So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX **Threadbans in OP**

Mike3549

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121252977#Comment_121252977

Wait.... So he pays 40B, sabotages business and sells for peanuts as fixer upper? That would make him even bigger idiot.

pixelburp

For context for those not seeing the headlines. Not exactly breaking the bank though as anyone with a Netflix account knows, the boiling frog effect quickly appears with these services' "cheap" subscription models:

THE SOCIAL MEDIA site X, formerly known as Twitter, has announced that it has begun charging new users in New Zealand and the Philippines to use basic features like posting messages.

X, owned since last year by billionaire Elon Musk, said in a statement that its new subscription method should “bolster” existing efforts to reduce spam and “manipulation of our platform and bot activity.”

Under the trial, new web users in the Philippines and New Zealand will have to pay X around $0.75 and $0.85, respectively, every year, in order to access basic functionality like posting on the site.

Those who decline to pay the nominal fee will only have access to a “read only” version of the platform, limiting them to reading posts, watching videos and following accounts, the company said.

“This will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount,” it added.

Existing users in these countries are not affected.

https://www.thejournal.ie/twitter-x-charges-new-users-make-posts-6200063-Oct2023/

Ashbourne hoop

Once the subscription model takes hold, even if it's 85c, I'm out. It's not the money, but no way would I trust Twitter with my bank details.

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121253143#Comment_121253143

Thankfully for me, it'll make no difference to how I use the site. I stopped posting years ago (and barely posted before that anyway) and I don't bother retweeting or liking tweets or anything. I only use it for following accounts and reading the timeline (of accounts I follow, not the curated For You tab they keep trying to push).

Ashbourne hoop

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121253159#Comment_121253159

The "for you" tab is the biggest contradiction ever. I wonder do people who follow the likes of Darren Grimes, Piers Morgan, John McGuirk etc get a "for you" tab of Colm O'Gorman etc...

I liked twitter, it's the one Social Media app I use, but it's gone to hell since Space Karen took over.

eightieschewbaccy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121253159#Comment_121253159

Yep, the number of active tweeters are drastically lower in general so even making money back this way feels unlikely. There's 370 million active users and imagine those that frequently tweet is a fraction of that. So the profit numbers on this are overall hilariously small.

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121253177#Comment_121253177

Contrarians drive engagement (positive but mostly negative). Engagement results in views/clicks. Therefore the For You tab pushes that stuff more to get people to engage with it and drive engagement further.

It doesn't actually care what you might like, as everyone has that mostly sussed anyway and follows the accounts they like. It's just all about those clicks. And paying people for their engagement serves nothing but encourage more people to be contrarians as doing so becomes profitable for them.

Christy42

The charging is obviously a test to see if they can without risking too much of the user base. The ideal would be to have a big uptake, expand it worldwide and up the price.

The price is nominal but also don't get the same as you would from a Netflix subscription. This is just charging people to create the content they need to get people coming back.

Fundamentally Musk is a salesman with a product he has no idea how to sell so he is just trying whatever he can. If it does get rolled out the most likely to pay are those who agree with Musk's politics further driving it down the road of the echo chamber his supporters gave out about. Course this would be the right type of echo chamber for them.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121253340#Comment_121253340

It's also possible this is all part of the grander, Everything App plan; tying these "trivial" subscription fees into X Pay or whatever it'll be called, the hope to capture an automatic market for Musk's slow merge & attempt to create a Western version of WeChat.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121253536#Comment_121253536

But no one wants an "everything" app.

If they did it would already exist in some form or other.

WeChat doesn't count as it solely exists in a vacuum created by the Chinese government.

WeChats utter non-existence outside of China tells you all you need to know about the actual market for an "everything" app.

Musk thinks it's a great idea and is going to do it no matter what , just like he always wanted a company called X so no matter how utterly brain-dead it was to flush years and years of brand recognition for Twitter , he went ahead and did it anyway.

Kevrano

I deleted my Twitter account earlier in the year. For months afterwards, I still had a sense of FOMO and tried to view tweets to see what was going on.

I've stopped caring now. I just follow this thread to see what happens with his next big revenue raising scheme. The man has nobody who will say No to him.

Mike3549

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121253662#Comment_121253662

I might defend musk in this case, I don't like him in fairness.

Just because we don't need it now, it doesn't mean it won't work in the future.

Couple of examples: Nokia smartphones/tablets, 00s, we weren't ready at the time.

Selfie stick created in the 80/90s. It's was in the book of useless inventions.

Everybody laughed at the robot vacuum cleaner at first, not anymore.

But yeah, twitter/x is going to dogs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121252977#Comment_121252977

I think this notion that he actually has a strategy is giving him far too much credit.

As for an everything app? I would point out that Twitter / X can’t even do one thing well, yet it wants to be an “everything app”.

Seems the speculation that he’ll just walk away from the EU market is being taken seriously by the media now too. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-considering-taking-twitter-x-out-of-europe-dsa-2023-10

timetogo1

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121257286#Comment_121257286

What's the betting it's something he's saying now and will back away from in the next month or two.

McFly85

Even if an everything app was viable in a western market(but really, it isn’t - people are very happy to have their everything app essentially be their phone, and SSO integration means even the benefit of having only one account for everything is limited), Musk is not the person to be able to deliver it.

I don’t know if he’s prepared for the amount of regulatory oversight that comes with an app that you can do everything in, even in the US.

We’ve already seen him throw his toys out of the pram with the relatively light touch regulation in the EU, when the fed and ECB get involved he’ll really start feeling it.

Hes a man who likes to throw our big ideas and have his engineers worry about implementation, and ordering large changes as he thinks of them. Thats already at odds with Twitter as an advertising platform, it’s certainly going to be much more at odds when people’s money is involved.

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121257622#Comment_121257622

With Musk, it'll always come down to if the fines for breaking rules is less than the profit from doing so, he'll do it.

McFly85

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121257632#Comment_121257632

Agreed, but unless X starts making serious profit, it will almost always be the case that he’ll have to back down.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121257286#Comment_121257286

Go on Musk: do it. Kill Twitter in a stroke. I'd bust a blood vessel from the laughter as their traffic cratered and the company truly went into freefall. Just goes to show that above all else, Musk is just another petulant billionaire who wants to ignore the kind of governmental oversight that's trying to protect us - not stymy "innovation" as pleaded by the corporations.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121257622#Comment_121257622

The irony is that the culture and economy that people like Musk want - freewheeling capitalism - is never gonna let an Everything App take root 'cos the nature of capitalism demands competition (even if modern corporate culture is trying to homogenise that); and if you don't have an authoritarian government cosplaying as an open capitalist society, one that can enforce an Everything App, then it ain't gonna happen. And that's leaving aside the reality that there are already very solid, very successful corporations who fulfill each pillar within this fantasy Everything App.

They seem to have implemented an EU illegal content reporting button, which requires you to fill in your full real name, email address and make a statement saying basically that you believe you’re making a true statement and you also have to pick which country you think the content is illegal in and why.

Obvious that they don’t want to deal with reports.

McFly85

So end users are supposed to understand EU regulation?

Even if this was being fed into an algorithm to better understand how to prevent similar posts from being allowed in future, it will create more noise than anything else.

Imagine deciding that the person who implements a social media site this poorly is the guy you want responsible for your money.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121257731#Comment_121257731

That's a really low effort attempt to circumvent the EU regulation, by the looks of things; I can't imagine Brussels is gonna be happy with that?

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121257764#Comment_121257764

That's the hilarious thing. If he'd announced as soon as he bought Twitter that he wanted to turn it into his everything/payment app thing, a lot of people might have thought it was a strong idea that could work.

Instead, he tried to get out of buying the site altogether, was forced to take it at an absurdly high price, completely mismanages the site for about a year, saddles it with a huge amount of debt, and then throws in "I want people to link their banking accounts and use my site for payments etc"

It's the equivalent of claiming the window on your truck is so strong it won't break if you throw a metal ball at it, then throwing a metal ball at it and it cracking, and then just shrugging your shoulders.

McFly85

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121257782#Comment_121257782

Having had to deal with regulators myself, I really doubt “we have asked our customers to let us know when we don’t comply with regulations” is an acceptable process!

It also very clearly is aimed at discouraging reports and won’t allow reporting with just your user name. It wants real names and emails before it will even allow you to flag illegal content beyond a rather narrow range of options that Twitter itself has.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121257868#Comment_121257868

Plus: wouldn't asking for a real name and email itself also open a can of GDPR worms that'd only increase Musk's problems?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121257890#Comment_121257890

Not to mention that you could fill in anyone’s name as it doesn’t check …

Tony EH

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121257286#Comment_121257286

The idea of an "everything" app is a very scary one TBH. Especially one that's under the control of someone like Elon Musk.

Thankfully it's extremely unlikely, given market forces.

super_furry

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-considering-taking-twitter-x-out-of-europe-dsa-2023-10?r=US&IR=T

"Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X, is considering removing the service formerly called Twitter from Europe in response to a new internet platform regulation in the region, news site Insider reported on Wednesday."

At this stage, nothing of value would be lost. He's killed the site as anything other than a crypto-scam spam farm and a troll party. The Gaza/Israel crisis shows just how useless it is at presenting any kind on trustworthy information now.

McFly85

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121258162#Comment_121258162

Complete bluster.

X needs the EU far more than the EU needs X.

Removing the platform from the EU would lose tens of millions of users and a significant amount of advertising revenue, and would open the door to another competitor to swoop in and start competing with his platform pretty quickly.