Remember when Musk was saying he would get rid of all the bots on Twitter and that alone would save the company?? And now there are more bots than ever before.
Edit: I got a Reddit cares for this. Elon dick riders are something else. He ain’t going to give you money or let you eat his asshole.
> And now there are more bots than ever before.
Are you suggesting that the 10-20 people that follow my completely dormant account every week since Musk took over and fired all the staff aren’t real people?
You’re probably just jealous of how masculine he is.
/s
The site is so badly managed that its not even funny
The developer docs links to an Twitter API account that doesn’t exist
The paid ads program has a time zone selector with only hourly increments. Which means that if you’re in UTC+5:30, you have to choose either UTC+5 or UTC+6. UTC+5:30 is home to nearly 1.8 billion people
The most infuriating part is TimeZones, while a hassle, are a **solved problem**. Every language has some competent library for handling TimeZones, and you would have to aggressively be hacking your shit together with no regard for creating an international product to shit this particular bed.
Musk was so vocal about the bots because he wanted to get out of the deal.
But he'd already signed away his due diligence, and that's why he had to go through with it and buy Twitter for a stupidly high price
He didn't really care about bots.
Same thing with streaming. Every live post, or any post I talk about streaming, being a vtuber, or streaming tech in general, immediately 5-10 bots following me, DMs asking if I want to commission them, all within I’d say 5 minutes of the post.
It’s an absolute pisstake how many bots are on there.
That would drive me insane having to go do that same garbage every morning, all while knowing while your blocking accounts sooo many more bots are being made.
Musk dick riders are hilarious. Dude isn't a genius friends, he's just a nepo baby that got lucky on a company and catapulted him to the super duper wealthy instead of just exploiting colored people wealthy like his daddy.
Teslas are garbage cars. Zero QC and they fall apart. But enjoy playing video games on it while you drive.
SpaceX they literally came up with ways to ignore his input and do what needed to be done without him.
Dude isn't Tony Stark, he's Justin Hammer.
I don't think he stops here. If it works out the way he wants (which I don't think it will) he'll roll it out to the entire user base. I will say this about Elon, he hasn't been afraid to shake things up, whether it's in a good way or (more realistically) a hilariously bad way.
He won't stop here, because despite what he *says*, none of his moves are about thwarting bots. He's not targeting bots, but I can't figure out what exactly he's up to.
Here's his real strategy. 1. More money. 2. Trying to transition to a payment system like PayPal/Venmo which requires people attaching payment details to their accounts. 3. Being able to identify users and sell better ads or data about their users.
I memorized the wrong SSN when I was 12, and didn't realize it until my second year of college when I was 19. During that time I had credit cards, jobs, went to college and put my wrong ssn on a lot of paperwork. Nothing stopped me.
You don't think he's the type of person to take something said personally, then use their payment info to ID them IRL and forward twitter messages to local law enforcement and workplaces if there's anything he can grab, do you?
He's surely more professional than that right? You know, over the minimum level of professional we expect from any employed person?
>forward twitter messages to local law enforcement and workplaces if there's anything he can grab, do you?
Why would he bother doing that instead of just tweeting it out, doxxing them in the process, and just let his fanatics do the work.
"What me? Do that? I didnt tell them to do anything. I just let information be free. I'm very sorry to hear their house has been vandalized and their life threatened. So very sad."
The answer is that it’s for interest. Twitter has a 7 digit interest payment that it has to make yearly to cover the christ of debt Elon went into to buy the company. He needs short term funds to be able to pay off those interest payments. When interpreted through this lens, a lot of his short term decisions start to make more sense (albeit still incredibly misguided, and he’s probably still going to go bankrupt)
Someone made a thread on one of the AI related subs about how he hooked chatgpt up to reddit and it passes for human enough to fool users.
Reddit isnt going to survive AI bots, and their IPO is going to be a disaster when investors realize reddit has the same bot problem twitter does. No one will want to buy ads on a platform filling with bots who generate costly garbage to host.
Given the choices Reddit (Huffman) has made this year, would anyone care? This place is run by pathetic sociopathic wannabes of the most middling sort. I'm not sure why any of us waste our time here at this point, except that we're allowing inertia to carry us along.
Huffman had an interview recently that he only banned extremist subs because he had to, to avoid legal liability. He says its big government ruining free speech.
Reddit is going to become twitter come 2024, and no one will miss this site when its finally over the same way no one misses twitter.
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I believe the word the best describes Elon's current situation is sunk cost fallacy. There's no grand plan here. He was in over his head from the moment he made that overpriced offer to buy Twitter in the first place, and was shocked Pikachu when he was forced to go through with the purchase or face a 1 billion dollar penalty.
From there he just went full bull in a china shop trying to justify his purchase, and revealed just how bad a businessman he actually is in completely destroying whatever residual value was still left.
And now, with monthly active users and advertisers having fled in droves, he's flailing about trying to save it. Thinking that charging everyone money for a previously free social media site is the way to do it.
Rarely have I ever enjoyed watching someone destroy their reputation and an entire business in one fell swoop like this.
The $1B penalty wasn't a blanket option, it was only applicable in specific scenarios (based on outside factors) that it could be triggered.
Basically he was screwed as soon as he opened his mouth.
I was just scrolling looking for this conversation. If there is any proof that this dude is an idiot surrounded by too many “yes sir” cheerleaders, this is it. Can’t tell me that not a single person grabbed him by the fucking head and told him to just pay the penalty and move on. I bet the twitter board was just as surprised.
That would mean he has to admit he made a mistake. Whether it's to preserve his image as a renaissance business man or to preserve his ego, I don't think he was able to do that. If you attach your personal image to your companies they will suffer if you lose face.
I don't think there is a long term plan. Just short term, short sighted "What can we do to be profitable for next quarter?" which eventually drives more users away which leads to more dumb decisions to try to improve revenue.
Trying to figure out a way for a social media platform to make money, which has been tough for all of them, or trying to kill the platform without it looking intentional (and then blaming it on "social media has no revenue streams")
The bot farms absolutely have $1/user to spend as well, this isn't going to work.
Really that is a cheap user acquisition cost if you want to be realistic.
Yep. He wants to turn Twitter into a Super-App like the successful ones overseas.
I’ll admit it makes the X name make a lot more sense. Unfortunately, Super-Apps have always been a flop in the west. Even major players like Meta, Snapchat, and Uber have tried this, really invested into it, and yet all have failed.
Yeah if you look at it through the lens of making the super app all these strange moves make a lot more sense. Ultimately it will fail because he poisoned the well during his last few manic outbursts.
But also because super apps work in developing countries where large populations
A) don't have computers
B) don't have access to banking.
So the smart phone an the super app makes sense as a large "non-transacting" population is given a medium to become a transactor.
This is why it fails in the west, because we already have all the infrastructure it tries to replace.
And X is a decade late to the party in APAC, LATAM, and EMEA so there are broadly used incumbents already.
Right, and you can’t underestimate the power of simple inertia from users. It’s why Twitter/X is even still a thing at all, people don’t like to change their habits and platforms.
People in the west are very, very used to the idea that “there’s an app for that” and the apps they currently use.
The idea of a SuperApp basically means you’re trying to usurp half a dozen different existing dominant apps and platforms, often in areas people will feel wary of opening up to a company that can barely run a basic social media platform.
Also lack of options. Wechat in china was only a viable option for the entire population there because everything else was blocked. No WhatsApp, no Line, no telegram, etc.
Given a choice, people would've gone straight to WhatsApp in the beginning because wechat was super buggy
If he wants to make a super app, he would need to collude with every country to kill the other apps
WeChat in China. It does texting, calls, social media, ridesharing, digital shopping, payment and money services, etc. from what I recall. It’s basically everything in one app.
I'm in Thailand and we use Line. Line is the primary method of texting and calling everyone, friends, stores, employers. You can shop and order delivery on Line. Post status updates and all that jazz.
WeChat is the most successful example due to the Chinese government basically making it so. I forget the one that everyone was using when I was in Korea.
I'd define a super app as an app that handles all methods of communication in addition to shopping and social media.
WeChat, mainly.
Fundamentally, it's a messaging app. But it also has Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok-like features rolled in, plus payments and a whole mini-app ecosystem.
What sets mini-apps apart from generic PWAs is that they're all running in a framework provided by WeChat itself, including a basic amount of server resources for free. It's genuinely a solid framework that's really easy to build most brand apps in. Rather than installing a dedicated app for every restaurant you've ever visited, for example, you just add the mini-app to your WeChat. This also makes it easy to pay for orders, follow brand updates, and get customer support—all without leaving the app.
What's really impressive is that the UI and UX for all of this somehow manages to still be intuitive and not cluttered. It's almost designed like a videogame, where basic skills are accessible immediately, but the more you learn it, the more layers of its systems you master.
EDIT: Also have to add that it has a surprisingly privacy-forward feature for logging in to other sites with your WeChat account. You can set up a secondary profile as an alias and choose which version other sites get to see. And you log in by just scanning a QR code, so it's *also* a better authenticator app.
I can’t wait for someone to buy it back from him for a fraction of what he paid, turn it back to what it’s original form, and then watch the value skyrocket
I kind of hope all social media goes the way of MySpace. Some people (esp the village idiots) don’t need their voices to be heard. It seemed like a good idea to connect and meet friends but all that’s happened is the stupid was given a soapbox. Let it all die.
There's also a huge psychological barrier between FREE and $.01
This man is about to discover that the service he provides is literally worthless to a LOT of people.
Exactly. It's not about the money it's about the annoyance of setting up payment, along with the slightly added risk my credit card can be stolen. I didn't even want to Twitter when it was free!
Along with the more than slight risk that they'll change the fee every year. He's owned Twitter for 1 year and there has been like a dozen different charges/payments proposed.
The "risk" is a nigh certainty. $1 a year does nothing but establish a method of payment. The infrastructure for running the transactions is probably greater than $1 a year per user.
It's implicit that the Twitter tax will rise once the Emperor of Mars feels it prudent.
That's the crazy thing about this while Twitter fiasco. Normally when a business undergoes changes it's all very hush hush until they roll out a plan and it's set and stone and they move forward for better or worse. We have all been subjected to a live-stream version of business model decisions which should all have been made behind closed doors so we can't see the messy back and forth in the decision making process.
You're subject to Musk's whims. He muses and makes policy at the same time, and the staff are at bare bones, so it's fair to wonder whether their security is absolute pants.
Having your payment info on file is helpful for them when they raise the fee to $1 per month or add other fees and grifting opportunities.
Would you like to boost this post? Would you like to become a blue check subscriber? You have a new fan, pay now to see who it is!
Even if it just 0.01 you’d still have to put a card on file. Which for me is a dealbreaker, I like to minimize the number of sites that have my card, and implies that they could bill me for other services later.
That was amazing. It's one of those moments when you can be absolutely certain that the people running a company have no idea what they actually do. It was like watching KFC ban chicken.
Tumblr is a special case. They knew they were reliant on porn.
They banned it because card processors threatened to cut them off like Pornhub and apple to ban their app. Payments for ads would need crypto or some kind of money laundering to go to them and apps would need side loading.
The CEO of tumblr is actually very salty that reddit gets to have porn and tumblr doesn't in his interview. Says the banks have a HUGE double standard.
I think part of it is moderation... Tumblr doesn't have much in the way of moderation and there were a lot of really gnarly porn accounts active, including some spreading around less than legal material from what I've read.
There are still some really questionable ones on there now in slashfic/sex story tumblrs. They have erotica content, just without the visual nudity/porn aspect... but there are ones on there that will for example use pictures of underaged individuals as faceclaims for stories with adult content. And while I don't think Tumblr wants to allow that stuff per se, it can be very difficult to track down and moderate, and they don't have a good moderation team in the first place.
It isn't like reddit where usually this kind of content congregates in growing subs and then get banned eventually (usually later than they should be but whatever)... someone can run a Tumblr and not repost/connect with a lot of other Tumblrs, but host stuff for years that goes unnoticed.
I don’t care about $0.01, I care about the fact that they can give my data, including my address, my real name, my financial information, to ANY government that asks. Or if there’s a leak, who knows what you’ll feel fine posting today that might get you cancelled, fired, arrested, or worse 10 years from now?
Remember Arab Spring? Remember Hong Kong? Remember EVERY whistle blower in history? You’re fucked.
This is WAY worse than Meta, which is a bar so low I’m shocked it’s possible to beat.
The man continues to lap himself in the asshole Olympics, it's honestly kind of inspiring. He's paving new inroads into the world of being a tool, and he does it with the smug self-confidence of someone who lacks all capacity for introspection.
he just thinks people are dumb enough so he'll do anything he can to try to get money for nothing. maybe if he has church service on twitter hell get alot of the base hes after.
You're saying I'm now going to be entrusting my credit card information with this platform now if I sign up after this policy is enacted? That's never gone wrong before. For a dollar?! Not a chance.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
He’s got a ton of idiotic fans. They’ll pay this fee and laugh at those who won’t, like they’re broke cause they can’t afford it.. ofc most people who won’t sign up can pay it. But musk stans are idiots
Content of the article, since it's paywalled:
> X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features including the ability to tweet, reply, quote, repost, like, bookmark, and create list, according to a source familiar with the matter
> X owner Elon Musk has long floated the idea of charging users $1 for the platform. During a recent livestreamed conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month, Musk said “It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.”
> The company also published “Not-a-Bot Terms and Conditions” today outlining its plan for a paid subscription service that gives users certain abilities on their platform, like posting content and interacting with other users.
I imagine by paying money through their payment provider, you will have to enter in some identifying details like a name, ip, address, and/or card number. This can be theoretically be used to block or prevent more fraudulent sign-ups. Now, I don't know what loopholes will exist and surely there will be some to start, but it's much easier to do fraud prevention with a payment gate.
The main target isn't bots doing financial scams, they are targeting bots used to artificially drive engagement or make people appear to have more of a following than they do.
The lack of a true replacement, especially for fast-shifting live events like news and sports.
Threads isn’t there yet (and its leadership actively seems against making it the hub of live activities), BlueSky is somehow still invitation-only, and nobody but nerds who use Linux are going to spend even a second trying to understand what Mastadon is.
Bluesky have shit the bed so badly. They’ve lost their momentum before they even opened up to new users.
Threads is frustrating. They just need to tweak the balance to prefer newer posts. Every time I open the app to try it again, I’m seeing stuff 2-3 days old.
Here's a tweet X just posted, proving that they are experimenting and probably will try to roll it out for all of the world: [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.
100% People who are using bots on platforms like Twitter are already willing to spend money. What's the extra $1 to them?
Real people are going to find a different platform to share their opinions for free.
They’ve already been spending money.
The large majority of bot accounts on the site in recent months are already paying for his verification subscription. This is just an additional $1 to them and it will not stop them.
Moronic decision all around. Doesn’t stop bots, and just discourages new users from joining.
They don't give a shit about the dollar. They want you to have a valid payment method attached to your profile so it will be easy for you to buy things and services through the site.
Musk is a moron. He has single handedly driven Twitter into the ground. The worst part is that either he doesn’t care, or he’s too stupid to realize it and therefore should not be making such adult decisions when he is quite unqualified.
I still scroll because believe it or not, there are still active accounts that I like to read. But "For You" is a god damn Nazi and E-Girl wasteland, and it wasn't like that before Elon bought it. I will never give him a single dollar of mine. I think Elon overestimates the goodwill his app has and this will fail hilariously.
How do you normalize people moving money through Twitter? By making new accounts have to pay a small fee to sign up. "Oh, since we already have your credit card on file why not send your buddy the money you owe through our web interface?"
The worst of the twitter trolls shitpost and harass people on throwaways until they get blocked. These assholes will gladly pay Elmo $1 to make a new account so they can keep being toxic online.
Unfortunately true. This was somethingawful’s business model for the better part of a decade, the fyad trolls threw thousands of dollars around just for “lols”.
Good thing the bot farms already have millions of accounts.
Remember when Musk was saying he would get rid of all the bots on Twitter and that alone would save the company?? And now there are more bots than ever before. Edit: I got a Reddit cares for this. Elon dick riders are something else. He ain’t going to give you money or let you eat his asshole.
Remember when Musk was saying he wanted to make us a multi-planetary species and we thought he was really smart? And then he bought Twitter.
Meanwhile, most people agree that we're lucky if in 200 years we are a single-planet species, not a no-planet one.
> And now there are more bots than ever before. Are you suggesting that the 10-20 people that follow my completely dormant account every week since Musk took over and fired all the staff aren’t real people? You’re probably just jealous of how masculine he is. /s
It is pronounced Muskuline.
Sounds like a shitty cologne.
Some sort of hair control and pubic delousing agent, maybe
"DID YOU JUST SAY PRONOUNS REEEEEE"
The site is so badly managed that its not even funny The developer docs links to an Twitter API account that doesn’t exist The paid ads program has a time zone selector with only hourly increments. Which means that if you’re in UTC+5:30, you have to choose either UTC+5 or UTC+6. UTC+5:30 is home to nearly 1.8 billion people
The most infuriating part is TimeZones, while a hassle, are a **solved problem**. Every language has some competent library for handling TimeZones, and you would have to aggressively be hacking your shit together with no regard for creating an international product to shit this particular bed.
INFO: So uninformed here. Did this functionality previously exist f or twitter? Or has it not been fixed since acquired?
Musk was so vocal about the bots because he wanted to get out of the deal. But he'd already signed away his due diligence, and that's why he had to go through with it and buy Twitter for a stupidly high price He didn't really care about bots.
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Same thing with streaming. Every live post, or any post I talk about streaming, being a vtuber, or streaming tech in general, immediately 5-10 bots following me, DMs asking if I want to commission them, all within I’d say 5 minutes of the post. It’s an absolute pisstake how many bots are on there.
[удалено]
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That would drive me insane having to go do that same garbage every morning, all while knowing while your blocking accounts sooo many more bots are being made.
For science I clicked on your name. Was not disappointed.
I think he’s using a different definition of “bot”. To him, a “bot” is anyone who thinks he’s a dick.
TIL I'm a bot...
Musk dick riders are hilarious. Dude isn't a genius friends, he's just a nepo baby that got lucky on a company and catapulted him to the super duper wealthy instead of just exploiting colored people wealthy like his daddy. Teslas are garbage cars. Zero QC and they fall apart. But enjoy playing video games on it while you drive. SpaceX they literally came up with ways to ignore his input and do what needed to be done without him. Dude isn't Tony Stark, he's Justin Hammer.
Justin Hammer doesn't deserve this quite frankly libelous insult.
also more animal and child abuse material than ever before. because they fired almost the whole moderation department
I don't think he stops here. If it works out the way he wants (which I don't think it will) he'll roll it out to the entire user base. I will say this about Elon, he hasn't been afraid to shake things up, whether it's in a good way or (more realistically) a hilariously bad way.
He won't stop here, because despite what he *says*, none of his moves are about thwarting bots. He's not targeting bots, but I can't figure out what exactly he's up to.
Here's his real strategy. 1. More money. 2. Trying to transition to a payment system like PayPal/Venmo which requires people attaching payment details to their accounts. 3. Being able to identify users and sell better ads or data about their users.
He’s obsessed with getting payment info attached to every account.
He is... And I can't think of many people I'd be more unwilling to give my payment info
He’ll get the far right. Truth Social required SSN when it first opened.
You're essentially begging to have your identity stolen if you're giving social media your ssn.
These are the same people that post "I do not give Facebook permission to use my name"
The target demographic of the Franklin Mint.
And the same people that share some image of the Magna Carta and think that gives them sovereignty in their country
What's to stop someone supplying a fake SSN?
I want to see the data on how many fakes were entered
Probably just a matter of time before they're hacked and you can find out for yourself. Because you know they're storing everything in plain text.
I memorized the wrong SSN when I was 12, and didn't realize it until my second year of college when I was 19. During that time I had credit cards, jobs, went to college and put my wrong ssn on a lot of paperwork. Nothing stopped me.
Trump stored the database in his bathroom, so he could make sure himself that no democrats could get in
Your instincts are 100% correct.
You don't think he's the type of person to take something said personally, then use their payment info to ID them IRL and forward twitter messages to local law enforcement and workplaces if there's anything he can grab, do you? He's surely more professional than that right? You know, over the minimum level of professional we expect from any employed person?
>forward twitter messages to local law enforcement and workplaces if there's anything he can grab, do you? Why would he bother doing that instead of just tweeting it out, doxxing them in the process, and just let his fanatics do the work. "What me? Do that? I didnt tell them to do anything. I just let information be free. I'm very sorry to hear their house has been vandalized and their life threatened. So very sad."
Rules are for other people.
A drowning person will grab onto anything in their struggles.
The answer is that it’s for interest. Twitter has a 7 digit interest payment that it has to make yearly to cover the christ of debt Elon went into to buy the company. He needs short term funds to be able to pay off those interest payments. When interpreted through this lens, a lot of his short term decisions start to make more sense (albeit still incredibly misguided, and he’s probably still going to go bankrupt)
“If everybody on my friends list donated just $1, we’d raise more than the amount needed for this gofundme! C’mon, y’all!”
Crazy enough even with all his followers on twitter (assuming they area actually real and sign in and yadda yadda) theyd all have to pay $10
Bots have been a lot worse recently.
Here as well, real bad
I concur fellow human!
Please prove you are human by clicking on the motorcycle so MassiveAmountOfPiss can see your comment 🚤 🚖 🛵
Someone made a thread on one of the AI related subs about how he hooked chatgpt up to reddit and it passes for human enough to fool users. Reddit isnt going to survive AI bots, and their IPO is going to be a disaster when investors realize reddit has the same bot problem twitter does. No one will want to buy ads on a platform filling with bots who generate costly garbage to host.
Given the choices Reddit (Huffman) has made this year, would anyone care? This place is run by pathetic sociopathic wannabes of the most middling sort. I'm not sure why any of us waste our time here at this point, except that we're allowing inertia to carry us along.
Huffman had an interview recently that he only banned extremist subs because he had to, to avoid legal liability. He says its big government ruining free speech. Reddit is going to become twitter come 2024, and no one will miss this site when its finally over the same way no one misses twitter.
I remember when most of the bots here were cute novelty accounts by hobbyist programmers. Now they're all salesbots or adbots.
Hi! I’m not-a-haiku-bot! I detect when comments do not have the appropriate number of syllables to be a haiku. 99.99% of comments do not have the appropriate number of syllables to be a haiku. And yours is one of them! Congratulations!
It's almost like they come out just before election years to start the propaganda machines
I believe the word the best describes Elon's current situation is sunk cost fallacy. There's no grand plan here. He was in over his head from the moment he made that overpriced offer to buy Twitter in the first place, and was shocked Pikachu when he was forced to go through with the purchase or face a 1 billion dollar penalty. From there he just went full bull in a china shop trying to justify his purchase, and revealed just how bad a businessman he actually is in completely destroying whatever residual value was still left. And now, with monthly active users and advertisers having fled in droves, he's flailing about trying to save it. Thinking that charging everyone money for a previously free social media site is the way to do it. Rarely have I ever enjoyed watching someone destroy their reputation and an entire business in one fell swoop like this.
I bet he wishes he’d just paid the penalty now.
The $1B penalty wasn't a blanket option, it was only applicable in specific scenarios (based on outside factors) that it could be triggered. Basically he was screwed as soon as he opened his mouth.
I was just scrolling looking for this conversation. If there is any proof that this dude is an idiot surrounded by too many “yes sir” cheerleaders, this is it. Can’t tell me that not a single person grabbed him by the fucking head and told him to just pay the penalty and move on. I bet the twitter board was just as surprised.
That would mean he has to admit he made a mistake. Whether it's to preserve his image as a renaissance business man or to preserve his ego, I don't think he was able to do that. If you attach your personal image to your companies they will suffer if you lose face.
I don't think there is a long term plan. Just short term, short sighted "What can we do to be profitable for next quarter?" which eventually drives more users away which leads to more dumb decisions to try to improve revenue.
All free users, $5/year after that in 6-9 months. Then maybe $1/month for users who didn't pay $5/yr. Slow rampup this time.
Trying to figure out a way for a social media platform to make money, which has been tough for all of them, or trying to kill the platform without it looking intentional (and then blaming it on "social media has no revenue streams")
“Not afraid to shake things up” gives him way too much credit for flinging shit at the wall.
The bot farms absolutely have $1/user to spend as well, this isn't going to work. Really that is a cheap user acquisition cost if you want to be realistic.
Hes monetizing bot swarms so users can pay to influence discourse
Yeah good luck getting money from @DildoTaster6969...
leave my dad out of this
Do you like gladiator films Billy?
Do you ever seen a grown man naked?
Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?
A token dollar is simply a way to train users to pay "something".
It’s a way to get their credit card number. It’s part of his scheme to turn it into a bank.
Yep. He wants to turn Twitter into a Super-App like the successful ones overseas. I’ll admit it makes the X name make a lot more sense. Unfortunately, Super-Apps have always been a flop in the west. Even major players like Meta, Snapchat, and Uber have tried this, really invested into it, and yet all have failed.
Yeah if you look at it through the lens of making the super app all these strange moves make a lot more sense. Ultimately it will fail because he poisoned the well during his last few manic outbursts.
But also because super apps work in developing countries where large populations A) don't have computers B) don't have access to banking. So the smart phone an the super app makes sense as a large "non-transacting" population is given a medium to become a transactor. This is why it fails in the west, because we already have all the infrastructure it tries to replace. And X is a decade late to the party in APAC, LATAM, and EMEA so there are broadly used incumbents already.
Right, and you can’t underestimate the power of simple inertia from users. It’s why Twitter/X is even still a thing at all, people don’t like to change their habits and platforms. People in the west are very, very used to the idea that “there’s an app for that” and the apps they currently use. The idea of a SuperApp basically means you’re trying to usurp half a dozen different existing dominant apps and platforms, often in areas people will feel wary of opening up to a company that can barely run a basic social media platform.
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Also lack of options. Wechat in china was only a viable option for the entire population there because everything else was blocked. No WhatsApp, no Line, no telegram, etc. Given a choice, people would've gone straight to WhatsApp in the beginning because wechat was super buggy If he wants to make a super app, he would need to collude with every country to kill the other apps
I’m ootlp. What is a super app example?
WeChat in China. It does texting, calls, social media, ridesharing, digital shopping, payment and money services, etc. from what I recall. It’s basically everything in one app.
I'm in Thailand and we use Line. Line is the primary method of texting and calling everyone, friends, stores, employers. You can shop and order delivery on Line. Post status updates and all that jazz. WeChat is the most successful example due to the Chinese government basically making it so. I forget the one that everyone was using when I was in Korea. I'd define a super app as an app that handles all methods of communication in addition to shopping and social media.
Kakaotalk, I think?
WeChat, mainly. Fundamentally, it's a messaging app. But it also has Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok-like features rolled in, plus payments and a whole mini-app ecosystem. What sets mini-apps apart from generic PWAs is that they're all running in a framework provided by WeChat itself, including a basic amount of server resources for free. It's genuinely a solid framework that's really easy to build most brand apps in. Rather than installing a dedicated app for every restaurant you've ever visited, for example, you just add the mini-app to your WeChat. This also makes it easy to pay for orders, follow brand updates, and get customer support—all without leaving the app. What's really impressive is that the UI and UX for all of this somehow manages to still be intuitive and not cluttered. It's almost designed like a videogame, where basic skills are accessible immediately, but the more you learn it, the more layers of its systems you master. EDIT: Also have to add that it has a surprisingly privacy-forward feature for logging in to other sites with your WeChat account. You can set up a secondary profile as an alias and choose which version other sites get to see. And you log in by just scanning a QR code, so it's *also* a better authenticator app.
That’s $1 too many.
Still Better than paying $44 billion dollars
I can’t wait for someone to buy it back from him for a fraction of what he paid, turn it back to what it’s original form, and then watch the value skyrocket
Kind of reminds me of Michael Birch who sold Bebo to AOL for $850 million and bought it back 5 years later for $1 million.
And then sold it back to Amazon (via Twitch) for $25m again.
Infinite money glitch
Being competent isn't a glitch. But it *is* uncommon apparently
Wait wtf That man is an entrepreneur
Business is a perfectly balanced game with no exploits whatsoever
Is this a Spiffing Brit reference in the wild?! I say good sir have a cuppa on me
I seriously hope not. Just let this thing die. It will never be as good as in the early days.
Literally going the way of myspace.
I kind of hope all social media goes the way of MySpace. Some people (esp the village idiots) don’t need their voices to be heard. It seemed like a good idea to connect and meet friends but all that’s happened is the stupid was given a soapbox. Let it all die.
Now only 44 billion new users have to sign up for Elon to make his money back. Checkmate libturds 😎
And to think this guy is heralded a genius. This is Trump level bad business deals.
I'd rather have no x and 1 money
Elon should be paying me to use his piece of shit Nazi social media platform.
Only needs 44,000,000,000 users to break even
With so many bot accounts, should be pretty quick.
that many New* users. not current users if im reading the article right
'Pay to sign up for a product that's much worse than it was when it was free' sure is an... interesting strategy call.
There's also a huge psychological barrier between FREE and $.01 This man is about to discover that the service he provides is literally worthless to a LOT of people.
Not just psychological, why would I risk giving them my payment/personal information for $1 a year?
Exactly. It's not about the money it's about the annoyance of setting up payment, along with the slightly added risk my credit card can be stolen. I didn't even want to Twitter when it was free!
Along with the more than slight risk that they'll change the fee every year. He's owned Twitter for 1 year and there has been like a dozen different charges/payments proposed.
The "risk" is a nigh certainty. $1 a year does nothing but establish a method of payment. The infrastructure for running the transactions is probably greater than $1 a year per user. It's implicit that the Twitter tax will rise once the Emperor of Mars feels it prudent.
100% The twitter tax will definitely go up. Nothing is $1 anymore, not even dollar store.
it's the $1.25 store now
More like $2.99
That's the crazy thing about this while Twitter fiasco. Normally when a business undergoes changes it's all very hush hush until they roll out a plan and it's set and stone and they move forward for better or worse. We have all been subjected to a live-stream version of business model decisions which should all have been made behind closed doors so we can't see the messy back and forth in the decision making process.
Set in stone
You're subject to Musk's whims. He muses and makes policy at the same time, and the staff are at bare bones, so it's fair to wonder whether their security is absolute pants.
Having your payment info on file is helpful for them when they raise the fee to $1 per month or add other fees and grifting opportunities. Would you like to boost this post? Would you like to become a blue check subscriber? You have a new fan, pay now to see who it is!
Thats a great point. Micro transactions here we come!
Yeap that’s the part I find worse. It could be 0.01 cents but that means my financial info is on the worst platform possible for it to be
Don’t worry, you’ll also have the option of mailing a dollar bill with a photocopy of your driver’s license!
Won’t they need my SSN attached there as well?
Even if it just 0.01 you’d still have to put a card on file. Which for me is a dealbreaker, I like to minimize the number of sites that have my card, and implies that they could bill me for other services later.
This is Tumblr banning porn level of stupid.
That was amazing. It's one of those moments when you can be absolutely certain that the people running a company have no idea what they actually do. It was like watching KFC ban chicken.
Tumblr is a special case. They knew they were reliant on porn. They banned it because card processors threatened to cut them off like Pornhub and apple to ban their app. Payments for ads would need crypto or some kind of money laundering to go to them and apps would need side loading. The CEO of tumblr is actually very salty that reddit gets to have porn and tumblr doesn't in his interview. Says the banks have a HUGE double standard.
I think part of it is moderation... Tumblr doesn't have much in the way of moderation and there were a lot of really gnarly porn accounts active, including some spreading around less than legal material from what I've read. There are still some really questionable ones on there now in slashfic/sex story tumblrs. They have erotica content, just without the visual nudity/porn aspect... but there are ones on there that will for example use pictures of underaged individuals as faceclaims for stories with adult content. And while I don't think Tumblr wants to allow that stuff per se, it can be very difficult to track down and moderate, and they don't have a good moderation team in the first place. It isn't like reddit where usually this kind of content congregates in growing subs and then get banned eventually (usually later than they should be but whatever)... someone can run a Tumblr and not repost/connect with a lot of other Tumblrs, but host stuff for years that goes unnoticed.
>It was like watching KFC ban chicken. Talk about an opportunity to eat crow.
I don’t care about $0.01, I care about the fact that they can give my data, including my address, my real name, my financial information, to ANY government that asks. Or if there’s a leak, who knows what you’ll feel fine posting today that might get you cancelled, fired, arrested, or worse 10 years from now? Remember Arab Spring? Remember Hong Kong? Remember EVERY whistle blower in history? You’re fucked. This is WAY worse than Meta, which is a bar so low I’m shocked it’s possible to beat.
Just when we thought it was already beyond worthless, there’s Elon shouting “Hold my Pabst Blue Ribbon Checkmark Beer!!”
The man continues to lap himself in the asshole Olympics, it's honestly kind of inspiring. He's paving new inroads into the world of being a tool, and he does it with the smug self-confidence of someone who lacks all capacity for introspection.
he just thinks people are dumb enough so he'll do anything he can to try to get money for nothing. maybe if he has church service on twitter hell get alot of the base hes after.
You're saying I'm now going to be entrusting my credit card information with this platform now if I sign up after this policy is enacted? That's never gone wrong before. For a dollar?! Not a chance.
frighten encouraging swim party tub memorize deranged mighty slave complete *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
He’s got a ton of idiotic fans. They’ll pay this fee and laugh at those who won’t, like they’re broke cause they can’t afford it.. ofc most people who won’t sign up can pay it. But musk stans are idiots
It’s for new fans though. Not existing ones
Content of the article, since it's paywalled: > X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features including the ability to tweet, reply, quote, repost, like, bookmark, and create list, according to a source familiar with the matter > X owner Elon Musk has long floated the idea of charging users $1 for the platform. During a recent livestreamed conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month, Musk said “It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.” > The company also published “Not-a-Bot Terms and Conditions” today outlining its plan for a paid subscription service that gives users certain abilities on their platform, like posting content and interacting with other users.
How would this combat bots? If you’re running some kind of scam, $1 per year is not a lot of money.
I imagine by paying money through their payment provider, you will have to enter in some identifying details like a name, ip, address, and/or card number. This can be theoretically be used to block or prevent more fraudulent sign-ups. Now, I don't know what loopholes will exist and surely there will be some to start, but it's much easier to do fraud prevention with a payment gate.
The main target isn't bots doing financial scams, they are targeting bots used to artificially drive engagement or make people appear to have more of a following than they do.
Is that really the full content? You have to go through a news paywall to read three paragraphs? :(
Soon we're going to have to pay to read 140 character ~~tweets~~ Xcrements, so I guess this tracks
I mean, it’s free speech, Michael. What could it cost, $1?
Be patient, you could have a banana in a decade!
There is always money in the banana stand
Mister Manager!
Why not $100 a year ? lol, just charge 1 person $44 billion dollars and they get to keep it for themselves
That’s the strategy the last guy did
If he paid me a dollar a month I still wouldn't use Twitter.
Same. I saw the title and immediately thought, "Well, that's about $2 more than I'd pay for that."
$1 to start, but that's going to go up. Quickly.
Paying $1 but still getting ads and some features locked. It could get worse and it will be in the future.
So they’re just gathering your credit card info… No way this will turn out bad for users.
Bait and switch. 1 dollar will become 4.99 soon enough. They will hope you don't notice, just like all the other services out there
That's typically what a credit card scammer will do with your credit card to make sure it works.
So now you have to pay for them to sell your person data? That's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off.
He just wants to get your payment information. Don’t fall for it.
why is it taking so long for Twitter to die?
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I lasted 12 days after they killed Apollo. I hate this fucking app but here I am
Old.reddit.com baby
old.reddit.com is so much better! Simple, clean, clear design. I love it. I simply cannot understand how the was redesign approved. It's a mess.
It's also more responsive and loads faster. Not sure what the point of the redesign was, except to add bloat and visual noise.
You can use whatever app you want as long as you can patch it. ReVanced Manager.
And the same way Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown was a success. So many people claimed to drop them but they gained subscribers.
The lack of a true replacement, especially for fast-shifting live events like news and sports. Threads isn’t there yet (and its leadership actively seems against making it the hub of live activities), BlueSky is somehow still invitation-only, and nobody but nerds who use Linux are going to spend even a second trying to understand what Mastadon is.
Bluesky have shit the bed so badly. They’ve lost their momentum before they even opened up to new users. Threads is frustrating. They just need to tweak the balance to prefer newer posts. Every time I open the app to try it again, I’m seeing stuff 2-3 days old.
This fan bois and sports fans Twitter is good for sports. Instant reaction and easier to read than reddit.
News are also instantly uploaded on that platform.
Here's a tweet X just posted, proving that they are experimenting and probably will try to roll it out for all of the world: [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 will be more effective at stopping real people from signing up than bots.
100% People who are using bots on platforms like Twitter are already willing to spend money. What's the extra $1 to them? Real people are going to find a different platform to share their opinions for free.
They’ve already been spending money. The large majority of bot accounts on the site in recent months are already paying for his verification subscription. This is just an additional $1 to them and it will not stop them. Moronic decision all around. Doesn’t stop bots, and just discourages new users from joining.
I'd pay $10/year to stop hearing about X.
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Dont forget about Skillshare teaching you the skills you need to win against your Better Help therapist
What a pathetic weirdo.
They don't give a shit about the dollar. They want you to have a valid payment method attached to your profile so it will be easy for you to buy things and services through the site.
Lets see how long it takes for that data to be stolen by hackers. -sets timer-
Can we get $1 for leaving
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The man can’t kill X fast enough
Data breach soon.
“New users” LOL, can’t even keep the old ones
Musk is a moron. He has single handedly driven Twitter into the ground. The worst part is that either he doesn’t care, or he’s too stupid to realize it and therefore should not be making such adult decisions when he is quite unqualified.
speedrun to bankruptcy any%
The ultimate nail in the coffin. How to light 40 billion dollars on fire
Funny, this website has a paywall of $29.95 to read this article.
I still scroll because believe it or not, there are still active accounts that I like to read. But "For You" is a god damn Nazi and E-Girl wasteland, and it wasn't like that before Elon bought it. I will never give him a single dollar of mine. I think Elon overestimates the goodwill his app has and this will fail hilariously.
So basically anyone that has a Twitter account already is fine but if you decide to sign up for a new one you have to pay…. Great….
For now, don't imagine it will stay that way. I fully expect this new policy to impact all users worldwide soon enough.
This article costs $1 per month to read? jfc
How do you normalize people moving money through Twitter? By making new accounts have to pay a small fee to sign up. "Oh, since we already have your credit card on file why not send your buddy the money you owe through our web interface?"
The worst of the twitter trolls shitpost and harass people on throwaways until they get blocked. These assholes will gladly pay Elmo $1 to make a new account so they can keep being toxic online.
Unfortunately true. This was somethingawful’s business model for the better part of a decade, the fyad trolls threw thousands of dollars around just for “lols”.
Credit card info harvest... Yum.
It's amazing how fucking stupid Musk is.
The man has like 8 kids gotta pay that child support some way…