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?
This $1 'fee' monetizes and benefits bot-accounts more than anyone else.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
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?
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.
A MAU is a MAU, whether its a bot or not.
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.
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
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?
No one is going through account creation or double checking this stuff anymore at Twitter.