4 ms·

> expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis. Twitter blue is an optional premium service as far as I kn

> expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis. Twitter blue is an optional premium service as far as I know.

mschuster91 3y ago
Twitter is getting increasingly hard to use without paying for it. Tweet read limits, DM limits, and now the inbox filter for your DMs got silently auto-changed to "only verified accounts can DM you". And no matter how good your reply to someone is quality-wise - a bunch of bluecheck dumbasses will be prioritized. Like every viral tweet has an absurd amount of blue-checked far-right, braindead, scammer and spammer replies below. Musk ruined Twitter by making it "pay to play". If I were to run Twitter, I'd have offered actual verification against a reasonable price to cover the cost of validation, say 100$, years ago. On top of that, some paid features (e.g. long text publishing, uploads > 2 minutes) for those who don't pass the "notability" threshold.
- tome 3y ago
  > Twitter is getting increasingly hard to use without paying for it nitter.net works wonderfully! > DM limits I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon!
  - eropple 3y ago
    > I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon! Then you should have been happy in like, 2018? when they added that. You could restrict DMs to people you followed for a long time. The only thing Musk did was add, and then force on for users, "only followers and people who have paid me eight bucks a month can DM you". "Thanks Elon", indeed.
    - tome 3y ago
      Ah, I only recalled that there wasn't a way to prevent DMs from everyone, not even people I follow, and indeed Elon's innovation doesn't improve that. Oh well.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      The only thing forced was "only those submit to us AND spammers can DM you". Spam DMs still fills my inbox.
- cbm-vic-20 3y ago
  I don't have a Twitter account, but I would occasionally read threads, and obviously a lot of content linked to various Twitter posts. After all of these changes to limits and generally making it harder to read Twitter content without being logged in, I simply don't bother clicking on their links anymore. Nothing of value was lost. I'm only one person in a large Internet, and I'm sure they won't miss the $0.03 of advertising revenue I brought them.
dorkwood 3y ago
Currently if you try to DM most people, you'll get the message: "Get verified to message this user. Only verified users can send Direct Message requests to people that don’t follow them. Sign up for Twitter Blue to continue." I wouldn't exactly call DMs a premium service.
oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
But it's what he's relying on to try to arrest the free-fall. He doesn't expect everyone to pay £100/year, but he expects a certain number to do so. IMO, the cost of living crisis was one impediment, but the other, more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral, and offered reliable, useful functionality behind that subscription, I would gladly have paid £5-10/month for the service. As it happens, I will almost certainly never subscribe to Twitter/𝕏 now.
- badwolf 3y ago
  > try to arrest the free-fall Important to remember that he is the one who pushed the Twitter car over the cliff into financial free-fall with his leveraged buyout.
- okeuro49 3y ago
  > more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral It's documented that twitter before Musk was working with the US democratic party. Saying certain things that the far-left disagreed with could also result in a ban. However it's easy to see how moving Twitter to the centre, appears to be political move right from the perspective of the Left.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    Well, I was offering my opinion of why Twitter is failing from a business perspective, not from a moral or political one. You could well argue that the political bias is now open, and that such an outcome is a good thing. But from a business point of view, I maintain that it is bad for the company — overt politicisation is attractive to some, of course, but for a mass-market platform like Twitter/X, alienating approximately half of your potential audience is just bad business.

> expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis. Twitter blue is an optional premium service as far as I know.

mschuster91 3y ago

Twitter is getting increasingly hard to use without paying for it. Tweet read limits, DM limits, and now the inbox filter for your DMs got silently auto-changed to "only verified accounts can DM you". And no matter how good your reply to someone is quality-wise - a bunch of bluecheck dumbasses will be prioritized. Like every viral tweet has an absurd amount of blue-checked far-right, braindead, scammer and spammer replies below. Musk ruined Twitter by making it "pay to play". If I were to run Twitter, I'd have offered actual verification against a reasonable price to cover the cost of validation, say 100$, years ago. On top of that, some paid features (e.g. long text publishing, uploads > 2 minutes) for those who don't pass the "notability" threshold.

tome 3y ago
> Twitter is getting increasingly hard to use without paying for it nitter.net works wonderfully! > DM limits I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon!
- eropple 3y ago
  > I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon! Then you should have been happy in like, 2018? when they added that. You could restrict DMs to people you followed for a long time. The only thing Musk did was add, and then force on for users, "only followers and people who have paid me eight bucks a month can DM you". "Thanks Elon", indeed.
  - tome 3y ago
    Ah, I only recalled that there wasn't a way to prevent DMs from everyone, not even people I follow, and indeed Elon's innovation doesn't improve that. Oh well.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    The only thing forced was "only those submit to us AND spammers can DM you". Spam DMs still fills my inbox.
cbm-vic-20 3y ago
I don't have a Twitter account, but I would occasionally read threads, and obviously a lot of content linked to various Twitter posts. After all of these changes to limits and generally making it harder to read Twitter content without being logged in, I simply don't bother clicking on their links anymore. Nothing of value was lost. I'm only one person in a large Internet, and I'm sure they won't miss the $0.03 of advertising revenue I brought them.

dorkwood 3y ago

Currently if you try to DM most people, you'll get the message: "Get verified to message this user. Only verified users can send Direct Message requests to people that don’t follow them. Sign up for Twitter Blue to continue." I wouldn't exactly call DMs a premium service.

oneeyedpigeon 3y ago

But it's what he's relying on to try to arrest the free-fall. He doesn't expect everyone to pay £100/year, but he expects a certain number to do so. IMO, the cost of living crisis was one impediment, but the other, more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral, and offered reliable, useful functionality behind that subscription, I would gladly have paid £5-10/month for the service. As it happens, I will almost certainly never subscribe to Twitter/𝕏 now.

badwolf 3y ago
> try to arrest the free-fall Important to remember that he is the one who pushed the Twitter car over the cliff into financial free-fall with his leveraged buyout.
okeuro49 3y ago
> more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral It's documented that twitter before Musk was working with the US democratic party. Saying certain things that the far-left disagreed with could also result in a ban. However it's easy to see how moving Twitter to the centre, appears to be political move right from the perspective of the Left.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  Well, I was offering my opinion of why Twitter is failing from a business perspective, not from a moral or political one. You could well argue that the political bias is now open, and that such an outcome is a good thing. But from a business point of view, I maintain that it is bad for the company — overt politicisation is attractive to some, of course, but for a mass-market platform like Twitter/X, alienating approximately half of your potential audience is just bad business.