Elon Musk has indicated that X, formerly known as Twitter, is preparing to charge all users for accessing the platform.
The X owner said erecting a paywall around the business would ward off the bots, or automated accounts, that have become a bugbear for Musk.
Speaking in a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, the Tesla CEO and world’s richest person suggested that X was going to charge its user base. Currently, Twitter only charges users for its subscription service X Premium, which offers perks such as a verified account checkmark and costs $11 a month in the US for iPhones and £11 in the UK.
If all 330 MAUs paid this, Twitter would
netgross $3.6bn/month.Crucially, they absolutely will not.
Not only that, it’ll create a vicious cycle where engagement drops to the point where the people who still post on Twitter (politicians, reporters, celebrities, etc) no longer bother with it, thus leaving much less content for paying users, with the end game being that Twitter is the place where shithead tech bros and neo-Nazis talk to each other and pretty much nobody else.
Just as nature intended.
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Obviously it depends on the price, but maybe 10% of a free userbase will be willing to pay. The problem is, that userbase is coming to the platform mostly for rapid news and celebs. Will it still be the best place for rapid news with a 1/10th of the userbase? Will celebs want to stay on the platform when their reach is reduced to 1/10th? I think this likely just starts a death spiral that substantially shrinks the userbase.
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I mean I’m deleting it. I only have it because articles/friends/etc. have a link with something relevant. I only look at it out of convenience, not because it’s the only source. I am more than happy to take the extra step to Google whatever people were trying to show me moving forward. Though I imagine this will also have a chilling effect on the amount of Twitter links I am sent any given month.
Well, for the sake of context let’s note that we are two people talking about it on Lemmy, for free, with no corporations involved.
Whatever is next for Musk, I think if centralised social media needs to turn a profit then it’s probably not going to remain a central fixture of online society forever.