Elon Musk says Twitter, now X, is to charge all users subscription fees
Elon Musk says Twitter, now X, is to charge all users subscription fees
Billionaire also says platform has 550 million monthly users generating up to 200m posts a day
Elon Musk has indicated that X, formerly known as Twitter, is preparing to charge all users for accessing the platform.
The X owner said erecting a paywall around the business would ward off the bots, or automated accounts, that have become a bugbear for Musk.
Speaking in a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, the Tesla CEO and world’s richest person suggested that X was going to charge its user base. Currently, Twitter only charges users for its subscription service X Premium, which offers perks such as a verified account checkmark and costs $11 a month in the US for iPhones and £11 in the UK.
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Right up front here, Musk is an absolute idiot, and wrong about almost everything. I am not defending him as a person, and I am not defending his specific plan here to have people pay monthly for their account.
However -- charging a small one-time fee for an actual account with the ability to post is a legitimate avenue to reduce bots. SomethingAwful forums have done this for a long time: an SA account is $10. Doing something like that (maybe not as high as $10), and grandfathering in existing accounts - that could work, because the main thrust would be using the fee as a bot-blocker.
Musk, however, just wants the money, and he's hiding that behind the idea of preventing bots with it.
I’d pay for social media. But not from any of the current giants.
These websites cost a lot to run. They make that money via ads and selling your info. If a new social media came along with a month subscription, no ads, and protected my data then I’d be fine with it. I don’t trust Twitter to do that though. I’d see them collecting the monthly fee, still giving me ads and still selling my data.
It doesn’t work at scale.
$1, $10, or even $100 is nothing to me or possibly you, but to someone else that is grocery money, and most of us won’t pay a dime just out of principle.
I pay around $50/mo to my favorite sites for content. I wouldn’t give Twitter a dime. If this gets the few stragglers off Twitter and onto mastodon I am all for it.
you dont charge your product to exist. its clear elon doesnt understand what he purchased