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Comment by pard68 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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?

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.

> "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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

> 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.

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.

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