this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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176
Will you be willing to pay for using Twitter? (variety.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't see that big a difference there tbh. The WMF nowadays also has a paid trust and safety team like a social media platform.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

  • The entirety of the English Wikipedia can be stored in a single commodity hard disk. The entire database (with revisions and all) is less than 1TB. All other wikipedias combined amount to something similar. This is probably less data than what Reddit ingests every day.

  • Less than 0.05% of the Wikipedia users have done any type of contribution to the content. The absolute majority is just visiting to read it.

  • The content of an encyclopedia changes way less often than any social network. Any page written can be a resource used for any high-school student doing research for an assignment. How many people bother to revisit week-old memes on Reddit or imgur, let alone something written decades ago? Yet, both Reddit and Wikipedia need to store all their content forever.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  • most data on WMF servers is media files, most of them photos; Wikimedia Commons has at this point nearly 100 million of those; probably still less than many social media sites, though
  • this is true, but many people on social media are also only lurkers
  • the WMF projects get lots of changes every minute, just look at the recent changes page
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The "rule" of social media is that users split 1%/9%/90% on creators (prolific posters), participants (comments and reshares content that might be interesting to them) and lurkers (don't necessarily signup and only visit to read). That means that we have 200 times more "active" (0.05% vs 10%) users on social media relative to wikipedia. The operational costs and the staff required to moderate these sites should follow this proportion as well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

(on reddit) content creators and mods don't see a penny either.

Yeah, but since when is this considered fair? Facebook has one million faults, but at the very least they pay their moderation and safety teams.

The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.

Is there any donation-based instance where the admins can make a living out of their labor? Even mastodon.social with more than 6 million users can only manage to have two developers on payroll, and they pay themselves a ridiculously low salary.