• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Elon Musk plans to charge new X users to enable posting

Draugoth

Gold Member
Elon Musk is planning to charge new X users a small fee to enable posting on the social network and to curb the bot problem.

In reply to an X account that posted about changes on X’s website, Musk said charging a small fee to new accounts was the “only way” to stop the “onslaught of bots.”

“Current AI (and troll farms) can pass ‘are you a bot’ with ease,”

Musk said, referring to tools like CAPTCHA.



While replying to another user, Musk later added that new accounts would be able to post after three months of creation without paying a fee.

 

nush

Member
Charging 1cent is enough to verify someone is real and has a bank account. What are the logistics of opening bank accounts for a bot army?
 

STARSBarry

Gold Member
Im sorry that devs had to lose their jobs. But honestly. I hope X/Twitter vanishes

Elon comes across as an idiot.

Mkw2iJy.jpeg
 
Not sure how I feel about this but the bots have become increasingly cancerous especially on twitter. You'll see garbage journalist accounts or big companies with millions of views per posts and at most 100 comments and very few likes. Disney has been using these bots aggressively lately to promote their garbage.
 

dem

Member
The bots are absolutely out of control on the platform. WAY worse than before Elon took control.

I don't really post much.. but 80% of the likes on my comments are from porn bots.


This just sounds like it will delay the bot account creation by 3 months. lol
 
Last edited:

Sushi_Combo

Member
He's been talking about combating bots since acquiring the platform and everything he's tried to do to curtail them has utterly failed lmao.
 

JonSnowball

Member
Require phone verification? Nah - charge for new accounts. This Elon fellow seems incredibly idiotic. I hope one day he gets a UTI and complains about it on X (formerly known as Twitter).
 

Z O N E

Member
Old Twitter didn't have this issue with the amount of bots I'm seeing.

These are the main issues I have with the site:

- Seeing people post their own irrelevant tweets in replies so they can get their engagements up to make money.
- L I N K I N B I O
- Constant OnlyFans ads by popular accounts.
- People constantly misusing hashtags with irrelevant tweets.

How to fix:

- In the "report option" add an option for "engagement misuse" and also "misinformation". Warning for the 1st time and then remove their ability to make money from engagements the 2nd time.
- Ban porn accounts unless they verify their identity.
- Ban NSFW promotions by accounts. That way people can still post their NSFW stuff, but other accounts are unable to promote NSFW from other accounts/users.
- Ban people who misuse hashtags. Honestly, fuck these people. I click on a hashtag and I will literally see either an Indian account post irrelevant shit or some African account make a tweet advertising their business with irrelevant hashtags.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
This is the dumbest take EVER.

Elons EV cars and rockets objectively work. Therefore the assumption should be that his software changes may also work.
The stupid thing about that tweet is what if there was a car expert who didnt know anything about rockets or software with counter opinions.

And then a third guy says he knows a lot about rockets, but nothing about EV and software.

Which dumbass view takes precedent?
 

Griffon

Member
Bots are a big issue and there aren't a lot of catch-all solutions.

A 3 months cooldown (that can be optionally paid to skip) is not the dumbest idea. Hell, Neogaf itself made you wait on subscription, a decade ago that wait could be pretty long too and we didn't mind.

Edit: nevermind, I realize how dumb it sounds as I type this. Bot makers will just have a huge backlog of bot subscriptions and after the first 3 months it'll just be business as usual for them.
Fuck it, just make everyone pay for access, and if it helps get rid of dumb kids from the platform too, I'm all for it.
 
Last edited:

clem84

Gold Member
I'm apparently in the minority who thinks this is a good idea. Bots ruin the platform for everyone. When you click on a post nowadays, most of the replies are from bots posting something unrelated. Charge 2$ and have every credit card have a limit to the number of accounts it can used for.

I don't know where Twitter is going, heck maybe it will be dead in a few years, but this sounds like it will help.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
This is the dumbest take EVER.

Elons EV cars and rockets objectively work. Therefore the assumption should be that his software changes may also work.
It’s just a riff on the “First they came for… and I did not act” quote that people meme.
 
Last edited:

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
I'm apparently in the minority who thinks this is a good idea. Bots ruin the platform for everyone. When you click on a post nowadays, most of the replies are from bots posting something unrelated. Charge 2$ and have every credit card have a limit to the number of accounts it can used for.

I don't know where Twitter is going, heck maybe it will be dead in a few years, but this sounds like it will help.
Ive never had a twitter account, so for me I can only go by whatever embedded tweets people do from real people or sports teams or companies etc..... So I dont see all these useless bot filler posts people talk about. And if I have seen them, they arent the types of ones described by people saying they are ruining Twitter with totally off topic trash tweets.

The thing is life is kind of like that. The more free or low cost something is, the more possibility for derelicts or morons to jump on since it's free and anonymous. In terms of total user count potential, nothing beats free access to something. But the company has to figure out how to handle troublemakers trolling, scamming or in this case bot filling.

Compare Costco to any typical grocery store or Walmart. One has a small membership fee. The others dont. You'll basically never see any people shopping at Costco (at least I havent), which look like bums, groups of sketchy looking teenagers, the trailer park trashy slobs, people doing evening shopping in their pajamas etc... I dont think any Costcos even get flash looted (I took a guess there). But the other kinds of stores can get nailed with trashy people.
 
lol, he is still using "bots" as a convenient excuse to do shitty things? This move fast and break things guy sure does take FOREVER to solve a problem, and his solutions are fucking shitty on top of that. "Oh here's my solution, pay more money to me emperor elon, it's the only way, but I still gotta make you feel like you are getting something out of it!"
 
Last edited:

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
The problem is his algorithm pushing the most disgusting and violent things, and whores flooding every viral tweet with their only fans porn gifs.

He needs more moderators. Twitter is basically an example of what happens when you let men govern themselves. Complete chaos.
 

Bitmap Frogs

Mr. Community
Nah this dude just salty. Mastadon lol

Mastodon has comfortably settled at around 1 million monthly users. It's a healthy community with none of Twitter's problems.

Such a good idea that Jack Dorsey's bluesky is a Mastodon clone - he could have chosen to use Mastodon, but then he wouldn't own it.
 

Madonis

Member
Bots suddenly got worse when this guy took over, so I have zero faith in this. It sounds like an excuse to prop up the revenue.
 

EverydayBeast

thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
For the last 20 years social media has been running ramet with its goal is to provide data on things, we have people using it in different ways, for information gathering, it goes back 20 years to Myspace and in terms of eliminating bots we know there's tools to do this (fees).
 

Punished Miku

Gold Member
Twitter is basically an example of what happens when you let men govern themselves. Complete chaos.
Twitter is what happens when you let men govern themselves without the ability to act with physical violence. A lot of that stuff doesn't happen in person because you don't need moderators to enforce things in reality. Eventually people act for themselves.
 

Ozriel

M$FT
For the last 20 years social media has been running ramet with its goal is to provide data on things, we have people using it in different ways, for information gathering, it goes back 20 years to Myspace and in terms of eliminating bots we know there's tools to do this (fees).

Bot problem got worse AFTER he started monetizing verified accounts. And after moderation was gutted.

In terms of total user count potential, nothing beats free access to something. But the company has to figure out how to handle troublemakers trolling, scamming or in this case bot filling.

That has nothing to do with the service being free and more to do with lax moderation, allowing nefarious actors to pay for visibility and promoting payments for viral tweets.
 

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Twitter is what happens when you let men govern themselves without the ability to act with physical violence. A lot of that stuff doesn't happen in person because you don't need moderators to enforce things in reality. Eventually people act for themselves.
While i see what you're saying, we do have moderators in real life. they are called cops. Without them you would have chaos.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
The problem is his algorithm pushing the most disgusting and violent things, and whores flooding every viral tweet with their only fans porn gifs.

He needs more moderators. Twitter is basically an example of what happens when you let men govern themselves. Complete chaos.
Yup. Social media that are free, anonymous and full of losers itching to troll for laughs or botting will get that. Youre going to need a certain amount of mods to control the masses. A service like Twitter, FB, Instagram etc.... are not the kinds of ones to self govern themselves.

On the other hand look at Linkedin. That is pretty self governed I'd say. There's the free membership option, as well as the paid premium service. It's career based, people use their real name, pic, career history etc.... The only cruddy thing you really get are bootlickers trying score brownie pts for a career boost, but aside from that it's clean of stupid posts, porn uploads, and any sketchy content. I dont think thats due to Linkedin having the biggest and best mod team in the world. It's just that the users (even for the ones who just use the basic free service like me) arent assheads since it involves jobs and people's real ID.

Add a fee and personal ID to any product and service and that will improve quality of content right off the bat.
 
Last edited:

NickFire

Member
I don't know much about bots. But if someone can make a million bots that start posting in a day, what's there to stop them from making them and having them wait 3 months to begin posting?
 

Maiden Voyage

Gold™ Member
For the last 20 years social media has been running ramet with its goal is to provide data on things, we have people using it in different ways, for information gathering, it goes back 20 years to Myspace and in terms of eliminating bots we know there's tools to do this (fees).
Sometimes I wish they provided less data, you know?
 

Unknown?

Member
Im sorry that devs had to lose their jobs. But honestly. I hope X/Twitter vanishes

Elon comes across as an idiot.
Ah so you can only use CIA controlled sites that censor everyone that doesn't go along with the nonsense?

I still won't use Twitter though, it was ruined long LONG ago. Even before it worked with the government on censorship and surveillance.
 

Nobody_Important

“Aww, it’s so...average,” she said to him in a cold brick of passion
To curb the relentless flow of bots?


Didn't musk say he had gotten rid of most of the bots? lol
 

Kilau

Member
So basically a credit card check or a 3 month waiting period?

I’m not sure bots are the biggest issue anyway unless it’s the massive amount of bots that has made comments completely pointless and make videos freeze constantly.
 

6502

Member
Will he make you pay to get rid of the bugs too?

X, like facebook has become a slow glitchy grind to use. The bots and unrelated comments have made it unbearable. However, on the bright side I rarely use these things now (and feel all the better for it).
 
Last edited:

jufonuk

not tag worthy
Ah so you can only use CIA controlled sites that censor everyone that doesn't go along with the nonsense?

I still won't use Twitter though, it was ruined long LONG ago. Even before it worked with the government on censorship and surveillance.
I’d rather not use any twitter type site. But that’s me.
 
Wait, I thought Musk had fixed botting in the first few months of owning twitter with his mad coding skillz.

I guess the problem is not bots but the bots not paying enough.
 
Top Bottom