Yeah I came here with the same thought. Pay-to-win seems like a bad idea for Xitter (pronunciation left to the reader).
Imagine if Hacker News allowed people to pay to have their replies show up first?
This just tells me that Elmo doesn't care about discourse or being the "town square" at this point, he's just in panic mode trying to grow revenue, and he'll run the same grifter playbook that everyone else does.
At this point he should just throw a hail mary and charge every user a mandatory subscription fee, and see who sticks around. Maybe he discovers that as a winning strategy, worst case scenario he loses 40+ billions and goes back to rocket science world.
>When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Honestly, I feel like you zeroed in on a tiny, and insignificant, part of my actual comment which in itself feels a bit disingenuous? At least that's how it comes across to me.
It's not as if using a well-known nickname for a public figure was the sole purpose of my comment.
Plenty of other folks engaged genuinely with my actual comment, and that led to some interesting conversation, which is what makes HN great.
So what exactly are you adding to the conversation at this point by trying to cherry-pick a meaningless part of my original comment to make a whole deal out of it?
I'm not sure they have that sophisticated of an understanding or mental model. It just seems like they are looking at "Um, like, what do people pay for on social platforms?? Let's try charging for that and see if it works."
I am not trying to bust you. I'm trying to say you have this idea of why people might pay and I don't feel like they do. I feel like they are like someone who bought a restaurant and don't realize that people pay for food and they are going "Um, pay for entrance to the place? Um, pay to sit at the table for a certain amount of time? Um, bathroom access. People really need bathrooms when they eat. Let's charge for bathroom access. Surely that will rake in the dough."
I guess my take here is that I see this "pay to get your replies boosted or in front of more people" is roughly the same as "pay to feel important" in my mind...
I think they do know what they're doing, and they are trying to prey on the people who want to feel important on social media but can't get there organically, so will pay to do so, more for their own satisfaction than anything else..
But that's just my take! We can have many takes among us. :-)
The problem with X's strategy is that the main reason that someone would pay to have their tweets boosted is to advertise, but X is clearly in serious financial troubles and leaking users every day. This completely removes any incentive to use this subscription.
There is also no way for 'whales' to come out of these subs...at least with Instagram you can scale your spend to some pretty high levels...if X is going to nickel and dime its users...its going to need a lot more users.
Given the choice of old-Twitter's "shout to win" and new-Twitter's "pay to win", which is better for the overall discourse? Doesn't seem obvious to me.
Having nothing but random comments by $8 subscribers at the top of every post has been pretty terrible for any sort of discussion between posters and followers already, but at least you could ignore/filter posts by their blue checkmark. Now you'll still get the above but you'll also get a bunch of $3 subscribers straight after the $8 posts, but without any obvious marker to show they've been boosted artificially.
People have often accused Twitter of being full of people trying to shout the loudest and drowning out useful discussion, yet all of Musk's changes seem to be aimed at making this issue worse and worse. Soon there'll be a caste system where the only actual discussions will be between people on the same subscription tier.
Oh, you must have missed the update where blue checkmark people can HIDE their blue checkmark... So, you cannot even reliably filter/ignore based on that anymore...
I have good news for you: all major browsers have partnered with X to make it easy to filter out people who pay for Blue. If you look closely at the browser tab, you will see an "X" icon expressly for this purpose.
Of course they did that. So you'd have to use a user script to read each account's profile to see if they have a tick, which would be a pain even with caching the results.
Just opened Twitter to nose at their HTML, it still hasn't managed to load the homepage in the time it's taken me to write this entire comment lol.
I don't use X, but can you explain more about why this change has been harmful?
"People have often accused Twitter of being full of people trying to shout the loudest"
It sounds like maybe the subscriber change has actually addressed this problem? Instead of people trying to should the loudest, you get "random comments by $8 subscribers"?
Given the choice between people paying for attention, vs people being deliberately inflammatory for attention, I think I'd prefer the former. But again, I don't use X, just looking for more details here in order to understand.
The like and reply system is an organic and representative method of what comments people find interesting, pay2win is not. Especially because it is precisely the most inflammatory, spammy, and annoying people paying to have their opinion boosted. If their takes were interesting or pleasant they wouldn't be paying for someone to read them in the first place.
>The like and reply system is an organic and representative method of what comments people find interesting
I think maybe you've got rose-colored glasses on? See e.g. this post from Nate Silver about old Twitter:
>If you’re one of those annoying people like me who thinks there’s value in pointing out hypocrisy ... you will get absolutely shat upon on Twitter. People feel extremely threatened when you point this stuff out. They will go great lengths to deter it. They will launch all types of ad hominem attacks against you.
>...
>Twitter’s architecture makes this worse, particularly the quote retweet and the Trending Topics module. It is a medium where dissent from the consensus is treated punitively.
>Really, the problem with Twitter is just that it’s ruled by shouty jerks. All of the other problems — ubiquitous fear of “cancellation”, disruption of organizations, toxic status anxiety — ultimately come back to the Shouting Class.
It's interesting to me that HN threads about Twitter seem uniquely toxic, e.g. namecalling Elon. My hypothesis is that there's been a population replacement. Twitter was previously dominated by a certain group of shouters. The old shouters lost their power to a new group of shouters, and now the old shouters shout about the situation here on HN.
I’m long gone from Twitter (post-Elon, pre-X), so it makes me happy to see features like this roll out that will hopefully lead to its inevitable downfall.
I loved Twitter pre-Elon, but understood the criticism people had. I wonder if there’s anyone (besides bots) who can say it’s better now than it was? Would be interested to hear from them :)
It should limp along, but failing altogether would be bad.
You could think of Twitter as a honeypot keeping the Eternal September and the spam and the bots etc. out of the newer sites that are building their own respective identities and enjoying the higher quality of community that you get with a controlled size.
An impactful thing you can do for your health is delete all of your social apps and disengage from the circus completely. I did that a couple of months ago and it’s improved my concentration and given me back a lot more time to do other things.
The small amounts of time add up, and the quality of all of your time improves. You don’t have to use these services, and we got along just fine (if not better) before they existed.
Pay-to-win social media just seems like an extremely stupid idea. Yes, you can pay to have your nonsense boosted up to the top, next to the other marks! Who on earth does _that_ appeal to?
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 89.9 ms ] threadImagine if Hacker News allowed people to pay to have their replies show up first?
This just tells me that Elmo doesn't care about discourse or being the "town square" at this point, he's just in panic mode trying to grow revenue, and he'll run the same grifter playbook that everyone else does.
Pay us money to feel like you matter..
I'm not disagreeing with anyone, in fact I am agreeing with the parent.
BTW I also think you broke these guidelines:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
(Seems like X/Twitter is one of the most divisive HN topics.)
It's not as if using a well-known nickname for a public figure was the sole purpose of my comment.
Plenty of other folks engaged genuinely with my actual comment, and that led to some interesting conversation, which is what makes HN great.
So what exactly are you adding to the conversation at this point by trying to cherry-pick a meaningless part of my original comment to make a whole deal out of it?
I don't think they have any idea what they are doing. They seem to be throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks wrt to revenue models.
"Uhhhhh...Pay us money for the API?"
"Uhhhhh....Pay us money to get verified?"
"Uhhhhhhhhhh....Pay us money for (insert latest monetization scheme du jour)?"
For sure, I'm just pointing to the how you convince people to do it.
I am not trying to bust you. I'm trying to say you have this idea of why people might pay and I don't feel like they do. I feel like they are like someone who bought a restaurant and don't realize that people pay for food and they are going "Um, pay for entrance to the place? Um, pay to sit at the table for a certain amount of time? Um, bathroom access. People really need bathrooms when they eat. Let's charge for bathroom access. Surely that will rake in the dough."
(looks puzzled when none of that works)
I guess my take here is that I see this "pay to get your replies boosted or in front of more people" is roughly the same as "pay to feel important" in my mind...
I think they do know what they're doing, and they are trying to prey on the people who want to feel important on social media but can't get there organically, so will pay to do so, more for their own satisfaction than anything else..
But that's just my take! We can have many takes among us. :-)
People have often accused Twitter of being full of people trying to shout the loudest and drowning out useful discussion, yet all of Musk's changes seem to be aimed at making this issue worse and worse. Soon there'll be a caste system where the only actual discussions will be between people on the same subscription tier.
Just opened Twitter to nose at their HTML, it still hasn't managed to load the homepage in the time it's taken me to write this entire comment lol.
This would actually be great, it would make it easier to filter out.
"People have often accused Twitter of being full of people trying to shout the loudest"
It sounds like maybe the subscriber change has actually addressed this problem? Instead of people trying to should the loudest, you get "random comments by $8 subscribers"?
Given the choice between people paying for attention, vs people being deliberately inflammatory for attention, I think I'd prefer the former. But again, I don't use X, just looking for more details here in order to understand.
I think maybe you've got rose-colored glasses on? See e.g. this post from Nate Silver about old Twitter:
>If you’re one of those annoying people like me who thinks there’s value in pointing out hypocrisy ... you will get absolutely shat upon on Twitter. People feel extremely threatened when you point this stuff out. They will go great lengths to deter it. They will launch all types of ad hominem attacks against you.
>...
>Twitter’s architecture makes this worse, particularly the quote retweet and the Trending Topics module. It is a medium where dissent from the consensus is treated punitively.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blo...
Or here's another post about old Twitter:
>Really, the problem with Twitter is just that it’s ruled by shouty jerks. All of the other problems — ubiquitous fear of “cancellation”, disruption of organizations, toxic status anxiety — ultimately come back to the Shouting Class.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-to-fix-twitter
It's interesting to me that HN threads about Twitter seem uniquely toxic, e.g. namecalling Elon. My hypothesis is that there's been a population replacement. Twitter was previously dominated by a certain group of shouters. The old shouters lost their power to a new group of shouters, and now the old shouters shout about the situation here on HN.
I loved Twitter pre-Elon, but understood the criticism people had. I wonder if there’s anyone (besides bots) who can say it’s better now than it was? Would be interested to hear from them :)
You could think of Twitter as a honeypot keeping the Eternal September and the spam and the bots etc. out of the newer sites that are building their own respective identities and enjoying the higher quality of community that you get with a controlled size.
Wtf do we call the bad blue site!?!?
The small amounts of time add up, and the quality of all of your time improves. You don’t have to use these services, and we got along just fine (if not better) before they existed.