twitter to promote only paid content

[Another Name]

Recently, Elon Musk has announced that he will only be promoting tweets from people who pay him money. Is this right? Wrong? What does this mean for the internet?

Twitter to promote only paying users’ tweets, Elon Musk announces

From 15 April, 'For you' tab that curates popular posts will feature just Twitter Blue subscribers

www.theguardian.com

 

[SolidStateSurvivor]

The article you linked has a pay wall, but you can view it for free here.

Guess they're going to have to raise my taxes so the glowies can afford their online psyops?

Ultimately it'll probably just junk up the overall for you section and diminish the chances of any sort of quality of content showing up there. I mean just think about the type of people who pay for ads on YouTube/Insta, it's a combination of third worlders trying to build up their presence as influencers, corpos, and digital storefronts.

It really depends if the journos/blue checkmarks are willing to choose between relinquishing the only thing that grants them a feeling of distinction and giving big bad elon $$$

 

[Jade]

Recently, Elon Musk has announced that he will only be promoting tweets from people who pay him money. Is this right? Wrong? What does this mean for the internet?

Twitter to promote only paying users’ tweets, Elon Musk announces

From 15 April, 'For you' tab that curates popular posts will feature just Twitter Blue subscribers

www.theguardian.com

This sounds like something that could be heavily exploited to get tweets that otherwise would have been shadowbanned into everyone's feed

 

[Deleted member 3373]

I myself believe this signals the end of an era. Social media used to be a for free service that ran purely on ad revenue. But I guess that it's become clear that it doesn't work and that these companies need to treat their services like well.... any other service. It suggests that free social media is not economical and that it may be coming to a gradual end. This is the first step in what could eventually result in large swathes of the public losing access to social media which could have all sorts of positive effects. I personally welcome this.

 

[Yabba]

I see this quickly turning into a good or bad mark, depending on the community, like a new blue checkmark

 

[splashy]

Recently, Elon Musk has announced that he will only be promoting tweets from people who pay him money. Is this right? Wrong? What does this mean for the internet?

Twitter to promote only paying users’ tweets, Elon Musk announces

From 15 April, 'For you' tab that curates popular posts will feature just Twitter Blue subscribers

www.theguardian.com

who uses for you anyways.? i thought the point of twitter was to have a chronological, non-filtered timeline. not an infinite scrollfest. at least with an actual timeline there's a limit to how much you can doom scroll until you hit old tweets you've seen before.

 

[Another Name]

I myself believe this signals the end of an era. Social media used to be a for free service that ran purely on ad revenue. But I guess that it's become clear that it doesn't work and that these companies need to treat their services like well.... any other service. It suggests that free social media is not economical and that it may be coming to a gradual end. This is the first step in what could eventually result in large swathes of the public losing access to social media which could have all sorts of positive effects. I personally welcome this.

Na I disagree. I unironically think twitter worked perfectly fine. sure there were shitty sections, but it worked well for what it was -- a place for free expression. the problem was simply that people like Elon Musk, who constantly call for free speech, don't actually want free speech. so when the masses of people actively express themselves freely, tyrants like musk get butt mad that the dominant narrative is no longer theirs to control.

I learned a lot from people posting alternative perspectives. I learned of a lot of different economic theories, alternative political perspectives from people who experienced things like Occupy, the US Civil War, etc. There's no way i would have learned about the complexity of positions in mid-19th century America were it not for political and history dweebs posting all sorts of shit for me to fall down rabbit holes about.

elon musk is notrious for taking credit where it isn't due. this is just another example of him vampireing wealth out of the internet; wealth he doesn't deserve.

The article you linked has a pay wall, but you can view it for free here.

Guess they're going to have to raise my taxes so the glowies can afford their online psyops?

Ultimately it'll probably just junk up the overall for you section and diminish the chances of any sort of quality of content showing up there. I mean just think about the type of people who pay for ads on YouTube/Insta, it's a combination of third worlders trying to build up their presence as influencers, corpos, and digital storefronts.

It really depends if the journos/blue checkmarks are willing to choose between relinquishing the only thing that grants them a feeling of distinction and giving big bad elon $$$

link works fine for me?

 

[Deleted member 3373]

Na I disagree. I unironically think twitter worked perfectly fine. sure there were shitty sections, but it worked well for what it was -- a place for free expression. the problem was simply that people like Elon Musk, who constantly call for free speech, don't actually want free speech. so when the masses of people actively express themselves freely, tyrants like musk get butt mad that the dominant narrative is no longer theirs to control.

I learned a lot from people posting alternative perspectives. I learned of a lot of different economic theories, alternative political perspectives from people who experienced things like Occupy, the US Civil War, etc. There's no way i would have learned about the complexity of positions in mid-19th century America were it not for political and history dweebs posting all sorts of shit for me to fall down rabbit holes about.

elon musk is notrious for taking credit where it isn't due. this is just another example of him vampireing wealth out of the internet; wealth he doesn't deserve.

Free expression was already being limited by twitter prior to Musk as it has been everywhere. The thing is that it ultimately doesn't matter as it has no real impact on the establishment. It's fun if you're a hobbyist but not if you want to actually achieve anything.

I learned similar things on youtube and discord. Problem is that most of the people who consume these alternative viewpoints never manifest it into anything in the real world. It's just information consumption for the hell of it. Ideology is largely a waste of time and all I want is for much of the social changes over the past 20 years to be reversed so things can return to a sense of stability and normalcy. Musk limiting social media access can only assist in this.

 

[SolidStateSurvivor]

link works fine for me?

And it's working for me now too? That's strange no idea why I got that pay wall initially. Maybe something to do with my VPN honestly have no clue

Na I disagree. I unironically think twitter worked perfectly fine. sure there were shitty sections, but it worked well for what it was -- a place for free expression. the problem was simply that people like Elon Musk, who constantly call for free speech, don't actually want free speech.

Surely this is revisionism/nostalgia right? I actively used Twitter for a while (longer than I care to admit) and while I had some fun on the weird side of the site I watched the approach to censorship/bs bans get more strict and more petty until reaching critical mass in 2020. Elon's Twitter has its problems too but let's not pretend it was some free speech utopia prior to the acquisition. If anything the real issue with Twitter was the biased application of the rules, enforcement was heavily skewed with some getting free passes to do death threats, dox, form mobs, while others would get banned just for spicy memes.

 

[Another Name]

And it's working for me now too? That's strange no idea why I got that pay wall initially. Maybe something to do with my VPN honestly have no clue

Surely this is revisionism/nostalgia right? I actively used Twitter for a while (longer than I care to admit) and while I had some fun on the weird side of the site I watched the approach to censorship/bs bans get more strict and more petty until reaching critical mass in 2020. Elon's Twitter has its problems too but let's not pretend it was some free speech utopia prior to the acquisition. If anything the real issue with Twitter was the biased application of the rules, enforcement was heavily skewed with some getting free passes to do death threats, dox, form mobs, while others would get banned just for spicy memes.

No i literally never had any problems with Twitter. In fact, it was great until Musk came to power. Maybe it's because we were coming at it from two different angles. I appreciated the services the company provided. i never had any problems with anything i posted. my speech was always respected, if not amplified (perhaps too much, one might argue, but that's a digression). I liked that they had programs to take care of the employees. seemed like the only decent, humane company in silicone valley. Jack Dorsey seemed like a very honest, reverent company lead. i still view him with as much respect as one can view someone with direct ties to someone like Elon Musk.

But now that Musk owns the place it's basically just /pol/. "Ukranian Nazis" is trending every other day, and they're perfectly normalized. the communities are dead. No one wants to spend time there except for boomers who still think it's a viable alternative to the deep/dark web (i.e. agora type places, as "dark" as this place is).

most of the censorship, from people like pim tool, were not the free speech warriors we're supposed to believe they are. they're grifters. any sober observer could see this, hogging the mic so to speak; attention whores, if you will. Andy Ngo, for example, lost a defamation law suit for his slanderous "journalism". the problem was never twitter. it was always the MAGA hoard shouting down any dissenting opinion from their god king "ur fired" boi. yes, orange man bad

and here i am. just as i was fucking afraid would happen. All the story I've been trying to save to actually sit down and write is being devoured by a fucking sketchy website where the nazi blob runs free.

fuck me fuck you fuck this site why did i even start this fucking thread

 

[Regal]

I myself believe this signals the end of an era. Social media used to be a for free service that ran purely on ad revenue. But I guess that it's become clear that it doesn't work and that these companies need to treat their services like well.... any other service. It suggests that free social media is not economical and that it may be coming to a gradual end. This is the first step in what could eventually result in large swathes of the public losing access to social media which could have all sorts of positive effects. I personally welcome this.

Nah this is the wrong take. FB, Tiktok, etc still make tons of money off selling data and ads. Twitter is only doing this because Musk tanked Twitter's business and grossly overpaid for it. Musk being a bad businessman may mean the end of an era for Twitter, but not social media platforms as a whole.

That being said I wouldn't mind paying $1/mo subscription to a good social media platform if that was enough to keep the bots away.

 

[Jade]

Nah this is the wrong take. FB, Tiktok, etc still make tons of money off selling data and ads. Twitter is only doing this because Musk tanked Twitter's business and grossly overpaid for it. Musk being a bad businessman may mean the end of an era for Twitter, but not social media platforms as a whole.

That being said I wouldn't mind paying $1/mo subscription to a good social media platform if that was enough to keep the bots away.

I think Facebook is dying a slow death too honestly, especially with the Metaverse hemmoraging money for the company. But a lot of these sites are probably indirectly propped up by some bank or another or even the government so who knows

 

[Regal]

You got me there. So yeah, in all cases social media might be screwed by greed and bad business practices. But if they had stayed course and stayed lean they would have been fine.