Technology

I would sooner chew on glass than pay for Twitter.

Hell. No.

The correct answer is no.

Hell no, and that's why I love the idea and definitely encourage them to do so.

He went from saying he was going to build an 'everything app' to charging for something that does nothing and is shit at it.

Sorry Jovan Musk, from Calvin Klein! The answer is nooooOOOOOoooo. Old Twitter is dead. You killed it, and now you're trying to sell me its smelly corpse.

As I understand, even when paying you would still see ads and not get any benefits over what Twitter is at the moment whatsoever. I honestly cannot imagine the platform retaining many users after such a drastic step.

Maybe I will finally go delete my old account.

$0.

Twitter like so many other social media companies came into being with users as the product. As that fails (both because Elon is an idiot and because consumer knowledge has improved), these companies are finding that they never really had a sustainable business model.

Let the market work it out, as the overlords are so fond of.

Looking forward to the influx of users to Bluesky and Mastodon, keep it up lemonsuk

Oh god, please do this.

You couldn't pay me to use that cracker platform. I thought reddit was bad after they fucked over all the moderators, then comes xhitter with open pedo-nazis being boosted to the front page. Both are shit for the same reason and i'm never going back to either.

You couldn't even pay me to use Twitter

I would pay to not use it.

I'd happily pay a monthly fee for twitter to stop existing

no I'm not willing to play for using twitter, I'll just delete my account.

as for the "it's the only way to combat the army of bots" comment - how is that the army of bots only became a problem after twitter became x? i never had a problem before but now my every tweet is liked by a kinsley, madeline, josephine, mia or layla. it's crazy.

oh, maybe that's one of the microservices they shut down

I left already. I'm certainly not paying to use something so terrible

Nah, I'll definitely get that latte instead.

I won’t even use it for free, so paying seems unlikely.

I’ll just leave these here

We want a town square…

I just want to comment on this part, if that’s ok. Town squares are inherently not free. Sure, everyone is free to come to it. But it’s still paid for by someone. Usually by people who stand to gain the most value out of it. This has always been my problem with Twitter and Facebook and their ilk.

There are wonderful examples of people trying different payment models and yes, most of them have failed. But let’s look at them for a minute.

App.net came out swinging at one point, with the idea of a (what was it?) fifty dollars a year payment model. It was a great idea. But it lagged because of a few reasons. Instead of keeping the $50 price point and using the extra money to allow for free accounts, the founders first dropped the price to $36 a year and then quietly raised VC funding, which went against everything they talked about and thus the community turned. Needless to say, the service was dead a few years after it came.

Before that there was WhatsApp. WhatsApp would randomly charge people $1 to $3 for download or subscription. Their experiment was wildly successful. If you could do MMS with just $1 a year from everyone on your network (or, heck, some random number of people on your network), what’s better than that? WhatsApp’s Achilles? Selling to Facebook. Now it’s unmoored from its founding principles. It’s growing. But for every one bespoke feature added, two features are added that push your data to Facebook.

Then there’s micro.blog. The pricing is simple - $5 a month and you get a blog and a social media handle. Right now, the founder hasn’t cracked down on accounts that paid once and are only using the social features of the network without being able to blog on it. It’s surprisingly successful, though niche. Will it fail? Seems like there’s enough runway since the founder is strict about no free signups. That town square isn’t free to join.

The fediverse is blowing up and so are standalone companies with their homegrown social networks like posts.cv and whatever Substack calls their social network. Also egalitarian European countries are launching their own mastodon sites to host a digital town square for their citizens. It’s a great time to be on social media.

But none of the real digital town squares are free. Nor should they be. Yes, a small monthly fee seems unnecessary. But Twitter isn’t a public good. It isn’t infrastructure. It isn’t paid for with our taxes. If the US Government launches their own mastodon site then you can absolutely comment on how important it is for this country to value freedoms. Till then, stop expecting private companies to not experiment with pricing models.

Also, Elon is an idiot and Twitter is dead. But that’s besides the point.

Hell nar we got mastadon