X will begin charging new users $1 a year::X owner Elon Musk has long floated the idea of charging users $1 for the platform. Now, the team is moving the idea into production.
Oh, yes, please do. Just put that bullet in the skull of Twitter’s zombified corpse and end its suffering forever.
I think Twitter is just the start. Big tech had always placed user growth as the highest priority to accelerate growth. They assumed that once they monopolize the market, they will be free to do with said market whatever they want due to alternatives being nonexistent but are quickly learning that is not the case. Ads and sale of user data can only earn you so much.
Meta will follow suit within a year, I’ll set a reminder right now to see if my prediction was right.
Yeah, and one day the Tesla owners wake up and will be faced with $1 per trip in their car too. Reminder me in 2 years please.
Media business will start changing for subscriptions
News, but not technology.
My theory is he’s literally trying to kill Twitter. He blustered about buying Twitter as a brag with no actual intention to go through with it. And then they took him seriously and forced him to make good on it. Now he’s pissed he was compelled to take ownership of it and still doesn’t actually want anything to do with it. So he’s putting it out of his misery as quickly as possible. Meanwhile his hubris is blinding him to the ensuing shitstorm of shareholder litigation he’s about to face.
My theory is that announcing that this will apply for new accounts and that they are now testing it in New Zealand and Philippines he hopes that people that don’t have Twitter account now will create one.
Isn’t he the sole shareholder now?
He borrowed it from the Saudis who would dearly love to kill the main organising tool behind the Arab Spring. A few B lost is cheap to them
This is the best theory I’ve heard yet. I could get behind it. I’m certain he’s purposely trying to kill it, I just can’t fathom why he would if it’s going to cost him and other billions. But this holds together.
This always sounds nice, except that he could just fire everyone, turn off the servers and close the offices. That would kill Twitter instantaneously. No need to bleed money. Musk genuinely believes what he says and thinks that what he does is the correct thing to do, completely unironically and without any shred of self-awareness. He is just not a very clever man. He did similar hi-jinks when he was the CEO of PayPal, except there were other powerful people there smart enough to fire him so he didn’t destroy the company. Same with Tesla and SpaceX, there are other adults in the room that can put him on his place or distract him with shiny toys so he doesn’t break anything important. But with Twitter, there is no safety net, this is pure unadulterated, unfiltered, unhinged Muskrat brain juice.
“New users.” Ha.
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Elon whining about bots is the same as trump whining about fake news.
He’s just trying to use it as a carte blanche to do what he likes without having to explain himself
Because if you make it recurring you have justification to keep a card on file. Which means a good percentage of people will set it up and then forget about it. And if it remains yearly it’ll happen infrequently enough that people probably won’t bother cancelling it. Even if the price goes up.
Lmmfao!
Overpriced.
Reminder that Competing Social Network Mastodon still charges new users $0 a year, as legally required in it’s AGPLv3 License.
GPL licenses place no restriction on commercial use. They just say that the code has to be shared and free to modify and redistribute. Mastodon don’t charge because that makes little to no sense in a federated model
Except it’s not a standard GPL license. It’s an AGPL license.
Which does place many restrictions on commercial use and explicit rules for usage as a SaaS.
I don’t think you’re right.
The GPL 3 says:
You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable Corresponding Source under the terms of this License, in one of these ways:
…
d) Convey the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge), and offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge. You need not require recipients to copy the Corresponding Source along with the object code. If the place to copy the object code is a network server, the Corresponding Source may be on a different server (operated by you or a third party) that supports equivalent copying facilities, provided you maintain clear directions next to the object code saying where to find the Corresponding Source. Regardless of what server hosts the Corresponding Source, you remain obligated to ensure that it is available for as long as needed to satisfy these requirements.
So the GPL 3 explicitly allows anyone to sell anyone else’s GPL 3 code. I’ve written code that I’ve published publicly under the GPL 3. Insodoing, I’ve granted everyone who can download a copy (which is basically anyone who can find it out there on the open internet) to sell copies of my code for a profit if they so choose. (So long as they also provide the source code in one of the acceptable ways outlined in the GPL 3.) I knew and understood this consequence when I chose the GPL 3. That is to say I granted everyone else the legal right to sell my GPL 3’d code on purpose.
Basically the only thing in the AGPL 3 that’s not in the GPL 3 is:
- Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.
So, let’s say I make a fork of Mastodon that a) prevents people from completing the signup process until they’ve provided payment information and authorized me to charge them $1,000,000/day, b) charges anyone registered $1,000,000/day, and c) deactivates any account for which the daily $1,000,000/day charge failes to process or for which the user has cancelled their subscription.
And then let’s say I set up a Mastodon instance with that source code and invite the public at large to join for a $1,000,000/day subscription fee.
If I did that, I’d have to make sure that my modified source code was available to anyone who “interacted with it remotely through a computer network… at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software.”
Now, does “interacing with it remotely through a computer network” include going to the home page (even if you don’t ever subscribe or click the “login” or “register” button)? Prooooobbbbaaaabbbllyyyyyy? (IANAL and I doubt that’s ever been tested in court, so I definitely can’t be certain. I’d want visiting the home page without ever registering/subscribing/authenticating to qualify as “interacting with it remoteley through a computer network” for any software I put under the AGPL 3. (And I have published code under the AGPL 3 as well as other code under GPL 3.)) If so, I’d probably have to share the source code with anyone who visited the home page. But that still doesn’t say anything about me being disallowed from charging a subscription fee.
As far as I can tell, the AGPL 3 says nothing to disallow anyone from charging subscription fees for any AGPL 3 software.
All that said, if anyone who ran a free instance decided to start charging a subscription fee, people could jump to other instances and still largely get the same content and interact with the same userbase thanks to Mastodon’s Federation feature. So there are still practical reasons why Mastodon as a whole and also indiviual Mastodon instances probably wouldn’t or couldn’t start charging membership fees. At least not in an enshittifying imposed kind of way like Twitter is doing.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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, quote, repost, like, bookmark, and create list, according to a source familiar with the matter
X owner Elon Musk has long floated the idea of charging users $1 for the platform.
During a recent 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.”
The company also published “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 story is developing.
Please check back later for updates.
The original article contains 126 words, the summary contains 126 words. Saved 0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
In New Zealand and the Philippines only, right?
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