Elon Musk Suggests He Will Charge All X/Twitter Users a Fee to Be on the Platform
variety.com
Elon Musk may flip the switch to make X — the social network formerly known as Twitter — an entirely subscription-based platform. Musk brought up the idea of charging all users of X/Twi…

Elon Musk said he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee to be on the platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots," said Elon. I can’t believe that this is the only solution he can think of.

Dealing with bots would be Elon Musk’s responsibility, considering he’s the only one profiting significantly from X, not us. Elon Musk steals our data and censors each of our posts, now he even expects us to pay to clean up the mess he created.

Plus, the problems with X go beyond just bots. The algorithm and programming decisions are negatively impacting user experience and manipulating people’s minds.

We want a town square where everyone is free to have & voice an opinion. I do not believe we have to pay ”a small monthly payment” for such a place, especially in a country that should value these freedoms & suppressing ideas.

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    • The operational costs and usage patterns of wikipedia are completely different from a social media website.

    • Donations only “work” if you count all the labor done by volunteers as free. The Wikimedia Foundation might be swimming in cash, but the mods and editors don’t see a penny out of it.

    • renormalizer@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Isn’t that the same for Reddit or Lemmy? The content creators and mods don’t see a penny either. Operationally, a social network probably requires a lot more compute power and somewhat more bandwidth compared to a site that serves mostly static content. But I don’t see why small donations shouldn’t cover that. The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        (on reddit) content creators and mods don’t see a penny either.

        Yeah, but since when is this considered fair? Facebook has one million faults, but at the very least they pay their moderation and safety teams.

        The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.

        Is there any donation-based instance where the admins can make a living out of their labor? Even mastodon.social with more than 6 million users can only manage to have two developers on payroll, and they pay themselves a ridiculously low salary.