This has nothing to do with bots.
It's all about getting everyone to provide their credit card details for future revenue streams eg. micro-transactions.
And also to give them a competitive advantage in the ad space e.g. allowing companies to target you based on your real life identity.
I worry that this may paradoxically increase bots, because now the price of legitimacy is $1 per year. Bot farms and shills will do the math.
Aren’t tiny payments like this a favorite for people testing if stolen credit cards are working?
I couldn't imagine that he's trying to kill Twitter even faster than he already was killing it.
I've seen so many bots with blue checkmarks that $1 per year doesn't seem to be that much of a deterrence for the more sophisticated bots.
They charge for "the ability to tweet, retweet, like posts and reply to posts."
It will be very interesting to see how this turns out.
Obviously, there is no value in the ability to publish your thoughts. You can do that for free on an ever growing number of platforms. But Musk seems to bet on a private attention economy. Where even private individuals are willing to pay for attention. Not only businesses.
Has this been tried before, or is this a first?
I have no evidence to back this up, but I imagine a lot of people are like me and just keep the app on their phone or whatever for when the occasional person sends them something or they read a post on a forum that makes them need to actually browse Twitter.
I imagine a lot of people like me are not even going to remotely consider to pay a dollar to have that ability. It’s not nearly important enough or integral to our daily lives.
This does make me curious though. Could someone pay a dollar to have an account that dozens of people can access until it’s tapped each month or day or whatever the limit is? Basically create the Netflix account sharing problem for Musk. Or mirror the content out forcing a constant whack a mole?
I wonder, why they cannot just check your card, instead of charging $1?
It's not much and I'm ready to pay if it helps fighting bots.
But at the same time I noticed that before Elon took over Twitter, there were less bots (or it at least seemed so).
Will it help - that's the question
Well..not so easy, is it?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-text-messages-revea...
In another April 14 message, angel investor Jason Calacanis messaged Musk: “You could easily clean up bots and spam and make the service viable for many more users — removing bots and spam is a lot less complicated than what the Tesla self driving team is doing.”
Makes sense.
NZ (and Oz) is often used as a ‘isolated western market’ for testing product concepts. Coca Cola do this all the time for example.
Philippines is a fraud center. Sorry Filipinos I don’t like it either.
I think that's a good way to reduce bots but I also don't think Musk is an honest person.
What is the ratio of junk emails to junk carrier mail? The reason there is so much electronic spam and scams is because the cost to blast these out at scale is essentially $0.
Carrier mail is also traceable. Payment systems add traceability to something like X.
Unironically happy about this as I think it’ll help me finally kick my Twitter habit.
I hope they're prepared for the wave of fraudulent card transactions.
Can I get a list of the people who paid? I would like to sell them NFTs.
I don't believe this will work out well. Many bots will come, as long as they make a >$1/year profit, which I believe most of them do.
Ah yes, lets trust Elon Musk with your credit card info. What a joke.
They should charge more. Realistically nobody who can’t pay $1/year is worth listening to.
[Dupe]
Lots more discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37922973