Elon Musk Suggests He Will Charge All X/Twitter Users a Fee to Be on the Platform

I think he should seriously consider buying Meta so that we can watch it crash and burn just like Xitter. Facebook is the cancer of the internet and it deserves to go too.

if this was in lieu of data collection and tracking

I guarantee this isn't in lieu of, it's in conjunction with.

That's actually a good point about how some services do require payment to provide safe service to their users. A very close to home example would be your local Lemmy instance. In order to run the servers and keep it ad (and tracking) free, each instance needs donations from their users. The same is true for Mastodon, as you mentioned.

The problem is, I would be shocked if Twitter actually provided a safer (or improved in any way) service. There are a other issues at play as well, but they all basically boil down to most users not wanting too give money to Twitter, and if they were ok with that, they would already have purchased Twitter Blue.

I would love if there was a platform where they charged a very small amount monthly eg. I £1/€1/$1 in exchange for not using my data for anything. I love lemmy but I'm entirely at the mercy of the instance maintainers and there is no guarantee my data won't be used

Should we all go make twitter accounts and say how great of an idea this is?

Please remember that SpaceX and Tesla have entire teams dedicated to handling Elon and reversing his decisions. Twitter did not have the infrastructure required to handle the sheer level of stupid that is Elon Musk.

If he wanted Twitter to fail, he could have just unplugged all the servers and be done with it.

No need for him to change the policies so much everyone would leave, break his internet persona, and then declare Xitter bankrupt.

No, I believe he bought Twitter in order to manipulate the US presidential election by spreading propaganda from what he considers a "left-wing bubble". But because he has no idea how to run a social media, he is failing to keep it together and by now is throwing stuff against it to see what sticks.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's razor

There are some (extreme) suspicions on his intent: https://davetroy.medium.com/no-elon-and-jack-are-not-competitors-theyre-collaborating-3e88cde5267d

He's a stupid man. But he's also sitting on mbs dick, so he does what daddy says

He's probably losing money on it.. So, it makes sense for him to kill it, before he digs a deeper hole.

That being said, he's an engineer who seriously got angry at cave divers when they told him his sub sucks.

And I'm willing to bet many of the crappy design decisions for Tesla are made by him too

So, possible he's an idiot, but, equally possible, he's trying to kill it in a subtle way which won't instantly drive all traffic to a competitor

The biggest problem with Bluesky is it's owned by another musk.

Why Bluesky when there is ecosystem of dozens community-baked and deployed apps?

Rip the bandaid off! Get this shit closed down and be done with it.

$0.20 for every view of your tweet!

I don't know. Every time I think that there's some level to which no sane human being would stoop, this guy manages to surprise me. And not in a good way.

Isn't that supposedly the plan?

Well... Twitter is gone already. For his envisioned Everything whatever thingy, this might be the way to go. We'll see :)

He isn't. That's saber rattling.

Yeah, it's both. Final answer.

He's had a fair bit of cosmetic surgery over the years. Things like hair plugs to jaw fillers

You mean like an idiot who paid billions of dollars for a company only to ruin it in less than a year?

Use unitys model and charge per view, "Your post got 200k views, start paying up! 1 cent per view"

Quick, tell him that on Twitter! Maybe he'll actually do it and we'll finally be rid of his godawful grandstanding.

an X-cretion.

In all seriousness, it's just called a post now. Elon threw away the incredible brand recognition of "Tweet," the noun/verb that every tech company wants. It's like if Google stopped wanting people to use their name as a verb and just go with the generic "search" term.

A xit?

I propose we use it like "I'm taking a xit"

If you had a nickel for every time musk edged a promising platform closer to worthlessness and destruction you'd have a mother fucking shit ton of nickels.

Like... a cavalry charge? Infantry? Rhinocerii?

Ok, I loathe the man, hate the shit show he's made TwitX, think he's a clown, generally hate billionaires, etc. But this is kinda a really stupid comment.

He's the wealthiest man in the world. That doesn't mean he has a lair full of cash and just wants more. People really struggle to understand the difference between wealth and money in the bank. This isn't about hoarding money just for the sake of it.

Frankly I do not understand Twitter. Never been a member. Have looked at linked content sometimes but it always looks like a bunch of short meaningless thoughtless content. So I think Twitter has 0 value.

The people that seem to like it are those that want to be "the person" people follow or those that want to follow "the person". Both are kind of offensive behaviors as far as I am concerned.

I don't use Xitter, what functionality does it have that's not stupidly easy to implement? As far as I can tell the only thing that Xitter has is a userbase - and when they drive them away they'll have nothing [but debt].

A new platform has the potential for better moderation and better design to keep those unsavory elements in check. Since Musk has made himself the enemy, the only path forward is for Twitter to die. Nothing good will come from it as long as he is in charge.

It's a prisoner's dilemma thing. People have had ample time and opportunity to move to mastodon, but as you say Twitter is still where the bulk of eyeballs are, but that only remains true if everyone's too afraid to leave it.

Yo knees over toes guy slaps, I’m a huge fan and have been since the pandemic.

I definitely fell victim to the marketing but goddamn if his workouts haven’t helped my knee pain!