Elon Musk Says He Might Put X/Twitter Behind A Paywall
Musk said that he would charge “a few dollars” or “a small amount of money” for all users on X.
I can't get over the fact that this is the guy who was supposed to be some kind of tech genius.
He was never a tech genius. Maybe fairly competent in some areas, I'll give him that, but his main shtick was coming up with spectacular and insane ideas (who doesn't like rockets?) and having enough emerald money to pay engineers until they could come up with solutions that work.
He repeatedly is stumbling into the same fucking roadblocks tech companies have struggled with for a decade or more, and he's walking through even worse thought processes when there's mountains of data and analysis and proof on what does and doesn't work.
It's like rewatching a train wreck in slow mo, but for some reason there's extra explosions added in.
How people thought, let alone still think, he's some sort of tech genius is absolutely beyond me.
It was a bunch of marketing hype all along, apparently. The more he's revealed who he actually is, the less most people believe that he's really good at much of anything besides hype and being pretentious. The past decade of fawning news articles about how he's the smartest and most hard working person in the entire world is even more nauseating now, in retrospect.
Well, he's got emerald-mine money to throw at problems, and he's been lucky. Money and luck are a potent combination, and can stand in for actual talent and skill in a lot of cases.
He's also had a good eye for tech investments in the past, though he seems to have lost that recently. For example, he co-founded OpenAI. (Sold all his stake in it to Microsoft before it hit the big-time, though.)
So... luck, money, and a history of investing in or founding tech companies that become at least moderately successful off the talents of others. Of course that's going to give him an enormous ego and make him think everything he touches turns to gold.
That is what he pays his internet meme troll group to spread, yes.
Charging users to use a web service that costs money to run isn’t exactly rocket science, it’s how the web should work.
supposed != fact
Just fucking do it.
Maybe then other media will finally stop reporting shit like
"Person Z said Y on X (formerly Twitter)."
It’s annoying enough when they report what someone famous said on Twitter but the articles about what a bunch of random unknown people posted on Twitter (often phrased as if they represent a community) are even worse.
In my language we also have this "X (formerly Twitter)" shit, it's like these fucking stringers got it shoved down their throat by the marketing/lawyer team
Yeah, it's crazy how much influence Twitter still has on the media conversation. Nothing that happens on Mastodon ever makes the news because journalists haven't been able to figure it out.
This is a great idea. Do it!
Please kill it harder
Who in their right mind would pay for a dying social media platform? This reeks of desperation from a man trying to convince himself of his own supposed public image.
The requirement to create an account to view replies/threads is a show stopper for me and it has somehow made Twitter even more useless. It barely had value when it was freely legible but it's not worth sharing data with them to get festering garbage in return.
Yet he thinks people are going to pay for it?
We live in a world where social media and communication are commoditized as fuck and people refuse to pay premiums for shit they can do for free elsewhere. How is Twitter going to compete with Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Reddit, and Facebook when it's arguably the worst choice, objectively the least feature rich, yet the only one that costs money?
He's seemed oddly desperate for money not only about twitter, but also how he's the 1 or 2 wealthiest person in the world yet feels the need to run crypto pump-and-dump scams and game the stock market.
I think the biggest problem at this point is how much Twitter has replaced a core part of how journalism used to function. Back in the day, if a company/organization/famous person/etc was doing something of note, they would write a press release and send it to news organizations, who would then decide how to cover (or not cover) the story.
Now, shit just gets tweeted out and a good chunk of journalism is just putting a few words around that tweet and calling it news. If Twitter disappeared tomorrow and no clone immediately popped up in its place, modern journalism would collapse.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing.
You could ask the same about paying for verification. But a very surprising number of people did that.
I agree with your core point in general, but the reality possibly is "lots of people". The vast, vast majority of people appear to have stuck with TwitX because that's where the people are. People aren't moving to other places because the people aren't there. A jillion organizations, "influencers", wanna-be "influencers", etc are still there because of inertia that surprisingly hasn't run out.
And a whole bunch of idiots have paid for the blue checkmark because they are desperate for attention and think they'll get more views that way. In many cases they're right.
This move, I think, would be more likely to motivate people to move or avoid the platform, but it's ridiculous to me how many people are left after all the other bullshit (including requiring logins, dropping blocking, all the right-wing propaganda and terrible recommendations in general, Musk's behavior, at least a handful of people dropping the platform, etc).
He may be losing money and advertisers but holy shit are a bunch of people still there.
I would imagine people with huge followings and money to burn. Once the paywall is up, those huge followings are going to shrink fast.
Shitfluencers, bots and corporate profiles
I think it’s a great move Elon, charge $100 a month base price to keep the riff raft out, and then offer packages going up to $10,000 a month that allow people to post. I really, truly, seriously think you should do this!
He said creating such a system is “the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots
Lol the fucking “bots” again.
The thing is that the bots aren't going to lower by much when he does that, since the majority of bots on there are his own.
It does seem like it, considering how many inactive accounts follow him
He's still raging because the "bots" were supposed to get him out of having to purchase the company on wildly unfavorable terms. He'll ride this excuse along with the whole business straight into the ground.
Great idea. I definitely support this decision.
Do it.
You won’t.
No balls.
Please DO
Yes, do it then everyone will move to mastodon and we can finally forget about twitter (x) existence
You know deep down that most people would move to Threads.
"Sorry, we can only use a social network if it's owned by a large, evil corporation."
Oh thank God, then we can all finally move on and stop talking about it.
I don't hate what Twitter used to be. I never engaged with it much myself, but it was a fantastic tool for progressive organizations to network and mobilize, and the loss of that will genuinely hurt us all.
But at this point, that tool is already on life support. Better for it to die outright so that people find a new way to do those things x rather than this endless half life it's now trapped in.
I suspect the intention was to kill it because of how it aided people in organizing. Musk like many techbros does not want people organizing because then they might he able to divert the money he needs to build inefficient tunnels under the ground that could be used to feed and educate the masses about why Teslas are poorly assembled cars.
Sorry, but I really hate this argument. It buys into the bullshit mythology that Musk is some kind of evil genius and not just an egotistical moron.
The fact is that Elon went to court, at great expense, to try to get out of buying Twitter. It was a stupid mistake, and one that he was desparately trying to undo, right up until the last moment. To claim that this was part of his genius plan would be like saying that a good first step in planning a murder is to call the cops and tell them you're planning a murder.
He got into his mess because he's a sad divorced loser whose trans daughter won't speak to him anymore, and rather than do any soul searching about it he blamed Twitter for turning her into a "communist". He got sucked into the manosphere bullshit about how all the "woke" Silicon Valley companies are "censoring" people, tried to strongarm Twitter into changing their policies on hate speech by threatening to buy out the company if they didn't accede, tried to make the threat credible by tendering an actual offer that was, incredibly stupidly, far above what the company was worth, and then went all surprised Pikachu face when the shareholders of a company that has literally never been profitable said "That sounds great, we'll take it." Now he's just doing the best he can with a bad situation, after every legal move he could come up with to escape that situation failed ( did you know he's even suing the lawyers who won the case for Twitter against him?).
It's also important to understand that Elon took Twitter private. That means its profits (there aren't any, there never have been) flow directly into his pocket, and it's deficits flow directly out of his pocket. This isn't like with Tesla where he's a CEO of a publicly traded company, and get can get paid big bucks even when they lose money.
If Twitter loses money, Elon loses money. And in order to raise the capital he needed to buy it, he had to take out significant loans. In order to pay the interest on those loans he's been liquidating large amounts of his Tesla stock (which forms the bulk of his compensation as Tesla CEO), which is tanking the Tesla stock price, which further reduces his capital.
In all this debacle has lost Elon somewhere in the region of $200 billion dollars in net worth. There is absolutely no universe in which he is personally sacrificing that kind of capital just to kill a social media platform, and even if you still - against all reason - believe this was an evil scheme to kill Twitter, it's painfully obvious that they (whoever "they" are) could have done it for a LOT less than $200 billion.
All the changes he's made to Twitter since buying it are driven by two basic motivations; because he's a bigot who loves the adoration of other bigots, and because he genuinely thinks these are good ideas. Twitter is called X now because Musk has been trying to make X.com a thing for his entire adult life, to the point where its exactly what got him pushed out of PayPal.
There's no grand plan here. He really is just that stupid.
Dew it!
Literally every single day we have idiots doing Musk’s PR work for free.
Downvote Musk spam. The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring his businesses stay in the 24 hour news cycle.
I just like watching the service formally known as twitter burn.
Nothing like a daily dose of schadenfreude to make everything else seem brighter and nicer...
Literally every single day we have idiots telling us that we aren't allowed to enjoy news articles.
Downvote "Downvote Musk spam" spam. The lemmy user doesn't need your help ensuring their comments stay in the 24 hour news cycle.
Why do the most pathetic of people make the news so often?
He literally designs everything he does to get as much attention as possible. He's not saying he's going to do it, he's saying he's going to think about doing it. It's an outrageous thing, so it will get attention.
Personally I would love for him to put up a paywall. Kill x now. Mastodon needs another boost
God I hope his checkmark followers gaslight him into doing this
He could've spent money building his own Twitter and leave us be but instead he had to go and waste 44+billion to cause harm and damage and destroy a company with employees making a living. It goes without saying he is just such a shit, vile and evil person.
Stop feeding this guy.
Yeah he just says this shit to stay in the news cycle.
This isn't about some random 4chan troll. One of the wealthiest people in the world, now owner of a platform that hundreds of millions of people used to communicate can't be so easily ignored. That acquisition was itself an example of how he can insert himself into public discourse regardless of whether people care about him. A lot of the people now lamenting the decline of Twitter, especially the ones who rely on it for their career, didn't even use to think about this guy.
I pray this bumbling moron actually does it.
Edit: spelling. Apparently I’m a bumbling moron too.
I will pay you money to do it, Elon.
just putting it behind a login screen was catastrophic by itself... just saying
Twitter is dead in 2024 if not by the end of the year.
I remember saying "Twitter ain't making it to Christmas" a few months ago and every decision since then has not made that any less likely.
Do it..The ring commands you to do so.
Good, then all the actually normal people will leave and Elon will have his echo chamber
Truth Social: The Remix
Do it, you cuck.
Cuck-a doodle do it
Certainly gives him a good way to limit social media as we approach the new election cycle.
I’m convinced that was the whole point of him buying Twitter.
At a press conference today, Musk was quoted as saying:
Look at me. Look at me. Please, God, I need people to be paying attention to me and validating me all the time. Ever since I fucked it up with my hot goth gf I've been an absolute mess of transparent attempts to remain relevant. I tried to gain your approval by doing what I guessed would be cool guy shit like going on stage with Dave Chappelle and yelling at you small people about how rich I am. I did the meme thing with the fake money and the fun monkey pictures. I spent billions evading your blocks on Twitter. I give up. You don't have to love me. No one will ever love me. But I need you to always be looking at me.
Musk then produced an acoustic guitar and began to play a cover of Matchbox 20's "Push". According to reports, the entrepreneur who used his slave-generated wealth to build a private space program was on the verge of tears and within shouting distance of the key as he sang the line "Don't just stand there/say nice things to me/cuz I've been cheated and I've been wronged".
This supports the model that he's intentionally driving the platform into the ground.
Although I would not at all be surprised if he really is that stupid.
After Twitter's dead he's gonna reveal that it was all a social experiment, then he'll create a new company, PrankX, with his business partner, Joey Salads.
I honestly can't figure out what he is thinking: is he trying to kill of twitter because he doesn't care about it, or does he honestly belief that this will make good money? I feel like i'm watching a bouncing ball in a small room, you never know which way he goes next
I heard that he killed off Twitter because they were supporting Ukraine, and daddy Putin doesn’t like that.
I heard something like that too, he seems a very nasty guy
Please do! Then we can post pictures of "X marks the spot of Twitter's grave"
I'm supposed to be the random idiot here, Musk.
Stop stealing my shtick.
Your username suggests that you're merely a random idiot, not the random idiot
Relevant username
If that doesn’t finally kill off Twitter, I honestly don’t know what will.
His Saudi investors are going to be stoked he lost them billions and killed the platform they bought into so they could influence US politics.
Just getting rid of it is a way to influence US politics, and their domestic politics. Oligarchs don’t want people organizing politically on Twitter.
Hes worth 200 billion. God! I cant believe someone can actually have that kinda money and people in some part of the world can't afford a meal. If I had 200 billion , I would create X2 , will be called xtwice, just for shits and giggle. May be that's what he's doing.
Then you would not reach 200 billion. In order to reach that number you need to basically be a dragon sitting on your hoard. Bill gates would probably have been richer than Musk if he didn't start doing stuff with his money.
It is also relevant that these kinds of numbers are imaginary anyway. If they were to put all that money into actual use they would basically break the economy and a lot of it would evaporate.
I think a lot of people forget that Bill Gates was on a similar (if less public) fuck face path as Musk is on now. His complete turn toward philanthropism is pretty incredible.
I'm not saying he hasn't done awful things, I'm not saying he hasn't crushed the little guy, I'm not even saying at a basic level he's a good person. But he's used his incredible wealth to do a lot of good in the world, and with incredibly flippant monsters like Musk showing us the alternative I feel like it's worth re-acknowledging.
Even if 99% of it would evaporate that would still be a ridiculous amount of power.
But Bill Gates proved that diversifying a stock of mainly one company while having that company keep all its value is possible. Elon Musk is horrifyingly rich like it or not. His power and the damage he can do is huge.
He blew $20 billion dollars on a website that he’s treating like a broken toy, so not sure. Anyway Musk didn’t get rich from being thrifty. He got rich first from inheritance, then getting lucky that PayPal was dumb enough to merge with his crappy site, which did them no good, then got extra wealthy from buying Tesla. None of that involves a need to be stingy.
If they were to put all that money into actual use they would basically break the economy and a lot of it would evaporate.
This proves that there isn't a hoard after all, and it's all just wishful thinking that they could sell those imaginary shares all at once to get that money.
I switched to Bluesky a few weeks ago and it's so much better than Twitter. It's a smaller number of people but the vibe is generally positive (plus half the posts aren't ads).
Honestly it feels like Twitter did 10 years ago.
I'm skeptical that that vibe will survive open registration, much less the planned federation model, but I'd be happy to be surprised. As it stands, it looks like just another billionaire-generation wealth extraction vehicle.
Given how he's been doing things recently, you can expect a paywall to be added by next week sometime
I stay on twitter to read content from people that are hard to reach. This get my account flagged as spam and locked every other day. At this point, using the service is considered spam in itself, so it's no wonder he want to end it.
Good. How soon?
Please?
How fucking grand would it be if this cunt bought fox “news”?
"“the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots."
He's able to think, and he's all alone thinking and coding twitter all by himself
What a hero
He’s the only person who really knows anything about websites. Well, tbf he did fire practically everyone at Twitter that wasn’t an H1B programmer or network engineer.
Why is it even so damn important for him to get rid of bots that he has to take these extreme measures and make the X experience for everyone so bad? Or maybe it's just always the same excuse to justify his stupid decisions
As someone else pointed out, his entire perspective of Twitter is skewed by his own usage. His following and crypto bs have resulted in all of his tweets being bombarded by bots trying to get attention. It severely impacts his ability to use Twitter, and he's been disillusioned into thinking this is everyone's experience of the platform.
When you look at it from such a narrow perspective, I'm sure yeah, bots are a pretty big issue.
I guess his goal was to kill it since the beginning, or since he was forced to buy it.
He sees his employees as political enemies
And now that normal people are gone, most those still here are bots and people influenced by bots so maybe he think the "vast army" is growing but its just the proportion that grows.
I would pay as much as I need to. I can't live without twitter!!!! ^/s
Musk: Twitter is already pretty fucked since I took over but I want to finish the job...
At some point you got to start believing that Musk is still pissed they forced him to but twitter, so now he's trying his best to destroy it.
You see, I always thought that he bought Twitter so that he could have a parallel equivalent to that thing where the president can send a message to every cell phone instantly. You'll notice that one of the first things he did was make himself block-proof. He still shows up in your feed, even if you blocked him. That was actually what caused me to leave Twitter, though his later decisions have validated that. He's even floated the idea of getting rid of blocks altogether. He's slowly making Twitter unpalatable to anyone who isn't part of his white supremacist genius entrepreneur cult.
That is the point where I'd well and truly delete my account.
Elon Musk's buyout to me was an elaborate Twitter shitpost which went horribly wrong when their board forced him to actually go through with the deal. But if Musk thinks I'll pay money to use The App Formerly Known As Twitter, he's having a laugh. My profile have a grand total of 33 followers and almost all my posts only get interacted with by phishing scammers and spam bots pushing OnlyFans pages. I'd be better off just writing my thoughts into a Notepad file since nobody's going to read them anyways.
Not sure why X is like this. It's honestly been a problem with Twitter long before Elon Musk bought them out and it almost feels like I'm shadowbanned on the site for whatever reason. Twitter to me is a platform that only really felt useful if I wanted to follow a celebrity and it's for that reason that I never felt a need to subscribe to Blue.
Part of me wanted to stick around to the bitter end with a cup of soda and bowl of popcorn, because I thought it'd be entertaining to watch Elon Musk piss away sixty billion dollars, drive Twitter to the ground and then attempt to sue the ultra rich tech oligarchs who sold him the site. But this is just fucking depressing.
We are in a day and age where Threads will end up being the largest (non-Chinese) microblogging platform, despite being even more barebones than your typical Mastodon instance and lacking both hashtags and trending topics.
X is one of several reasons (the other being dating sites) why I well and truly subscribe to the dead internet theory.
That’s how Twitter was for me 2009-2016. I posted about programming, sysadmin stuff… zero engagement… posted photos about my travels, art hobbies, hiking, random observations, current events… pretty much nobody ever said anything about them. I had a successful nice web app from 2008-2012 and we started a Twitter for announcements, got 8,000 followers, but I doubt it brought us any new business.
I have met real people and had real sex from dating sites, they're way more useful than X.
Yeah... no.
Online dating from a straight male perspective fucking sucks. I have tried using various apps for the past decade to find someone to little luck.
Ten years ago, back when you didn't need to mutually match on every app to send a message, the cycle went: message lady, 99.99% get ignored, 0.009% get ghosted after first 3 messages, 0.0001% have an actual conversation.
Maybe that convo will lead to a date. Over half of my dates in my early twenties led to her making excuses to bail early and blocking me afterwards, and I don't even understand why.
On an incredibly rare occasion have I found a relationship from online dating, but that's fallen apart.
Nowadays, nearly all of the sites that I used to use had been bought out by Match, including OkCupid, POF, Tinder, Hinge, and a few other major ones. These apps have been enshittified to be little more than Tinder clones in both functionality and price. Other apps are owned by Bumble and are just as bad. On all of these apps, I seldom get any matches and those I do are either phishing scammers or throwaway accounts plugging an OnlyFans page. All except Okcupid which is a strange anomaly.
On Okcupid I have about 70 matches. I was given a month of Okcupid by Customer Support after having problems with a Turkish lady harassing me. Long story short, we switched to Telegram, I took twelve hours to reply to one of her messages and she went nuclear on me to the point of making multiple OKC accounts to send me abusive messages. I found out all these matches I had were African, Indonesian or Filipina ladies using the app to spoof their location and find a Western husband - and the means to a spousal visa to get into my country.
Falsifying your location to match with people halfway across the world is blatantly against Okcupid's Terms of Service, by the way. But they don't give a shit. Profiles which I reported weeks ago still haven't been banned.
When most of the online dating apps are owned by Bernard Kim and he's on a John Riccitello level of corporate greed, demanding £30 to £40 per month subscriptions just to see who has liked you, it's why I think X may actually be less egregious.
Coming next week on Proof That We Don't Live In A Meritocracy News:
Elon Musk says he might rename X to 🍆💦.com
And indeed anything else that keeps his odd shaped face in the news.
What a wonderful idea!
Elon Musk and Twitter destroying each other is the best long term storytelling I've seen in a long time.
Imagine paying money to post dumb thoughts on the Internet. Ha.