X will charge users ‘a small monthly payment’ to use its service::X owner Elon Musk today floated the idea that the social network formerly known as Twitter may no longer be a free site. In a live-streamed conversation

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    Look, we can hate Twitter and Musk all we want, but (a) the headline is absurdly false and (b) charging small amounts from every user instead of having an ad-funded business is probably the most honest and fair way to have a healthy internet and I for one would welcome the change. If Twitter becomes paid-only and removes all advertising and tracking (that’s the the big if) it can find its way to become the only sustainable and (dare I say?) ethical social media network around.

    I strongly believe that a lot of the decline in the quality of civic debate and the increasing polarization of our society is unhealthy and can be traced back to the point where online media started depending on “eyeballs” and advertisers. (Don’t believe me? Just check the headline and read the article, now see how it outright LIED in the headline to make you click). Every news media channel became more and more tabloid-like in a desperate attempt to keep their viewership numbers, quantity over quality became the norm and everything became a “market audience” segmented to perform well to specific editorial guidelines.

    To have meaningful change and actual progress, we need to have a healthy media that is focused on pursuing the truth. The current landscape is just a popularity contest. If people are able to vote with their wallets and if they become more than just a number , the people holding the megaphones will win more by paying attention to us than by treating us as cattle who can be milked out.

    • @[email protected]
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      142 years ago

      He still shows ads to Twitter blue subscribers, of course he would keep showing them to everyone if he charged them

    • @[email protected]
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      212 years ago

      charging small amounts from every user instead of having an ad-funded business is probably the most honest and fair way to have a healthy internet

      I agree, but wouldn’t you think it’s far more likely that they would charge small amounts from every user AND have an ad-funded business?

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        This is why I am not holding my hopes up for Twitter, but I do believe that the Fediverse can work because we can have many different small service providers that would all compete for its customers, and not having ads would be definitely an advantage.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

      But people keep talking about it and upvoting it. Please just downvote the musk spam. This isn’t even about Twitter/x, it’s just musk rambling.

    • Otter
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      2 years ago

      So many articles about what he’s pondering or what he might do

      How about we read about it when something actually changes

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    82 years ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    X owner Elon Musk today floated the idea that the social network formerly known as Twitter may no longer be a free site.

    In a live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, Musk said the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” for the use of the X system.

    But since Musk took over the platform last year, the company has been pushing its users to subscribe to its paid subscription product, X Premium (previously Twitter Blue).

    X doesn’t disclose how many paid subscribers it has, but independent research indicates X Premium hasn’t attracted a majority of X users.

    Platformer last year reported that Musk was weighing the idea of putting all of Twitter behind a paywall, in fact.

    The larger conversation between Musk and Netanyahu today focused on AI technology and its regulation, though the topic of hate speech on X came up.


    The original article contains 498 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @[email protected]
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    2292 years ago

    I hope this is the one thing that he actually follows through on. Drive a stake through it already

      • just another dev
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        2 years ago

        I wish Lemmy had keyword filters.

        Edit: hmmm… Maybe the slur filter will work. Let’s try.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          The beauty of the Fediverse is that many tasks like this can be done by the client, as opposed to the actual base software.

          For instance, Lemmy can’t actually block instances or “subs” (or whatever the equivalent is) on an individual level, but Voyager can.

          On another point, as much as I hate hearing about Musk and Twitter, they are both very powerful, and both have an impact on the world. Especially if Twitter were to become an “everything app” (AKA Superapp)(which it hopefully won’t).

          • just another dev
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            2 years ago

            True, but the clients are still in their infancy. Liftoff has no support for it as far as I know. Meanwhile, I have the luck of running my own instance, so if the filter fixes it, that would be great.

            When I still used Twitter, I was very glad to be able to filter out Trump, otherwise I’d see half a dozen tweets about him per day. We’re kinda heading there with removed on Lemmy now, and I really don’t even want to spend the mental energy it takes to ignore it.

            Edit: meh. Using the slur filter just replaces “removed” with “removed”. Time to investigate some other clients I guess.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          If you’re using Lemmy on iPhone, Memmy (application) provides this feature. It works pretty well

  • @[email protected]
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    122 years ago

    Very misleading title. Apparently floating an idea is now committing to implement a policy.

  • @[email protected]
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    312 years ago

    A service that I have to pay for AND it harvests and sells my personal data? SIGN ME UP!

    • @[email protected]
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      62 years ago

      If Musk wants me to use his shitty crap site, I will be charging him a small monthly fee.

  • NRay7882
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    2 years ago

    The only way to fight bots is to charge users a fee? Gee, I wonder how all of these other sites do it. 2-factor logins, manual auth prompts, rotating passwords on suspected accounts… a real unsolvable problem for the stable tech genius, I see.

  • @[email protected]
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    52 years ago

    And people will still insist on remaining there. I’m convinced Musk could shut down the site tomorrow, and people would continuously refresh until it somehow reappears.

  • @[email protected]
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    142 years ago

    Blue tick users: We are already paying a fee

    Elon: Yes, but what about a second fee? Premium tweets? Twitter awards?

  • @[email protected]
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    632 years ago

    Can we just skip to the part where the servers get shut down? I’m so tired of hearing about this prick.

    • Magnor
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      202 years ago

      Nah, let’s skip to the part where Musk tries to move them using cheap labour and a screwdriver.

      Wait … we already had that.

  • @[email protected]
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    282 years ago

    Not a single actual quote from Elon in this article. Does anyone know what he actually said? Because the title states it as a definitive while the excerpts sound more like he was just floating the idea out loud.

        • @[email protected]
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          62 years ago

          Yeah that’s true. The headline is asserting something that I don’t think Musk has actually said he will do. On the other hand, I’m having trouble thinking of any random idea Musk has had that he didn’t attempt to follow through on.

  • @[email protected]
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    92 years ago

    I’ve deleted my account way before Elon bought the company and haven’t been back since. When I was super active on Twitter which was many years ago and they said I had to pay a small fee every month I would have stopped using it right away. I don’t see the benefit of having social media and I sure as shit won’t pay for any of them. I’m in my 40’s so maybe it’s just me or my age but I can’t imagine anything on those platforms that would be worth a dollar a month.

    Sounds like he’s trying to recoup lost revenue and I can’t imaging this is going to work out well for them.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

      I use it to follow some art accounts but they usually also have a 2nd account somewhere else like DeviantArt or Pixiv.

      Also the Progressbar account just tweeting how far along we are in the year.

      Nothing of high value is lost.
      No meaningfull comments were written like on Reddit, nobody uses it like imgur or gfycat so what purpose does it fill except doom scrolling?

    • @[email protected]
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      92 years ago

      “Let’s make the content creators pay to make their content for us” has been the dumbest trend in the past few years