Are these new users in the room with us? lmao

This is just another attempt at establishing a new status quo for other social media before Twitter dies a death due to the insurmountable debt that Musk's purchase saddled it with. We've had a bunch of things tried, so far the only thing that stuck was charging for API access (which reddit soon adopted). Let's not have this as well, please.

tfw the free speech isn't even free monetarily

Free speech? More like free* speech

*Only $4.99/month, yeah, definitely "free"

I'm not a fan of him, nor a twitter user, but as far as free speech is concerned, that should mean your opinion is not censored, but the platform doesn't have to be free to use, but if it doesn't discriminate opinions, and everyone is allowed to make an account, and everyone has to pay the same

That's equal treatment, and isn't going against free speech.

Meh, you still ise Twitter, you get what you deserve.

My tracking app doesn't let this site load at all, so I didn't read the article, but fuck musk. Will he remove ads when people pay them? I forgot my password for Twitter since last year and never bothered to log back into that cesspool

Free to play speech

"Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots," Musk wrote on X.

...that makes no sense. By "bots" usually we mean accounts that advertise one thing or another to make money. And if there's any cause worth paying money for, it's making more money. But some sports fan or BTS stan or whatever just wanting to cheer on their thing is just gonna stop posting.

Money is speech? This is clearly in-line with current US legal definitions so what's the problem?

\s

This isn't useful or sufficient. You have to consider how many bots get banned and cost to determine efficacy. If you want 10,000 fake people to manipulate real people $10,000 doesn't seem a high price if you make the fake people act organic enough that they largely aren't banned.

It would be more useful if a singular service verified sufficient credentials to prove you were an authentic human and allowed you to auth to various sites. This in turn creates the problem that verifiers now know a LOT about your online life.

If the verification involved site -> verifier -> government held public key I think you could arrange so that none of the parties had enough info to identify users.

"This is going to make so much easy money", Musk thinks, delusionaly, as he further alienates the former core user base of the site he bought for literal billions of dollars and yet has never made any money. "They are going to be lining up to pay for this", he imagines, forgetting that paid checkmarks was a huge ass failure and twitter still has never turned a profit.