So much for free speech on X; Musk confirms new users must soon pay to post

If this dude had any experience running an online site he would know how many stolen credit cards are out there.

X is a fly-coated chum bucket.

"climate change and other left wing topics"... I know that's basically how it works in some countries, but it's insane to consider certain scientific facts left wing, and we really shouldn't support such statements.

I’ve had the same theory for a while. They saw the Arab Spring and other populist movements. With their vast oil wealth, tanking Twitter was a small price to pay to re-fracture descent and silence the left. The concentration of wealth has given insane power to wealthy who skew overwhelmingly on the side of themselves. The rise of the right is a direct result of billionaires funding across numerous avenues. The right aligns best with their self interest. They played the long game because they only have to pay people and let them do it for them. Regular folks have to stay engaged in the battle after working to support themselves. Billionaires are the matastasized cancer of capitalism.

The purchase itself was a leveraged buyout, they didn't pay the entire $44bn as Twitter took out a loan to cover $13bn. Like all leveraged buyouts (eg Toys R Us) the purchase itself is meant to kill the business. Even before Musk started screwing the revenue there was little hope Twitter could pay the interest, let along the principle. Now, Twitter is worth less than the debt, by some estimates.

This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.

Then why did Twitter needed to sue him to get him to abide by the deal? Musk often promotes stuff in a pump and dump scheme. One of the many examples is when he briefly promoted bitcoin. He made loads of money off that.

I'm guessing he thought he could make a lot of money quickly in some way. But then interest rates rose quickly and whatever he was planning fell through.

Twitter is really big there. It's basically the most used social media by a vast majority compared to other ones. It's way more plausible that some 'too much rich to know what to do with all the money' Saudi princes decided something like a few percent of their wealth to own the biggest social media on their country for bragging rights and admin privilege to be worth it. Plus, they probably thought Twitter was too big to fail and die, They didn't expect Elon would fuck it up so bad. I don't think anybody expected Elon to fuck it up so bad.

Conservatives are desperately trying to force TikTok to sell because even though its format is garbage, it's gathered a large leftwing userbase

Holy shit you might be right

This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.

Then why does it still exist? Musk took Twitter private, they could've just pulled the plug if they wanted to.

Why would they spend billions for this when they could (and still can) just block the website? It’s not like you can sue the King in Saudi Arabia (lest you think you have too many heads)

Reddit’s owned by tencent now? When did this happen?

Anti-user measures on a social media platform

What’s the alternative for one-to-many communication? I don’t use the platform anymore, but I miss a massive amount of news related to most of my hobbies due to it, normally relying on Reddit users to repost them. It’s incredibly annoying to have to search through 10+ social media pages to check for updates about a race team during a race or an ongoing gaming event.

Mastodon doesn’t have anywhere near the adoption necessary, bluesky still hasn’t taken off.

I don't see that. I see a lot of people who assume these two groups are the same people. But most of us don't use Twitter still. That's why their non-bot userbase is steadily declining. People are leaving. People are abandoning the platform.

Part of me really buys into the idea that Musk is pulling an evil mastermind move with his other billionaire pals, destroying one of the biggest social media sites to keep users fractured. End goal keeping any community small and unable to organize at scale. Then the voice of reason tells me this just another egotistical nepo baby trying to staunch the hemorrhaging of money from his last bad investment.

This is still my opinion. I hated shitter before boy wonder musk took over. It sucked before and it sucks worse now. Just kill it.

There was a theory that he was paid by a country like Saudi Arabia to take it down, sinces it's a powerful tool for a repressed population. Twitter was very important during the Arab Spring.

I scoffed at it before but it's starting to seem very plausible.

It's a numbers and modeling game. If we charge this much, how many users will we lose? If that number is less than what you will make by doing the change, then the change is worth doing.

The purchase itself was a death sentence. $13bn of the $44bn was a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk's behalf, even before Musk started tanking the revenue there was no way Twitter was going to be able to pay the interest on that without further cash investment.

Meanwhile, given that the business in unviable, Musk can try all sorts of crazy shit and are what sticks to the wall. Anything that proves successful can be adopted by whatever comes after Twitter or other social media. Charging for API access stuck, this is just the next attempt.

Maybe he's just trying to make it cheap enough for Dorsey to buy it from him.

It has a "chicken or egg" problem. There are better alternatives, except many don't use them because their userbase is still on Xitter, and said userbase don't want to move away from Xitter because their faves are still there. I deleted it from my phone, but I keep my account in case I need to look up something there, or to not get my identity stolen and exploited.

I went to check it out yesterday and I think I actually got dumber in 5 minutes I spent there.

Porn

For some (few) users, it's required for work. The rest are addicts or Musk fans.

True to a degee, but too many international journalists still depend on that plattform. Makes it hard to ditch it completly, until finally one of the alternatives really pick up.

Never used it. Never plan to do so.

Very aggressive, I use Twitter for porn, I don't know how that's any more moronic than using any other platform that hosts porn.

Add lootboxes and timers.

If you don’t pay to post, there’s a 50% chance of your post getting deleted after anyone sees it. Pay some money to get more favorable odds. Oh, but you don’t but that stuff with money. You gotta use xitter turds first that, and some times you can get those from xitter boxes. In order to buy the lootboxes, you have to spend real money.

If you haven’t bought any lootboxes in a month, xitter will take control of your account and start automatically posting flat earth nazi crypto trash.

Pretty much. 1usd per bot is a small price for maintaining a bot farm.

Or do they plan on banning accounts that use the same billing info? If CNN or BBC pay for their employees accounts, would they get banned?

People with "hot link in bio" and all that jazz

Gotta get them 44 billion back somehow.

aoh man. So apt and too soon.

Is SA still around?

I’ve seen web writers claim that the original brain trust of Weird Twitter started from a Something Awful clique

That’s not what free speech is

Well yeah, obviously. It's just wordplay based on the two common definitions of free.

Everybody knows what free speech means. It's just a bit of wordplay that you've taken very literally.

Elon Musk said free speech like once and then immediately threw a bunch of journalists off the site. And apparently every news article for the rest of my life is going to be about how he was hypocritical instead of whether he wants power or influence or has power and influence or the meaning of giving him those things.

Don’t trust every industrialist you meet even if they invested in one company where competent people make cool space ships. He’s clearly on Ket and some uppers. Grimes divorced him and her music isn’t even good. He’s not that complicated.

Elon and his sycophants have been the idiots talking about free speech on Twitter. It's perfectly fine to use that talking point as criticism. If he's not interested in free speech then what was he doing allowing banned Nazi accounts back on?

Upgrade your free speech to premium speech now for only $17.99

or 0.99/post.each retweet would cost you an additional 0.49. you pay less,you get less.

You don’t know what free speech means.

This is like claiming Blizzard is infringing on your free speech because they banned you from world of Warcraft for saying racist shit.

Better yet. This is like claiming blizzard is infringing on your freedom of speech because they deactivated your account as a result of you not paying your subscription.

Do better.

It's a clever line, but Musk hasn't invented a single goddamn thing in his life.

here's hoping it stops site growth

This will absolutely stop by far the most bots, because hostile governments like Russia and China use THOUSANDS of bots, having to pay $1 extra to maintain each bot, will be prohibitively expensive for those governments. Remember this can mean THOUSANDS in extra cost for those programs. No way either Russia or China will be able to afford that. So my guess is this will be 99.99% effective at preventing bots. The problem for Musk that he may not have foreseen is, the same will be true for MAGA racist anti LGBT propaganda bots. So now Twitter will go back to be dominated by liberals and socialists. Making it necessary for Musk to pay for another platform all over again, if he wants to have a free space to blurt his idiocy.

/s

Isn't that the started intent? Like adding a small roadblock or captcha.

I'm not saying I agree but the simple logic should work. It'll likely reduce the user base and still let bits in with cash to burn.

Its staying power is really annoying TBH.

I guess it could be worse (AKA everyone just going to Discord instead).

Add -twitter to your search queries.

I'll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?

Bot protection? Call me ignorant but what exactly do you do?

As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.

That's what I was coming in here to suggest, so I'm glad someone in the field was able to back that idea up. I think it's unlikely many bots that aren't made for fun are being put on Twitter unless they are generating a lot more than $1 for whoever is putting them up.

This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.

I'd bet that is explicitly part of the funding model. Pay to influence consensus, cuz this is a publicly traded stock and numbers need to go up, regardless of who is paying.

Yes only Russia and China do bad things with technology!

Perhaps when his name/companies will stop being on the headlines every single day multiple times. Unless it's something really big that could actually harm his reputation people should restrain from posting and upvoting news about him. This article is about shit that hasn't happened yet, this guy is tricking you all around.

Unfortunately, they’re going to Threads. Although I guess that’s technically better. But better in the sense that drinking piss is better than eating shit.

I can’t get past the og twitter which was everyone blogging minutiae of their life. What they ate for lunch. What street they’re walking down. What they thought of the music on the radio.

Somewhere along the way people tried to make it legit, but also it was people trying to claim firsties for any event worth mentioning.

It’s just a crap platform. Too much bs to wade through to find anything good.

twitter is for food trucks to tell me where they'll be today, and anything else is a misuse of the service

Twitter has always been pointless to me except for outage notices etc, and that's just because that's where the companies chose to post. The second there is a "town board" style app with all company announcements etc then it's completely pointless.

*keys and *omas are more fun though. mastodon's way too businesslike to encourage a fair share of people to pick it over shitter (it works other way around as well tho)

And make it a shitty place. Lemmy world already is in my block list

For real, shit platform with no real life benefit gets even shittier who would’ve thought

There are extensions for that.

I think the real solution is he wants money. If it was solely to reduce spam/bot activities, then there are other ways to do that. Maybe a Bitcoin-style proof of work scheme where evey post needs to show a hash of the message with a nonce. The difficulty needn't be that hard to make mass posting computaionally unfeasible.

In fact, Bitcoin appropriated this proposal to reduce email spam. It never took off with email as it was an open system and network effects and a catch 22 meant that it floundered. But X, née twitter is a closed off dictatorship. They could force it through edict.

It’s the American way. Aligns with the Supreme Court ruling on Citizen’s United.

Hopefully Twitter dying because of this will give other companies pause (or not, would it really be that bad if facebook kills itself copying him?)