Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter/X, is floating an idea that he's had before to remedy the problem of social media bots: charging people to use social media.
A mandatory subscription is a much harsher barrier to the median user though.
We have a direct reference point for this: when Reddit began to charge for access to its API. 3rd party clients for Reddit like Apollo, RIF, Infinity, etc could have carried on by charging their users a low monthly fee in turn. The Apollo developer calculates 2.50 $/month as the additional cost to pass on. That is quite low for the potential utility you’re getting if you compare it to even a cup of coffee yet still expensive enough for 3rd party apps to shut down.
Point is: many users may ultimately not care enough about the issues around censorship, botting, propaganda, hate speech or the persona of the CEO himself but once their wallets are affected its a different story.
A mandatory subscription is a much harsher barrier to the median user though.
We have a direct reference point for this: when Reddit began to charge for access to its API. 3rd party clients for Reddit like Apollo, RIF, Infinity, etc could have carried on by charging their users a low monthly fee in turn. The Apollo developer calculates 2.50 $/month as the additional cost to pass on. That is quite low for the potential utility you’re getting if you compare it to even a cup of coffee yet still expensive enough for 3rd party apps to shut down.
Point is: many users may ultimately not care enough about the issues around censorship, botting, propaganda, hate speech or the persona of the CEO himself but once their wallets are affected its a different story.