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X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines
- Akcium 3y agoI wonder, why they cannot just check your card, instead of charging $1? It's not much and I'm ready to pay if it helps fighting bots. But at the same time I noticed that before Elon took over Twitter, there were less bots (or it at least seemed so). Will it help - that's the question
- throwaway2990 3y agoHahahhaha there’s less bots now than before Elon took over. Now instead of reply bots tho I get like bots.
- reocha 3y agoDo you have a source on that?
- dEnigma 3y agoI paradoxically only really started heavily using Twitter when it seemed to decay under Musk (because I wanted be along for the fun ride). But I can hardly imagine that there could have been more bots before than there are now. Almost all my tweets are immediately liked by some catfishing bot and there are crypto spam bots under every slightly popular tweet.
- Akcium 3y agoSame here. And good engagement dropped down significantly. When I had 10K followers, I can easily get 200-400-500 likes and they were more or less real because I also get a lot of impressions and replies. Nowadays with 35K followers I get, say, 20 likes and ~3 of them are bots.
- horseRad 3y agoAs someone who reported tons of stupidly obvious spam/crypto bots pre takeover I'm genuinely puzzled as to people reporting _increased_ bots as I can spot maybe one every now and then. Maybe it's because I'm a passive user, but to me it's solved.
- dEnigma 3y agoInteresting. It could be that I never noticed before because I wasn't as active (and have gained a couple followers in the meantime, thus becoming a slightly more attractive target). In any case it's now bad enough to make me reconsider using the platform at all (that and the promoted replies and tweets by blue checkmarks). Related to your remark about reports: my last few spam reports got the reply that the tweets didn't violate the "sensitive content policy", even though I reported them as spam, not sensitive content. So something seems to be broken about the report system now too.
- throwaway4aday 3y agoYour profile must have a target painted on it because that is not my experience at all.
- Ensorceled 3y agoThere are definitely more bots in the replies to the people I follow (a dwindling number as they are all switching focus to bluesky, threads and their own email). And many have the $8 checks so ... $1 a year is going to very little to the bot population.
- hliyan 3y agoI worry that this may paradoxically increase bots, because now the price of legitimacy is $1 per year. Bot farms and shills will do the math.
- SXX 3y agoBot farm owners are the only ones who dont care about either $1 a year or $5 a month because they are the only ones on platform who know their ROI very well.
- prepend 3y agoIt’s not the $1, it’s the identity linked to the charge. So now they can be blocked as well as traced back to the funding account. I once was in a charity sponsored therapy group and they had a $10 fee. I was annoyed as this was a pretty wealthy organization and the fee seemed discriminatory, or at least a hassle. I learned that it was just there to validate each participant. So I think this is just a filter to help reduce bot spam.
- raverbashing 3y agoPlenty of bots are paying the 5$ verified account It's a non-issue And of course a lot of them have the same X logo or Elon's picture, because His Xcellence probably fired the thinking heads dealing with spam
- godzillabrennus 3y agoI’m surprised he hasn’t asked his fanboys to volunteer to moderate. Reddit has volunteer moderation.
- inversetelecine 3y agoAnd Reddit just got done crapping all over them, and they're still there working for free. I think X will be ok.
- input_sh 3y ago
- wlesieutre 3y agoAren’t tiny payments like this a favorite for people testing if stolen credit cards are working?
- mrweasel 3y agoThey are, credit card thieves will happily spend more than $1 to verify a credit card. Not acting on such transactions if how you get an angry call from VISA.
- bhaak 3y agoI couldn't imagine that he's trying to kill Twitter even faster than he already was killing it. I've seen so many bots with blue checkmarks that $1 per year doesn't seem to be that much of a deterrence for the more sophisticated bots.
- FranzFerdiNaN 3y agoAh yes, lets trust Elon Musk with your credit card info. What a joke.
- andsoitis 3y agoPeople buy Tesla cars online.
- threeseed 3y agoIt's been widely reported that many of the senior management at Tesla/SpaceX had to run interference to keep Musk away from day to day operations. X/Twitter is Musk unchained.
- honeybadger1 3y agoHonestly, why make shit up?
- FranzFerdiNaN 3y agoTesla isnt the personal toy of Musk.
- rvz 3y ago…and using their Starlink on a subscription plan which their plan is linked to their card numbers. Oh No /s Time to cancel because Musk made lots of techies cry over a bird site.
- philipwhiuk 3y agoI hope they're prepared for the wave of fraudulent card transactions.
- SXX 3y agoYeah they'll get even more money. Unlike small businesses or startups their payment processor not going to get rid of them for those refunds.
- prepend 3y agoId expect they are. And that will allow them to shut off more accounts.
- ceejayoz 3y agoThe people making those charges don't care about the accounts; they're using the $1 charge to test that the stolen card details work before going and buying a $500 gift card somewhere else. The victim eventually does a chargeback, which are expensive and risk your merchant account.
- prepend 3y ago> they're using the $1 charge to test that the stolen card details work before going and buying a $500 gift card somewhere else Why would they start using twitter for this rather than the current merchants they use?
- thiago_fm 3y agoI don't believe this will work out well. Many bots will come, as long as they make a >$1/year profit, which I believe most of them do.
- prepend 3y agoI think you need millions of bots and the marginal return on spammers may be thousands of a cent. So even $1/year may be too much for botnets. Imagine a botnot and if each node cost the operator $1. The economics require near zero marginal costs to ddos or spam or whatever. It seems to cost $10-20 to buy 1,000 followers [0] so I expect lots of those accounts get turned over frequently. It will be interesting to see if this has any effect. [0] https://www.socialchamp.io/blog/buy-instagram-followers/ https://www.socialchamp.io/blog/buy-instagram-followers/
- Ensorceled 3y agoThere are a ton of blue check bots right now and that is more that $1/year. It might eliminate some of the like bots and other noise, but might also make the blue check bot network cheaper to run.
- prepend 3y agoIt doesn’t need to eliminate all bots, just reduce the number. And I think there are far fewer blue check bots to regular, free bots.
- Ensorceled 3y agoIn my personal experience, the bot problem is actually worse than it used to be.
- nailer 3y agoMakes sense. NZ (and Oz) is often used as a ‘isolated western market’ for testing product concepts. Coca Cola do this all the time for example. Philippines is a fraud center. Sorry Filipinos I don’t like it either.
- threeseed 3y agoThis has nothing to do with bots. It's all about getting everyone to provide their credit card details for future revenue streams eg. micro-transactions. And also to give them a competitive advantage in the ad space e.g. allowing companies to target you based on your real life identity.
- lapcat 3y agoExcept the plan will never work for mobile users who sign up via the App Store or Google Play Store. "According to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, Musk’s push to sign-up subscribers was very much intertwined with his quest to build an “everything app,” and Musk grew angry when he learned Apple doesn’t share credit card details of those who sign up with their iPhones." https://www.engadget.com/x-is-starting-to-charge-new-users-1-per-year-to-send-tweets-000925191.html https://www.engadget.com/x-is-starting-to-charge-new-users-1... Of course every iOS developer already knew this, including members of his own engineering staff, which just goes to show how insulated and out of touch with reality the guy is.
- basisword 3y agoJust finished reading the bio so I can clarify this a bit. Despite what it sounds like out of context the take away was that he did know the App Store rules but he was under the (wrong) impression a company of that scale could speak with Apple and get the data anyway.
- dkdbejwi383 3y agoTBH this highlights even more how out of touch they are -- too used to living in a bubble where the rich can get what they want and bypass rules that apply to regular folk.
- ffwszgf 3y agoIt’s not like there’s no precedent for this. Look at all the rules WeChat was able to ignore due to their size and influence. I assume Elon expected a similar treatment for Twitter.
- shipscode 3y agoThey should charge more. Realistically nobody who can’t pay $1/year is worth listening to.
- mg 3y agoThey charge for "the ability to tweet, retweet, like posts and reply to posts." It will be very interesting to see how this turns out. Obviously, there is no value in the ability to publish your thoughts. You can do that for free on an ever growing number of platforms. But Musk seems to bet on a private attention economy. Where even private individuals are willing to pay for attention. Not only businesses. Has this been tried before, or is this a first?
- greggsy 3y agoThis is really just a way to get your CC authorised to make transactions. It’s a nothing cost, but it exponentially increases he likelihood of someone buying something through the platform, or upgrading to a new feature set. IMO, this will fail.
- afavour 3y ago> Where even private individuals are willing to pay for attention Twitter Blue is already this. When you get verified your replies and posts are boosted in others feeds. Just one of the reason the quality of the app has bottomed out but yes: I think there is an audience very willing to pay for that.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[Dupe] Lots more discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37922973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37922973
- Forgeties79 3y agoI have no evidence to back this up, but I imagine a lot of people are like me and just keep the app on their phone or whatever for when the occasional person sends them something or they read a post on a forum that makes them need to actually browse Twitter. I imagine a lot of people like me are not even going to remotely consider to pay a dollar to have that ability. It’s not nearly important enough or integral to our daily lives. This does make me curious though. Could someone pay a dollar to have an account that dozens of people can access until it’s tapped each month or day or whatever the limit is? Basically create the Netflix account sharing problem for Musk. Or mirror the content out forcing a constant whack a mole?
- afavour 3y agoUnironically happy about this as I think it’ll help me finally kick my Twitter habit.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoI think that's a good way to reduce bots but I also don't think Musk is an honest person. What is the ratio of junk emails to junk carrier mail? The reason there is so much electronic spam and scams is because the cost to blast these out at scale is essentially $0. Carrier mail is also traceable. Payment systems add traceability to something like X.
- hoosieree 3y agoCan I get a list of the people who paid? I would like to sell them NFTs.
- nova22033 3y agoWell..not so easy, is it? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-text-messages-revealed-in-twitter-dispute-175049645.html 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.”