X begins charging new users $1 a year in New Zealand, Philippines

[ChrisArchitect]

[Dupe]

Lots more discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37922973

[threeseed]

This 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]

Except 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...

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.

[mrweasel]

It would actually be completely fair to say that X now costs $1 per month to use. You'd have to drop the ads as well, which given their fall out with larger advertisers again would make sense. In some weird sense it would fit with my overall view of Musk, if the advertisers don't like what he's doing, he'll block their access to his platform.

Journalists, consultants and influencers could just expense the cost and get a tax deduction or have their employer pay. Given the value most people claim to get from X/Twitter I don't see why $12 - $20 isn't a reasonable cost.

I'm also not sure if a dollar per month would be enough to keep bots at bay, it's also a little unreasonable to simply outsource your vetting of users to the credit card companies and banks in this manor and I doubt that neither VISA nor MasterCard finds the idea amusing.

[HeckFeck]

Indeed. X could raise the funds by using anonymous payment methods, but we all know it won't use those.

[bluescrn]

It might cut down on anonymous harassment/abuse if people can't create anonymous accounts and hide behind VPNs and throwaway email addresses.

But it's not going to make any difference to anything if it doesn't apply to existing accounts.

[paulette449]

I'm embarrassed for Musk. He overpays for Twitter, mismanages it to a lower value, and is now panhandling for dollar bills to make himself whole.

[hliyan]

I 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.

[prepend]

It’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.

[tbabej]

However, the rate-limiting factor might not be the cost, but the availability of unique credit card details.

[SXX]

Bot 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.

[wlesieutre]

Aren’t tiny payments like this a favorite for people testing if stolen credit cards are working?

[mrweasel]

They 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]

I 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.

[mg]

They 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?

[afavour]

> 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.

[greggsy]

This 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.

[Forgeties79]

I 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?

[Akcium]

I 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]

Hahahhaha there’s less bots now than before Elon took over.

Now instead of reply bots tho I get like bots.

[nova22033]

Well..not so easy, is it?

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.”

[nailer]

Makes 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.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I 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.

[afavour]

Unironically happy about this as I think it’ll help me finally kick my Twitter habit.

[philipwhiuk]

I hope they're prepared for the wave of fraudulent card transactions.

[prepend]

Id expect they are. And that will allow them to shut off more accounts.

[SXX]

Yeah they'll get even more money. Unlike small businesses or startups their payment processor not going to get rid of them for those refunds.

[hoosieree]

Can I get a list of the people who paid? I would like to sell them NFTs.

[thiago_fm]

I 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]

I 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/

[FranzFerdiNaN]

Ah yes, lets trust Elon Musk with your credit card info. What a joke.

[andsoitis]

People buy Tesla cars online.

[shipscode]

They should charge more. Realistically nobody who can’t pay $1/year is worth listening to.