Orange site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37922973
EXCLUSIVE: X, formerly known as Twitter, will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features including the ability to tweet and retweet
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, will begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features including the ability to tweet, reply, and quote, according to a source familiar with the matter and later confirmed by the company.
The company will begin charging the fee on Tuesday for new users in New Zealand and the Philippines, marking one of the most significant changes to the social media platform since Elon Musk acquired the company nearly a year ago.
In a statement published shortly after Fortune reported the news of the $1 plan, X ‘s support account confirmed the details and described the move as a way to curb the prevalence of bots and spam on the platform, rather than a money-making endeavor. “This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver,” the company said.
https://twitter.com/Support/status/1714429406192582896
Starting today, we're testing a new program (Not A Bot) in New Zealand and the Philippines. New, unverified accounts will be required to sign up for a $1 annual subscription to be able to post & interact with other posts. Within this test, existing users are not affected.
This new test was developed to bolster our already successful efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. It is not a profit driver.
And so far, subscription options have proven to be the main solution that works at scale.
More details → https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/not-a-bot
The company published the “Not-a-Bot Terms and Conditions” today outlining its plan for a paid subscription service that gives users certain abilities on their platform, like posting content and interacting with other users. This program is different from X Premium, which offers more features like “Undo” and “Edit” for posts for $8 a month. Given the company's tumultuous reputation under Musk, some users have voiced their hesitancy to turn over their credit card info.
X owner Elon Musk has long floated the idea of charging users $1 for the platform. During a livestreamed conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month, Musk said “It's the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots.”
Shortly after the announcement, Musk tweeted that you can “read for free, but $1/year to write.”
“It's the only way to fight bots without blocking real users,” Musk wrote. “This won't stop bots completely, but it will be 1000X harder to manipulate the platform.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino was asked last month onstage at Vox's Code Conference about how going to a full subscription model on X will affect revenue, something that is now going live to users today. Yaccarino answered at the time, “Did he say that or did he say he's thinking about it?”
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Real
old Musky.
surely no scammers would ever spend an entire dollar
I think twitter (or Grimussy?) maybe broke his brain so he thinks that site is more valuable to shitposters than to scammers: the only people who actually make money using it.
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Scammers won't want their payment info and personal details associated with scam accounts. They'll have to find someone else's bank details, which is a significant barrier to entry
And how are bot farms gonna pay that dollar for thousands of accounts? They'll somehow need almost as many bank accounts or get instantly flagged as suspicious. And when they're caught and banned it's trivial to permanently block their payment details, so they'll need even more bank accounts
Bank accounts aren't easy to get en masse. Why do you think all those sexy Indian dude scammers insist you send google play codes instead of just transferring the money?
Honestly, I think you're the smoothbrain here
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You misunderstand: They want to receive lots of money, not just spend $1. Stolen credit cards and personal account details are so fricking cheap, you can buy them in batches of hundreds of thousands.
If Elon thinks his payment processor (Stripe? Braintree?) is great at filtering out fraudulent cards, he should hire their fraud team to run his anti-bot jihad. But this stunt is just outsourcing fraud detection and irritating actual users (most of whom he will find do not get anywhere near $1 of utility from X).
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Yeah and how easy is it to get money out of those accounts without being caught by either the bank or the legitimate owner? There's a reason they're so cheap.
Anything that gives scammers additional costs / barriers to entry will massively cut down on their numbers. Most scammers are genuinely dumb. COULD a scammer get past the $1 requirement? Yes, obviously. Will most scammers bother doing it at scale? Lolno
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Any scammer that makes money with his twitter scams (or thinks he will) has much more incentive to pay $$$ than most of the regular users who only go on twitter to tweet about their lunch or thirstpost at celebs or whatever the frick people use twitter for.
Will it deter some scammers? Yeah, probably, but a lot of them will just absorb it as part of the cost of doing business. And it will deter regular users, too.
What Elon doesn't understand is
most of the "bots" he's whining about aren't really bots, just poor desperate third worlders.
most people are not like him, they're not addicted to twitter and it's worth a lot less than $1 to them.
if you can pay $1 to reply-tweet "OMG Elon gave me ShibaTeslaGrimes coin, send to this address!!" and morons will send you $5 worth of shitcoins , then they will keep on doing that.
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