Lots more discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37922973
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.
"According to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, Musk’s push to sign-up subscribers was very much intertwined with his quest to build an “everything app,” and Musk grew angry when he learned Apple doesn’t share credit card details of those who sign up with their iPhones." https://www.engadget.com/x-is-starting-to-charge-new-users-1...
Of course every iOS developer already knew this, including members of his own engineering staff, which just goes to show how insulated and out of touch with reality the guy is.
Try to clone WeChat in the US but with more trolls? Now that’s important to the human future.
Journalists, consultants and influencers could just expense the cost and get a tax deduction or have their employer pay. Given the value most people claim to get from X/Twitter I don't see why $12 - $20 isn't a reasonable cost.
I'm also not sure if a dollar per month would be enough to keep bots at bay, it's also a little unreasonable to simply outsource your vetting of users to the credit card companies and banks in this manor and I doubt that neither VISA nor MasterCard finds the idea amusing.
But it's not going to make any difference to anything if it doesn't apply to existing accounts.
Nobody's going to call it X, and 'ex dot com' isn't a great name. He should probably just accept that mistakes were made and revert it.
I once was in a charity sponsored therapy group and they had a $10 fee. I was annoyed as this was a pretty wealthy organization and the fee seemed discriminatory, or at least a hassle. I learned that it was just there to validate each participant.
So I think this is just a filter to help reduce bot spam.
Also there is number of services like privacy.com that allow to hide real card details. And even if person is using real card then payment process have absolutely no way of knowing anything except those few last numbers of the card.
Bypassing credit card checks for botting as easy as any other protections.
Do people on HN actually think this will work? I'm genuinely curious. Knowing everything we know about the underground economy of sockpuppets, bots and carders - combined the (un)willingness of real people (especially in relatively poorer countries) to pop out their credit card during signup for a social media site - do folks really think this will produce a high-quality stream of new signups?
Given the current policy around blue tick (which is full of crypto bot and onlyfan sex workers, without any reaction from Musk whatsoever) I doubt it will have any effect.
Also, World of Warcraft servers are full of bots, despite needing to pay to create and keep an account, so again it doesn't bode well.
It's a non-issue
And of course a lot of them have the same X logo or Elon's picture, because His Xcellence probably fired the thinking heads dealing with spam
Availability of cards isn't going to be an issue.
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.
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?
Twitter Blue is already this. When you get verified your replies and posts are boosted in others feeds. Just one of the reason the quality of the app has bottomed out but yes: I think there is an audience very willing to pay for that.
IMO, this will fail.
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?
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
Now instead of reply bots tho I get like bots.
And many have the $8 checks so ... $1 a year is going to very little to the bot population.
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.”
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.
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.
The victim eventually does a chargeback, which are expensive and risk your merchant account.
Imagine a botnot and if each node cost the operator $1. The economics require near zero marginal costs to ddos or spam or whatever.
It seems to cost $10-20 to buy 1,000 followers [0] so I expect lots of those accounts get turned over frequently.
It will be interesting to see if this has any effect.
[0] https://www.socialchamp.io/blog/buy-instagram-followers/
It might eliminate some of the like bots and other noise, but might also make the blue check bot network cheaper to run.
X/Twitter is Musk unchained.
Time to cancel because Musk made lots of techies cry over a bird site.
