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X/Twitter will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features
- huytersd 3y agoI’ll never use this crap but $1 a year is smart. People will sign up for it because it’s nothing and that gives twitter a foot in the door for price hikes later.
- danso 3y agoThe seemingly smartest thing about it is that it’s reportedly for just new users. Many/most power users might stay. But huge numbers of casual (but otherwise active and monetizable) users would just drop off rather that go through the process of adding their payment info.
- greenie_beans 3y agothis would turn me off as a new user. it's already hard to look at tweets if you aren't a user.
- malfist 3y agoIn what world does raising the price from free to $1 lower the barrier for signing up?
- minimaxir 3y agoA decade of App Store user behavior refusing to pay $0.99 one time for an app vs. using an app for free tells a different story.
- throwaway4aday 3y ago99.99% of app store apps are not worth $0.99 and are easily replaced by free web based alternatives or the built in apps
- hparadiz 3y agoWhen he made the purchase I disagreed with people that it was a bad business decision because at the time revenue was approx 6 billion and if they could lower operating costs while increasing revenue it would actually make a ton of sense. I've sinced changed my mind.
- stuvie 3y ago[flagged]
- pard68 3y agoI 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.
- skyyler 3y ago>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.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoExactly 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.
- greenie_beans 3y agoi would pay for this.
- dgfitz 3y agoYou mean like this?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723 (app.net)
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoYeah 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.
- bennettnate5 3y agoThe paywall on Fortune that is telling me to pay $1 monthly to see the article is so, so sweetly ironic
- gdulli 3y agoI don't think it's ironic. Paying for access to content at least makes logical sense, paying for the privilege to provide content to a platform is ridiculous.
- wannacboatmovie 3y agoServers cost money. Bandwidth costs money. And pre-X Twitter was bleeding money. In the old days the grey beards called this computing model time sharing. 30 years ago people gladly paid AOL and CompuServe for their chat tools. How is this any different?
- gdulli 3y ago> And pre-X Twitter was bleeding money. It had been profitable, shortly before covid. They could have had layoffs and been there again if not for the baggage that came with the acquisition. The debt, the exodus of advertisers, the general worsening.
- danso 3y agoThe $1 subscription would be for the privilege to do write-operations, e.g. tweeting and liking. Paying to consume content has been a thing for long before the internet
- iamdelirium 3y agoThis is going to kill engagement. 90% of people don't care enough to pay for that and any sort of barrier will lower engagement. Twitter/X is going to be use this as a way to fight spammers and bots but those accounts never had a problem paying or using stolen money.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago> This is going to kill engagement. Maybe! The people who are still left must really like Twitter. I think charging a token amount to limit who can post from a Sybil attack mitigation perspective might actually be reasonable, and it’s exciting that someone who doesn’t care if they lose is willing to perform the experiment. If you’re not willing to pay at least a dollar to post, maybe your content doesn’t have any value to the audience or platform. I’d pay $1 to keep posting here (probably more! But don’t tell the YC folks).
- greenie_beans 3y agoi don't really like twitter. it's just where most of my network still hangs out online (for now).
- iamdelirium 3y agoYes, the people remaining are addicted to/like Twitter. But this is the equivalent of imposing a sin tax on it and it will cost Twitter engagement like sin taxes lower alcohol or smoking. It will probably lose them even more money as their primary income is ads and lower engagement will drive advertising incoming even lower. Like all of new X/Twitter's changes, it doesn't seem to have any foresight or insight into the product at all.
- joegahona 3y agoSounds like this fee is for new accounts only.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
- mistrial9 3y agoin related news, a new "private browser" tab with Google Image Search just asked me if I want to "sign in with fingerprints or eyescan" possible answers -- later or Let's Go
- wincy 3y agoI tried to open a link from an X profile today and couldn’t get it to open in safari just the X app’s crappy browser. I had to exit out then hold press then open it in their crappy browser then open it in safari. Either this is intentional or things are just deteriorating. I feel like one dev could make the UI of the app work, that the hard part is the backend stuff. But what do I know.
- amerine 3y agoNot 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?
- dragontamer 3y agoAnyone running a TwitterBot through an LLM or other AI tool is paying far, far more than $1/year. This $1 'fee' monetizes and benefits bot-accounts more than anyone else. ------ 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. ------- 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.
- hcurtiss 3y agoI'm not a programmer, but it seems like they could make it non-trivial to automate the payment process. If I have to click 30 times per account, with a captcha, and wait a minute for the payment to clear, 10,000 accounts suddenly starts to become very expensive in terms of time/effort.
- dragontamer 3y agoYou literally buy Filipinos to do this for you for like 5-cents per account. Maybe 1 cent, account creation never was an issue in today's bot / astroturf meta. 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. ------- Like seriously, ever since 'Mechanical Turk' and other websites made cheap labor from 3rd world countries available, this has been a solved problem. https://www.mturk.com/ https://www.mturk.com/
- tzm 3y agoI find it ironic that Fortune charges $1 a month to read about X charging for $1 / year access?
- bazmattaz 3y agoExactly. I’m so sick of seeing website after website paywalling content and requiring a subscription. What is the future going to be like? Are we supposed to have like 20 subscriptions every month?
- IvyMike 3y agoOne fun thing about twitter was always the anonymous novelty accounts that people could fire off on a whim and see where they went. Most of the time they go nowhere but the viral ones can be great fun. Any barrier to entry, even $1, ensures that there's gonna be a lot less of these going forwards.
- rovr138 3y agoI've been to conferences in the past and randomly we get on a table, think, _you know what?, that'd be a great twitter account_ then quickly hop and create an account. I have access to 3 major conference random accounts that every year go up when the conference is happening and it's always a blast.
- slg 3y ago>Musk said “It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.” With so many of these billionaires and CEOs it is becoming impossible to tell whether they are transparently lying or complete idiots. Just admit you need the revenue and you want people to put a card on file to lower the bar for future financial transactions. Charging for a service doesn't eliminate bots, it just shifts the financial break even point a little. If that is truly the only solution Twitter has, that is a huge indictment of his and his team's intelligence. EDIT: To expand on why this clearly isn't targeting bots, this only applies to new users. It therefore does nothing regarding all the bots currently on the platform. It is clear that they don't want to chase off existing users which applies to both real users and bots.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stevehawk 3y agoI love to mock Elon but even I am inclined to agree with him. It seems like the only other solution is something like Google's Web Environment Integrity thing, which scares me. The best/easiest solution is to make it more expensive for the botters to play the game,
- e2le 3y agoAttestation of personhood would be another possible solution. Might even be more effective given the cost of each new key ($10+). https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attestation-of-personhood/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attest...
- hcurtiss 3y agoI'd way rather pay a dollar.
- bccdee 3y agoNah. Twitter never had this much of a bot problem before Elon bought it, which is a big clue as to what's actually gone wrong: He laid off all the moderators and all the staff who were training the automated bot detection algorithms. Extremely formulaic spam which would have been instantly flagged a couple years ago just piles up in my notifications.
- mtmail 3y agoBack in 2016, before the acquisition by Facebook (now Meta), Whatsapp planned to charge $1/year, too. https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-is-ditching-its-annual-dollar-subscription-fee/ https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-is-ditching-its-annu...
- minimaxir 3y agoWhat's worse, killing your own company because you can't get advertising revenue, or killing your own company because you are desperately trying to make up for the loss of said advertising revenue?
- fooey 3y agoOr killing your company because you never wanted it to start with and have no idea what to do with it now that you're stuck with it?
- bryanlarsen 3y agoTip: a good way to refer to this company is "Xitter". It concise and less awkward then most other conventions, and is easily recognizable. And if you pronounce the "X" with an "sh" you get a joke compatible with Elon Musk's humour style.
- nomilk 3y agoCharging $1/year for the ability to tweet and retweet should reduce spammers significantly. But don't journalists in oppressive regimes (e.g. Venezuela, China, Russia, Myanmar, Arab Spring) use twitter to share information? They could previously share information with nothing more than an internet connection, but now they'd be required to enter payment info; what does that do for their anonymity? If the idea is to improve accountability for posted content, this $1 charge might work, but only for those who are allowed to speak, not for the sizeable portion of the world's population who aren't and whose lives will be at risk if their identities are revealed. The sad conclusion is that those journalists may simply stop posting as it's not worth the risk to their lives.
- rpgbr 3y agosomewhat free speech.
- clipsy 3y ago> But don't journalists in oppressive regimes (e.g. Venezuela, China, Russia, Myanmar, Arab Spring) use twitter to share information? They could previously share information with nothing more than an internet connection, but now they'd be required to enter payment info; what does that do for their anonymity? Considering how supportive Elon is of oppressive governments, I imagine he views this as a side benefit.
- rurp 3y agoThis is a great point. There have already been scandals in the past where oppressive regimes offered Twitter employees bribes to expose the people behind certain accounts so that they could be tortured or killed. This will make that existing risk even greater. Musk's cosiness with dictatorships makes the threat even worse. I would never trust this version of Twitter with my real identity or payment information, and hope people in precarious positions know not to as well.
- jryle70 3y ago> They could previously share information with nothing more than an internet connection Do you know who else could do the same? those who spread misinformation. EU threaten to take action against Twitter if they don't take it seriously - [0] This could be a step they take to address EU. [0] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/26/eu-warns-elon-musk-that-twitter-x-must-comply-with-fake-news-laws https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/26/eu-warns-...
- rcurry 3y agoReminds me of the whole “Artist formerly known as Prince” thing, Twitter was a brand and renaming it to X is just stupid. Oh well.
- danso 3y agoOfficial confirmation: https://twitter.com/support/status/1714429406192582896 https://twitter.com/support/status/1714429406192582896 Starting today, we're testing a new program (Not A Bot) in New Zealand and the Philippines. New, unverified accounts will be required to sign up for a $1 annual subscription to be able to post & interact with other posts. Within this test, existing users are not affected. This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver. And so far, subscription options have proven to be the main solution that works at scale. More details → https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/not-a-bot https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/not-a-bot
- pupppet 3y agoCan’t become the everything app he dreams of unless your credit card details are in there somewhere.
- janalsncm 3y agoSomeone should buy the domain http://twitterformerlyknownasx.com http://twitterformerlyknownasx.com. I don’t know what I’d put there but it would be very funny.
- fomine3 3y agoI was a fan for the idea to pay small amount of money for social network than annoying ads. I no longer fan of a service formerly called Twitter.
- rhabarba 3y agoAnd they all go over to Bluesky now, co-invented by the former Twitter CEO, paid by investors, providing exactly one server. What could go wrong?
- greyface- 3y ago> co-invented by the former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey no longer believes in or participates on Bluesky. He deleted his account a month ago. Is his former involvement really still relevant?
- rhabarba 3y agoThe website says he's still a member of the board. But I have not noticed his general disapproval, so thank you!
- k310 3y agoWhat a bargain! For $1 a year (that YOU pay), Elon gets your credit card info or other. (where |you| is a much larger number than previous) sig mentioned this. I just wanted to double down. Elon just wants to be your bank. "Too bad" he scared away so many potential customers by politicizing the platform. Narcissists really do want to have things "both ways"
- lancewiggs 3y agoI'm in NZ, and I don't even trust Xwitter under Musk to re-confirm my phone number or email, let alone a credit card. Much of the vibe here has migrated to Bluesky.
- badwolf 3y agoElon is combining a major social media platform amplification service with a $1 stolen credit card verification service for carders and fraudsters! What could go wrong!
- tivert 3y ago> In a statement published shortly after Fortune reported the news of the $1 plan, X ‘s support account confirmed the details and described the move as a way to curb the prevalence of bots and spam on the platform, rather than a money-making endeavor. “This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver,” the company said. $1 per account is not that much money to pay if you want to spam or manipulate twitter. According to this (https://www.privacyaffairs.com/dark-web-price-index-2022/ https://www.privacyaffairs.com/dark-web-price-index-2022/) as hacked Twitter account $25, and I believe I've read that fresh accounts already sell for a couple dollars (because the cost of faking through signup verifications, etc).
- nova22033 3y agoLOL https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-text-messages-revea https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-text-messages-revea... In another April 14 message, angel investor Jason Calacanis messaged Musk: “You could easily clean up bots and spam and make the service viable for many more users — removing bots and spam is a lot less complicated than what the Tesla self driving team is doing.”
- eviks 3y agoThis is the easy way! Charging $100 would make it even easier
- yankput 3y agoIt doesn’t surprise me that twitter engagement went down. It’s worse in every imaginable way (except for community notes, those are nice I guess) What does surprise me is how little it decreased. The site is barely usable now and, the usage did not go THAT down?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gatinsama 3y agoNobody said it so I'm going to: Mastodon. It's quieter and less crowded, and connections are closer. At least for now. Good for the kind of people who like hackernews.