It's already starting btw: "New users in the Philippines and New Zealand are the first to be asked for an annual payment in the latest change to the platform."
Real glad I've been off Twitter for over a year now.
Musk floated the idea of an annual subscription in September, saying it would help tackle bots, which can be used to artificially amplify political messages or racial hatred.
lol, $1 is going to stop people from paying for bots?
In theory, you could leverage unique credit card accounts to sift out real people from fakes. After all, if you see 1000 accounts under one credit card, you can be reasonably confident that there aren't 1000 unique users underneath.
That said, unique personal identifiers are also highly sensitive precisely because we use them to conduct financial transactions. Handing Elon my credit card info is an invitation to have him fumble it (or simply rack up a bunch of extra charges and fees) such that I'm overwhelmed with fraudulent transactions. I'd as soon give him my SSN or my driver's license number.
there are services which provide hundreds of virtual cards in bulk for verification and stuff, you can type any name you want in the field and itll still go through.
I'd as soon give him my SSN or my driver's license number.
He wants those too. Business users already have to provide them and they can be requested as part of ban appeal
Isn't it his business plan to artificially amplify political messages and racial hatred for $8 a month?
It's going to stop more real people than bots lmao. I'm never going on that shit again if I have to pay.
Imagine giving Elon Musk's most comically ill-managed firm access to your credit card information.
You might as well just pick up a call from Scam Likely and read your Social Security number to the first human that answers.
Don't give his company your credit card info. Dunking on chuds isn't worth it.
I am not convinced that all his actions since being forced to follow through with the buyout hasn't been to do just that. He is the kind of person that always has to feel like he won (if only to himself), while also being "important/cool" enough to be in the spotlight. He wanted to bluff Twitter while trying to look like he was "fighting against censorship". But Twitter called his bluff and tried to make an example of him so other rich folks wouldn't go around doing shit like that. Which also blinded them to the kind of crazy rich dick Musk is and how far he is willing to go to "win". So they forced the buyout and were likely thinking that the massive influx of money would be overall a good thing and just be ready to make some minor changes here and there if Musk really pushed as the main shareholder.
Which might have worked if he were a "normal" liberal capitalist. However he immediately came in and tried to either quickly cut costs in order to drive stock prices up as investors or folks trying to pull a new GME rush so he could sell off and get money back. Or to make sure that the folks that forced him to buy are able to see him slowly and publicly drag the company down and turn it into a laughing stock. While also maybe trying to eventually change it into the "everything" network he has dreamed about ever since he got the "X" domain. With all the other extreme and sudden changes done on whims, it isn't exactly a bad time to just say wild ideas to see how people react.
Since lots of people are most certainly not going to pay for "Blue" every month. $1 a year does "seem" like a small enough number to convince lots of normies that are already conditioned into thinking everything should be a monthly/yearly subscription. Which could (if everyone were to actually pay in addition to normal ad-rev) also be an attempt to pump stock prices as it would be one of the only chances of the company making money and therefore allow him to sell off.
Never used twitter and everything
has done since buying it has guaranteed I never willEnshittification on the super real is a very interesting thing to watch. One of the cardinal rules of the internet is NEVER again i say NEVER pay for something you used to get for free.
It's fascinating seeing these MEGACORPs no longer able to acquire new users and now, due to the eternal laws of capitalist compound growth of ~3% per year forever, are just trying new ways to get more money out of existing users. Their walled gardens are falling in on themselves and it's awesome. We see it with Facebook, YouTube, Instagram (which is also just Facebook), Twitter all of these platforms.
It's gonna be great to see Twitter drop a battle pass and cosmetics next quarter too.
I still can't get over the real world getting shittier, faster, and in a more bleak and less interesting way (no Awakening, no Ghost Dances) than in the Shadowrun timeline.
Can Shadowrun even count as a dystopian setting anymore?
In almost any cyberpunk dystopian setting, there's strong community engagement, most people can eke some kind of living with any sort of job (everyone is paid equally shit, of course), and you can make a living outside the law doing very useful shit like repairing radios or running a back alley soup kitchen
Unironically would rather live in Shadowrun Seattle or Cyberpunk Night City.
Time to dust off my Comstar robes and work for the salvation of humanity. Blake's blessings.
Elmo doesn’t care about bots. He depends on them. He botched about them when he thought he could slip out of having to vastly overpay for the company because he was making yet another 420 joke, but they’re the only thing holding up his user numbers right now. Twitter stopped reporting on things like mDAUs because their real users are dropping.
Bots are just his thing to removed about, but he knows if he actually got rid of them his “users” would fall by 50% and his 90% loss and counting on the Twitter purchase would be complete.
Based, it's time that conservatives had to deal with paywalls when they go to get their news too.
well rip gonna miss stealing memes and sending death threats (and pigpoopballs. mostly pigpoopballs) to zionists
ha ha YES YES destroy the website!
