Even if it was free, I wouldn't use it. I'd rather not waste hours of my time in there. And yes, I had that opinion before Musk bought Twitter and renamed it to X (I actually left the platform exactly 24 days before the renaming, the same day that I left Reddit).
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
176 points (72.7% liked)
Technology
59632 readers
2750 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I've never used it. This doesn't make me want to start
It was trash before he bought it. I quit before then and nothing I've seen makes me wanna go back
We want a town square…
I just want to comment on this part, if that’s ok. Town squares are inherently not free. Sure, everyone is free to come to it. But it’s still paid for by someone. Usually by people who stand to gain the most value out of it. This has always been my problem with Twitter and Facebook and their ilk.
There are wonderful examples of people trying different payment models and yes, most of them have failed. But let’s look at them for a minute.
App.net came out swinging at one point, with the idea of a (what was it?) fifty dollars a year payment model. It was a great idea. But it lagged because of a few reasons. Instead of keeping the $50 price point and using the extra money to allow for free accounts, the founders first dropped the price to $36 a year and then quietly raised VC funding, which went against everything they talked about and thus the community turned. Needless to say, the service was dead a few years after it came.
Before that there was WhatsApp. WhatsApp would randomly charge people $1 to $3 for download or subscription. Their experiment was wildly successful. If you could do MMS with just $1 a year from everyone on your network (or, heck, some random number of people on your network), what’s better than that? WhatsApp’s Achilles? Selling to Facebook. Now it’s unmoored from its founding principles. It’s growing. But for every one bespoke feature added, two features are added that push your data to Facebook.
Then there’s micro.blog. The pricing is simple - $5 a month and you get a blog and a social media handle. Right now, the founder hasn’t cracked down on accounts that paid once and are only using the social features of the network without being able to blog on it. It’s surprisingly successful, though niche. Will it fail? Seems like there’s enough runway since the founder is strict about no free signups. That town square isn’t free to join.
The fediverse is blowing up and so are standalone companies with their homegrown social networks like posts.cv and whatever Substack calls their social network. Also egalitarian European countries are launching their own mastodon sites to host a digital town square for their citizens. It’s a great time to be on social media.
But none of the real digital town squares are free. Nor should they be. Yes, a small monthly fee seems unnecessary. But Twitter isn’t a public good. It isn’t infrastructure. It isn’t paid for with our taxes. If the US Government launches their own mastodon site then you can absolutely comment on how important it is for this country to value freedoms. Till then, stop expecting private companies to not experiment with pricing models.
Also, Elon is an idiot and Twitter is dead. But that’s besides the point.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Either pay or get off the Shitter
-Elon Musk
Stop using it already. If you are still there you are part of the problem.
Naw.
lol
I suspect this will backfire, as usual.
I'm not willing to use it even while it's still free, so no. Mastodon FTW
Anytime there is a pole, I will vote yes.
But I am totally not going to do it.
Charging for the platform is a sure fire way to make it disappear. I hope Twitter disappears.
this is never going to happen unless musk looks for a reason to shut xitter down. like so many times before he's talking out loud what he's thinking right now, creating a massive migrane among the guys still running the site and everyone who is financially invested in it.
Given I don't use it now and it's free, I don't think making it paid is suddenly going to incentivise me to do so
Why do I have to see the face of this idiot almost daily? I don't use that shit X and never will. What's the appeal? I even could understand TikTok somehow, but X/Twitter? Where's the informational value in these completely useless posts there?
He just does the "all publicity is good publicity" trick. He isn't so stupid to actually do it.