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Will you be willing to pay for using Twitter? (variety.com)

submitted 1 year ago by t4k3@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Elon Musk said he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee to be on the platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots," said Elon. I can’t believe that this is the only solution he can think of.

Dealing with bots would be Elon Musk’s responsibility, considering he’s the only one profiting significantly from X, not us. Elon Musk steals our data and censors each of our posts, now he even expects us to pay to clean up the mess he created.

Plus, the problems with X go beyond just bots. The algorithm and programming decisions are negatively impacting user experience and manipulating people’s minds.

We want a town square where everyone is free to have & voice an opinion. I do not believe we have to pay ”a small monthly payment” for such a place, especially in a country that should value these freedoms & suppressing ideas.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For those that are saying "no" because it's Musk: would you be willing to pay to your account on Lemmy, Mastodon, or any other social network that you happen to use?

Let me be specific: I am not asking if you donate or contribute to any server. I am asking if you'd sign up to a social network that required payment from every user as a measure to avoid spammers and to keep the service running.

[–] EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I effectively pay to use my IRC, XMPP and email, since I rent a VPS. But that payment earns me much more pleasant usage experience (in case of my IRC bouncer) and a lot of cotrol over my servers in case of the latter two. So while paying a subscription feels a bit bad, I think it's worth it.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We can't expect everyone else to self-host. The question is, what would be the most viable solution for a better (ad free, Surveillance Capitalism free) Internet that can work at scale?

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Donations. Wikimedia proves that some people will want to donate if they find something useful.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The operational costs and usage patterns of wikipedia are completely different from a social media website.
Donations only "work" if you count all the labor done by volunteers as free. The Wikimedia Foundation might be swimming in cash, but the mods and editors don't see a penny out of it.

[–] renormalizer@feddit.de 0 points 1 year ago

Isn't that the same for Reddit or Lemmy? The content creators and mods don't see a penny either. Operationally, a social network probably requires a lot more compute power and somewhat more bandwidth compared to a site that serves mostly static content. But I don't see why small donations shouldn't cover that. The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.