportive of a model where a social network (not social media) was established with modest annual fees with the condition that the usual privacy violation and targeting and engagement hacking wasn't going to happen.

But that's clearly not what this is.

i would pay for this.

You mean like this?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723

(app.net)

Yeah I never claimed such a thing is a viable business model. Esp in competition with free (but not actually) mass scale Twitter, FB, etc.

I think you'd have to offer something entirely different that is not in "competition" in any way by not being "alike" at all, but still filling some similar needs.

I personally have never enjoyed Twitter or the kind of service it offered, so would never consider paying for anything which looked like it really. Though I guess I do donate to the Mastodon instance I have an account on, but that's more of a philosophical thing than anything to do with subscribing to a service. I barely use it.

I think X should get credit for this move anyways. Them charging for access may make more people comfortable with the idea of paying for social networking, so that in the future more people will join when new social networks are made that don’t mine the data of the people

I donate monthly to my Mastodon instance, so it can afford to be an ad-free space. It doesn't take that much.

> Them charging for access may make more people comfortable with the idea of paying for social networking, so that in the future more people will join when new social networks are made that don’t mine the data of the people

Won’t that just make people get used to paying and having their data sold? Why would future companies not follow that same model?

> Why would future companies not follow that same model?

Because some companies are happy to be profitable without having to squeeze out ever last cent possible of their customers.

When enough people are willing to pay for social media, someone will realize that there is room to build a business that doesn’t abuse its users and they will have enough money to run it.

That's optimistic thinking. I don't believe that will happen even if people realize that it is possible. Because tracking is not detrimental enough to user experience that people move off of existing platforms.

paying customers is the most desirable target audience for Ads.

Then those happy companies get sold to people that _do_ want to squeeze out the last cent possible of their customers. And then they will start collecting their user's data and do nefarious things with it

WhatsApp did the $1/yr thing a long time ago. Here is an article from 2016 about them scrapping it.

https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/

This might be different though because this is led by Elon Musk, who has always somehow managed to come out well despite bad looking decisions,

Like pard68 though, I have no skin in the game and have also given up on social media.

... "This bad idea is actually good because Naughty Old Mr Car is magic" is a _hell_ of a take. Perhaps companies should simply have their policies dictated by that octopus that predicted World Cup game outcomes.

For sure. There's no way they'd break even at $1/year per user, let alone turn a profit, unless they're also running ads for those users.

I wonder how much of that $1 they get after payment processing fees and such.

~$0.67 cents without negotiated processing fees (ex: Stripe's rack rate is 2.9% processing fee + 30 cents per transaction)

There is no way they would hide ads for users who pay $1 a year. That would be a bargain.

My guess is that they’re starting with $1/year to test the waters and see who would pay. Maybe they want users to get hooked on those extra features so they can up the price.

Please read my conclusion where I commented on this exact point.

So if I understand correctly, you’re arguing that making a product worse is good because it makes it easier for competition to beat it?

I mean, I guess, but it still means the product that got worse got worse, and didn’t get better.

Your conclusion where you said this was a good thing? I did read it; I thought it was a shit take, so I commented.

"you will pay to be the product"

Sounds like Musk got inflationpilled.

Not really. It is laughable to think $1/year is paying for this service. If it is paying for anything, it is to reduce the number of bots and spammers on the network.

So no, it's not having it both ways. Paying a meaningful monthly fee would be.

Mostly seconded. Another upside is this really does put a much larger cost to bots and problem accounts. Even $1 a year is a big deal if you've got an army of 5000 bot accounts (something pretty trivial in this environment).

I'm all for things like Kagi doing this RIGHT and supposedly not selling all my data, but I've argued that companies like twitter charging for access is the path to a healthier environment.

Oh and to add, earlier this year I would've bet money that if Musk started charging, it'd be WAY more. $1 a year is a very smart starting point for a whole slew of reasons, and will let them tier out their services.

> Even $1 a year is a big deal if you've got an army of 5000 bot accounts (something pretty trivial in this environment).

I think this belief is highly misguided. Whoever is in the business of managing bot farms comprised of thousands of bots is certainly monetizing them for way more than $5000/month.

Per year not per month, which of course is just grist to your mill.

Not per account. Also the point is you then need 5000 methods of payment, making correlation between accounts trivial.

That $5,000/mo is 5,000 payment transactions that need to come from somewhere. People running illegal or shady activities are not super fond of leaving their fingerprints all over payment gateways (this is the entire reason cryptocurrencies exist). Even if they're not doing anything illegal, they are certainly violating the TOS and tracking down fresh credit cards each time one of their accounts gets banned presents a significant logistical problem.

Let me introduce you to privacy.com virtual card. Or slash, or stripe, or really any of the virtual cards even from Amex and citi. No issue generating 1000s of new cards and numbers. Phones numbers are a bit more expensive but still under 35c a text verification.

Users that pay $8/month for X Premium still get served ads and have the same ToS for tracking/spying as everybody else, I don't think the $1 crew is going to fair any better

That is the main reason I quit paying for it. X is trying to sit on two chairs and that is just disrespectful of the user.

Yep. The problem is Musk. If the FSF launched a paid social media that required payment to cover sever costs and so it could be completely free of ads and tracking that would be one thing, but how much do you really trust Elon to do that?

No. He ruined the product in every way then said “pay”. There’s nothing to pay for anymore. Let it burn.

??? How is twitter any different from a casual user perspective?

Ruined verification, ruined home timeline algorithm, promotion of political nonsense throughout the platform, extremely bizarre bottom of the barrel scam ads replacing reputable advertisers, inscrutable links with no headlines, and proliferation of "engagement hustlers" who posts clickbait to get to our timelines at the hope of getting something from the revenue sharing program. Made worse by the fact moderation basically does not exist anymore. Including fake content about real events, like Ukraine and Palestine. Also banned third party clients, including their own Tweetdesk (replaced by a shitty webapp), frequent reliability issues. I mean I can go on all day.

The question is how come YOU do not know any of that? You must be way more casual user than me, I guess.

Twitter used to be a medium where I come for links to content from anyone I care about. Many I care about are gone from the platform or inactive. Many others I care about just do not show up on my timeline, because the timeline prioritizes garbage I don't care about. I keep clicking "Following" but it never sticks. Intentionally.

Twitter is only slightly better than 4chan right now. And getting worse by the minute.

As a casual user twitter feels exactly the same to me, but perhaps less spammy responses to tweets selling NFTs and the addition of community notes.

Twitter has always had a reputation of reliability issues. They're basically famous for it.

There's a difference between the idea of paying for a service in the abstract, and paying for one that's past its prime and has gone through extreme enshittification. Would I pay this much for 2015 Twitter? Sure.

Sure at a value level, but it's still setting a precedence and making the way. I could see small time Mastadon operators getting more traction for charging a nominal fee for running an account.

A lot of great ideas have come from companies that the idea killed (Xerox comes to mind).

> "if you do not pay for the product, you are the product"

Yeah, I think we moved from that one to "you're the product, regardless if you pay or not"

They are killing their golden egg-laying goose. It's good.

I tend to agree. Society was healthier prior to massive, wide-spectrum (my term) social networking.

Agreed. It might also increase confidence that the information you're seeing isn't just a product of a giant bot farm trying to shape public opinion. I, for one, would be willing to pay a little extra if the only "likes" that calibrate my feed are those coming from people paying at the same payment level as me.

> Well, here is X trying to make a product you pay for.

I think they still show ads if you pay for it, so it's really just adding insult to injury.

A: Lots of spying, tracking, ads, etc A-next: The exact same spying, tracking, ads, etc. but also you must pay $1.

Im struggling to understand how A-next is in any way better than A.

No, this is intended to tackle bot signups. No one, not even a moron like Musk, believes that $1/y is the value of a social network user. He will continue selling user data and pushing ads.

Nah, this is two things:

Ostensibly it's a link to a real identity. This is something that social media always struggles with and money —any amount— always seems to be the leveller. Until bots can register their own credit cards, this helps prevent spam, abusive posting, account cycling and a host of other nasties.

But I suspect the true aim is getting a foot in the door. Once they've saved your card details, future billing gets super-simple. Activating trials of Blue and micropayments for small oneshot promotions, even silly little things like super-likes.

But they're not going to stop seeking advertisers and using what they know about you to link the two. If anything this just gives them more data points.

The other saying "if you pay for the product, you are still the product" has also been said forever, and that hope re no tracking /ads isn't grounded

Official confirmation:

https://twitter.com/support/status/1714429406192582896

Starting today, we're testing a new program (Not A Bot) in New Zealand and the Philippines. New, unverified accounts will be required to sign up for a $1 annual subscription to be able to post & interact with other posts. Within this test, existing users are not affected.

This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver.

And so far, subscription options have proven to be the main solution that works at scale.

More details → https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/not-a-bot

This is going to kill engagement. 90% of people don't care enough to pay for that and any sort of barrier will lower engagement.

Twitter/X is going to be use this as a way to fight spammers and bots but those accounts never had a problem paying or using stolen money.

> This is going to kill engagement.

Maybe! The people who are still left must really like Twitter. I think charging a token amount to limit who can post from a Sybil attack mitigation perspective might actually be reasonable, and it’s exciting that someone who doesn’t care if they lose is willing to perform the experiment.

If you’re not willing to pay at least a dollar to post, maybe your content doesn’t have any value to the audience or platform. I’d pay $1 to keep posting here (probably more! But don’t tell the YC folks).

i don't really like twitter. it's just where most of my network still hangs out online (for now).

Yes, the people remaining are addicted to/like Twitter. But this is the equivalent of imposing a sin tax on it and it will cost Twitter engagement like sin taxes lower alcohol or smoking.

It will probably lose them even more money as their primary income is ads and lower engagement will drive advertising incoming even lower.

Like all of new X/Twitter's changes, it doesn't seem to have any foresight or insight into the product at all.

Sounds like this fee is for new accounts only.

Existing accounts would be seasoned, and they can filter existing bot accounts over time.

> Yes, the people remaining are addicted to/like Twitter.

I remain because I still follow a lot of people on Twitter (news/tech/journos).

There is not one single place that still has a majority of them apart from twitter.

They basically all have substack newsletters, just move there

> If you’re not willing to pay at least a dollar to post, maybe your content doesn’t have any value to the audience or platform.

Said $1 fee would kill my audience, and therefore my incentive for posting there.

It's an inverse network effect, and why bad changes to social networks cause the death spiral effect.

The question is how much value Twitter is adding to people's lives. Netflix costs almost 200x this proposed price and yet it has over 200M subscribers. We got so used to free, but we all know that there is no such thing as free; today the only source of income for many web companies is to sell your data. So what if it loses engagement, I'd rather pay a bit for Twitter than the status quo which is getting followed by scam porn bots.

I like seeing more and more services becoming paid like, well, everything else in life. You don't get free haircuts while watching 30 minutes of ads. This actually helps competition by taking some power and leverage away from the big ads cartels.

But... Twitter users who pay will still be tracked constantly, see targetted ads, and run into tons of spam bots. But now they have to trust Twitter with their payment information for the privilege.

Just wait until an ad-free option costing a lot more. Netflix, Hulu etc also have cheaper ad-supported plans. Regarding bots, it will be progressively harder to run a bot farm if you have to pay fees.

This is for new accounts only. Not existing ones.

Back in 2016, before the acquisition by Facebook (now Meta), Whatsapp planned to charge $1/year, too. https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-is-ditching-its-annu...

LOL

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-text-messages-revea...

In another April 14 message, angel investor Jason Calacanis messaged Musk: “You could easily clean up bots and spam and make the service viable for many more users — removing bots and spam is a lot less complicated than what the Tesla self driving team is doing.”

This is the easy way! Charging $100 would make it even easier

Not a x/twitter user much these days (mostly quit a long time ago) but I’m happy when companies put a minor barrier up to stop botting. So meh, good idea I guess?

Anyone running a TwitterBot through an LLM or other AI tool is paying far, far more than $1/year.

This $1 'fee' monetizes and benefits bot-accounts more than anyone else.

------

Let's say I setup 10,000 bot accounts for $10,000/year total. Will I really be banned from Twitter? Or will I be treated like the high paying customer that I truly am?

Is $10,000 expensive for a marketing team pushing a new product? Sounds like easy-astroturf to me.

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The economic incentives here are all wrong. Astroturf / marketing companies pay $10,000,000 for a singular 30 second Superbowl ad. They absolutely don't give a crap about $10,000 for an easy army of astroturf accounts that will upvotes and generate fake LLM discussion around products.

I'm not a programmer, but it seems like they could make it non-trivial to automate the payment process. If I have to click 30 times per account, with a captcha, and wait a minute for the payment to clear, 10,000 accounts suddenly starts to become very expensive in terms of time/effort.

You literally buy Filipinos to do this for you for like 5-cents per account. Maybe 1 cent, account creation never was an issue in today's bot / astroturf meta.

Hell, for like 5 cents/account, you probably can get Filipinos to post enough legitimate traffic about innocuous topics to look like a human before being turned into an astroturf bot.

IIRC, the typical Filipino baker makes $5/day. They literally can make more money making accounts for you all day long at 5-cents per account than legitimate jobs in their town.

That's 100 accounts made in a 8 hour period. More than doable.

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Like seriously, ever since 'Mechanical Turk' and other websites made cheap labor from 3rd world countries available, this has been a solved problem.

https://www.mturk.com/

It seems like they could also limit the number of accounts per credit card. 10,000 credit card numbers are not easy to come by. And all of this is creating a pathway for law enforcement. I’m skeptical it’s as easy as you say.

Why would Twitter reject $10,000 coming out of one credit card?

The economic incentive of this model is backwards. A person paying $10,000 for 10,000 bot accounts is a bigger source of revenue than a $1 normie.

You think they’re making money on $1 per account? Processing fees will eat most of that. It seems likely to me they’re doing it to improve the user experience, which if that recruits more users will be worth much more to them than the 10,000 bots each paying $1/year.

Its easier to make money from 100 users willing to pay $10,000 each, aka $1 million/year in revenue, than to recruit 1,000,000 individual users.

Bonus points: bots want the blue-checkmark to look more legitimate, so bots are also more likely to pay $8/month for the blue checkmark. The actual revenue is going to be far higher in practice when you consider that any bot-farm / astroturf will obviously have some blue-checkmarks + an army of normies in some kind of mix.

Somebody with some actual experience/authority on the subject:

https://x.com/troyhunt/status/1714529503823953990?s=46

I think you're avoiding the crux of the issue.

Elon isn't trying to solve the bot-problem per se, but is instead trying to solve Twitter's revenue problem.

You are basically arguing that Twitter needs to solve the bot problem to get all of its users back. That's... not really a direct solution or simple way to raise revenue. Its not very clear if say bots were cleaned up, that anyone would come back (or advertisers would spend more).

----------

On the other hand, if this is just a tacit acknowledgement that $1/year is the assumed "cost of doing botting", then the solution is for botters to pay $10,000/year for 10,000 accounts. This provides the *direct* answer to the revenue problem.

Elon is solving a revenue problem with $1/user/year? That will assuredly cost some real users too? Please. You have this exactly backwards.

On the contrary.

Twitter's survival is entirely dependent on becoming profitable. Entirely. Revenue (and eventually, profits), is and should be, the primary goal.

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Without a doubt, this is "supposed to increase revenue".

From my perspective: you are seemingly arguing that this will increase revenue by somehow improving the Twitter experience and growing the userbase. Unless... you somehow don't think revenue is an important question at all?

Yes, they have said explicitly they are working to improve the user experience. Likewise, they are working to assure their advertisers that the numbers they are showing them are real users. This has been a known issue since well before Musk's acquisition.

My point is that the $1/user is not solving a revenue problem by raising $1 times 10,000 bots, as you claim. It's designed to eliminate bots so that they recruit real users that advertisers value, and which also improves the user experience.

Musk hatred consumes too many.

you honestly think they make less than $1 in ad revenue per account per year where this calculation would make any sense?

Do you think bot accounts won't make ad-revenue?

A MAU is a MAU, whether its a bot or not.

if it's identified as a bot then it won't. This change in policy seems to be a move away from that kind of revenue generation. If you're happy with MAU from bots then why bother to identify them?

> if it's identified as a bot then it won't

If Twitter could identify bots, then they wouldn't have this problem at all.

This whole issue exists because they can't identify bots to any degree of accuracy. So now they're cedeing the situation and simply trying to monetize it.

no idea where you're getting that idea from but it's wrong, that is not how you generate revenue from bot accounts if that was the goal

I think this severely overestimates the sophistication of bots. You don’t need to give coherent, thoughtful replies. You just need keyword detection and link spamming.

In my mind this is not about spammers not having the money to create 10k accounts.

but about how many CCs would they put for 10k accounts? If you have 1000 accounts with the same CC it does seem to make it a bit easier to say maybe these 1000 accounta are bots.

but let me tell you what Musk can do to actually let bots run: allow crypto payments :D

One CC.

Only Twitter will know that the 10,000 accounts are bots. It'd be up to them to ban, but why would they ever ban a high-paying customer who is paying literally 10,000x more than the typical user?

the change is to require payment for all new users so they won't be paying more than anyone else other than the old accounts that got grandfathered in. They won't ban them if they pay but they will derank their posts and if they do allow a group of them to sign up with the same CC then they can punish the entire block of them if they start spamming with any of the accounts. It also allows for permabans based on CC or other identifying info making it more difficult to create a new botnet. It's not a perfect solution but it does add friction. There will probably be ongoing changes to make it even harder for bot accounts.

With what moderators? Twitter laid off significant amounts of their moderation team.

No one is going through account creation or double checking this stuff anymore at Twitter.

Each account will require a unique credit card and phone number. https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1714513153407807835

Bots and spammers are already using stolen credit card to pay for Premium. This isn't going to stop them.

Maybe the top end of the distribution is doing that. That’s an entire criminal operation which no doubt does happen of course. But not all spammers put in the same amount of effort. Cutting down spam is about sealing off the big leaks first.

One fun thing about twitter was always the anonymous novelty accounts that people could fire off on a whim and see where they went. Most of the time they go nowhere but the viral ones can be great fun. Any barrier to entry, even $1, ensures that there's gonna be a lot less of these going forwards.

I've been to conferences in the past and randomly we get on a table, think, _you know what?, that'd be a great twitter account_ then quickly hop and create an account.

I have access to 3 major conference random accounts that every year go up when the conference is happening and it's always a blast.

When he made the purchase I disagreed with people that it was a bad business decision because at the time revenue was approx 6 billion and if they could lower operating costs while increasing revenue it would actually make a ton of sense.

I've sinced changed my mind.

I’ll never use this crap but $1 a year is smart. People will sign up for it because it’s nothing and that gives twitter a foot in the door for price hikes later.

The seemingly smartest thing about it is that it’s reportedly for just new users. Many/most power users might stay. But huge numbers of casual (but otherwise active and monetizable) users would just drop off rather that go through the process of adding their payment info.

this would turn me off as a new user. it's already hard to look at tweets if you aren't a user.

In what world does raising the price from free to $1 lower the barrier for signing up?

the difference between free and $1 is enormous

It massively raises the barrier for signing up, but drastically reduces the barriers to squeeze more money out of those that do down the line.

A decade of App Store user behavior refusing to pay $0.99 one time for an app vs. using an app for free tells a different story.

99.99% of app store apps are not worth $0.99 and are easily replaced by free web based alternatives or the built in apps

Nobody said it so I'm going to: Mastodon.

It's quieter and less crowded, and connections are closer. At least for now. Good for the kind of people who like hackernews.

> In a statement published shortly after Fortune reported the news of the $1 plan, X ‘s support account confirmed the details and described the move as a way to curb the prevalence of bots and spam on the platform, rather than a money-making endeavor. “This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver,” the company said.

$1 per account is not that much money to pay if you want to spam or manipulate twitter. According to this (https://www.privacyaffairs.com/dark-web-price-index-2022/) as hacked Twitter account $25, and I believe I've read that fresh accounts already sell for a couple dollars (because the cost of faking through signup verifications, etc).

What a bargain! For $1 a year (that YOU pay), Elon gets your credit card info or other. (where |you| is a much larger number than previous)

sig mentioned this. I just wanted to double down.

Elon just wants to be your bank. "Too bad" he scared away so many potential customers by politicizing the platform.

Narcissists really do want to have things "both ways"

Charging $1/year for the ability to tweet and retweet should reduce spammers significantly.

But don't journalists in oppressive regimes (e.g. Venezuela, China, Russia, Myanmar, Arab Spring) use twitter to share information? They could previously share information with nothing more than an internet connection, but now they'd be required to enter payment info; what does that do for their anonymity?

If the idea is to improve accountability for posted content, this $1 charge might work, but only for those who are allowed to speak, not for the sizeable portion of the world's population who aren't and whose lives will be at risk if their identities are revealed. The sad conclusion is that those journalists may simply stop posting as it's not worth the risk to their lives.

> But don't journalists in oppressive regimes (e.g. Venezuela, China, Russia, Myanmar, Arab Spring) use twitter to share information? They could previously share information with nothing more than an internet connection, but now they'd be required to enter payment info; what does that do for their anonymity?

Considering how supportive Elon is of oppressive governments, I imagine he views this as a side benefit.

somewhat free speech.

This is a great point. There have already been scandals in the past where oppressive regimes offered Twitter employees bribes to expose the people behind certain accounts so that they could be tortured or killed. This will make that existing risk even greater. Musk's cosiness with dictatorships makes the threat even worse. I would never trust this version of Twitter with my real identity or payment information, and hope people in precarious positions know not to as well.

> They could previously share information with nothing more than an internet connection

Do you know who else could do the same? those who spread misinformation. EU threaten to take action against Twitter if they don't take it seriously - [0] This could be a step they take to address EU.

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/26/eu-warns-...

It doesn’t surprise me that twitter engagement went down. It’s worse in every imaginable way (except for community notes, those are nice I guess)

What does surprise me is how little it decreased. The site is barely usable now and, the usage did not go THAT down?

What's worse, killing your own company because you can't get advertising revenue, or killing your own company because you are desperately trying to make up for the loss of said advertising revenue?

Or killing your company because you never wanted it to start with and have no idea what to do with it now that you're stuck with it?

I tried to open a link from an X profile today and couldn’t get it to open in safari just the X app’s crappy browser. I had to exit out then hold press then open it in their crappy browser then open it in safari. Either this is intentional or things are just deteriorating. I feel like one dev could make the UI of the app work, that the hard part is the backend stuff. But what do I know.

Someone should buy the domain http://twitterformerlyknownasx.com. I don’t know what I’d put there but it would be very funny.

I'm in NZ, and I don't even trust Xwitter under Musk to re-confirm my phone number or email, let alone a credit card.

Much of the vibe here has migrated to Bluesky.

And they all go over to Bluesky now, co-invented by the former Twitter CEO, paid by investors, providing exactly one server. What could go wrong?

> co-invented by the former Twitter CEO

Jack Dorsey no longer believes in or participates on Bluesky. He deleted his account a month ago. Is his former involvement really still relevant?

The website says he's still a member of the board. But I have not noticed his general disapproval, so thank you!

I was a fan for the idea to pay small amount of money for social network than annoying ads. I no longer fan of a service formerly called Twitter.

Reminds me of the whole “Artist formerly known as Prince” thing, Twitter was a brand and renaming it to X is just stupid. Oh well.

That's surprisingly the least of Twitter/X's current problems.

> Twitter was a brand and renaming it to X is just stupid.

The rebranding itself is stupid, but the spin that's added to the rationale behind it makes the "X" brand sound eerily similar to Zombo.com.

Can’t become the everything app he dreams of unless your credit card details are in there somewhere.

Elon is combining a major social media platform amplification service with a $1 stolen credit card verification service for carders and fraudsters! What could go wrong!

The paywall on Fortune that is telling me to pay $1 monthly to see the article is so, so sweetly ironic

I don't think it's ironic. Paying for access to content at least makes logical sense, paying for the privilege to provide content to a platform is ridiculous.

Servers cost money. Bandwidth costs money. And pre-X Twitter was bleeding money.

In the old days the grey beards called this computing model time sharing.

30 years ago people gladly paid AOL and CompuServe for their chat tools. How is this any different?

> And pre-X Twitter was bleeding money.

It had been profitable, shortly before covid. They could have had layoffs and been there again if not for the baggage that came with the acquisition. The debt, the exodus of advertisers, the general worsening.

The $1 subscription would be for the privilege to do write-operations, e.g. tweeting and liking. Paying to consume content has been a thing for long before the internet

Tip: a good way to refer to this company is "Xitter". It concise and less awkward then most other conventions, and is easily recognizable. And if you pronounce the "X" with an "sh" you get a joke compatible with Elon Musk's humour style.

It's better not to stoop to Elon's level.

Thanks Dad

I find it ironic that Fortune charges $1 a month to read about X charging for $1 / year access?

Exactly. I’m so sick of seeing website after website paywalling content and requiring a subscription. What is the future going to be like? Are we supposed to have like 20 subscriptions every month?

in related news, a new "private browser" tab with Google Image Search just asked me if I want to "sign in with fingerprints or eyescan" possible answers -- later or Let's Go

How is that related news?

what are the credentials being asked for by X ? Does their roadmap include biometrics? Its not fiction, this google prompt just really happened minutes ago.. first time here

Email, username, and password?

With this payment?, maybe a webhook for paypal?

> Does their roadmap include biometrics?

Does it?, you're the one saying it's related.

Elon's plan for X to become the "everything" app is not related to this particular news story.

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