No more online anonymity. That’s not good, for countless reasons.
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Pay to read would finally kill off all those embedded tweets xists.
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Musk seems determined to hammer so many nails into that coffin that it ends up a festering corpse buried under a heap of nails and sawdust. Meanwhile, journalists still treat X like it’s mandatory and relevant.
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I think it is important to view this in the context of his stated desire to turn Twitter into a global version of WeChat, with shopping and money transfers and IRL payments and all that. By convincing enough people to give Twitter their financial credentials to pay for service, it’s a baby step to then use these credentials to offer merchant services and the likes.
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You definitely point to a possible strategy, but that strategy appears to be so widely divorced from reality that it’s sort of laughable.
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The obvious flaw in his plan being that no one signed up for Twitter to do any of those things. So he’d be charging for something that used to be free in the hopes that people will eventually pay even more money for services nobody even asked for.
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Absolutely.
A depressing amount of ‘journalism’ is indistinguishable from being a gossip columnist.
Over here in the UK, both the BBC and ITV employ chief political correspondents on obscene salaries and they never break actual news - instead their output is nothing more than a torrent of ‘a senior party source’, ‘a Cabinet minister’, ‘a party grandee’, ‘a source close to the Prime Minister’, ‘a friend of the minister’ etc. They offer no insights, no substantiated evidence, just an endless torrent of speculation and deniable nonsense in a desperate rush to be the first to tweet a ‘story’.
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Not if he’s smart (he’s not, so he’ll probably just block them). A paywall can be leaky based on the referer (sic, misspelled in the standard)
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When twitx goes under, he’s going to owe the Saudis an arm and a leg.
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It’s an installment plan.
Of sorts.
Well, the opposite, really.
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This is slowly turning into “Something Awful,” no pun intended.
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Will the Saudis care about the money when X has been a great help to roust out anti-regime Saudi citizens?
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The rich always care about the money.
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I almost recently signed up for the new Nielsen rating program. Got this really interesting mailer and they literally put cash in it for me to fill out some very generic surveys. Then they asked if I’d be interested in being one of the rating houses, and I’m certain our particular demographic was juicy. But after they told me what was involved I dropped it fast. They kept calling until I blocked the number.
You now have to wear a fitbit like device, all the time. It’s tracking far more than your TV watching.
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They still don’t. There’s no way to. By definition, broadcast is simplex, one-to-many, over-the-air arrangement. Nielsen takes viewership samples, but that yields demographic info of the broadest kind. That broad anonymity is really the beauty of it.
Of course, cable and satellite services can be different if there’s data connectivity present, but even that hasn’t really been implemented well and local ad insertion would require more specialized hybrid approaches that even the FAST & similar data based services are still taking baby steps with. ATSC 3.0 offers mechanisms to start to hybridize parts of the over-the-air broadcast experience, but the implementation costs are significant and the required amount of human involvement to really dial it in means it may never be realized, since advertisers can buy regular commercials for cheaper rates than many of the segmentation concepts could offer.
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The quickest way through most restrictions and paywalls is to change the user-agent string to the GoogleBot. (I haven’t extensively tested that, but everyone wants the juicy pagerank, and few people are going to verify that it’s from a Google IP block.)
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Came here just to like this.
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Oh, absolutely agreed, and I’ve done it myself.
Most of the time though, I don’t even bother, and the majority of the people going don’t even know that. I don’t think there’d be enough usage to impact the income. Of course I don’t think there’d be much income in the first place.
I can see one way your scenario could possibly play out.
- Paywall implemented, Googlebot leaky
- Someone writes an extension to let you go through the paywall, just site based UA changing
- Musk get all “Fix this now or you’re fired”, possibly firing a few before it’s even started
- UA gets blocked, globally
- Google results, what google results?
ETA: I don’t think googlebot leaky matters all that much for Twitter, nor would it help it survive. You still wouldn’t be able to post, only read. For traditional media, this doesn’t limit the usefulness all that much. For Twitter though? As it is the main things I see now are embeds anyway, going there for more doesn’t gain me much, and you already can’t see more than the single embedded tweet without a login anyway.
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