[HN Gopher] X launches two new subscriptions to boost your replies
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       X launches two new subscriptions to boost your replies
        
       Author : mindracer
       Score  : 19 points
       Date   : 2023-10-27 20:56 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
        
       | jaredwiener wrote:
       | Unpopular(?) opinion: the people who pay for their replies to be
       | boosted are the people whose replies I want to see the least.
        
         | sbarre wrote:
         | That is the _most_ popular opinion I think.
        
         | huytersd wrote:
         | I cannot think of a more popular opinion
        
       | mym1990 wrote:
       | This is like pay to win mobile games, which, to be fair, generate
       | an enormous of money. Don't see the same outcome for Twitt...X.
        
         | sbarre wrote:
         | 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.
         | 
         | Pay us money to feel like you matter..
        
           | rchaud wrote:
           | P2W games still have ads, and those make plenty of money
           | considering they can't be scrolled past like in Twitter.
        
           | mym1990 wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | matteoraso wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | mym1990 wrote:
           | 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.
        
       | spiralx wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | jjkaczor wrote:
         | 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...
        
           | kibwen wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | Freedom2 wrote:
             | I think the X button is there for other reasons, I'm not
             | sure if it has explicitly anything to do with X?
        
           | spiralx wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | sbarre wrote:
         | > Soon there'll be a caste system where the only actual
         | discussions will be between people on the same subscription
         | tier.
         | 
         | This would actually be great, it would make it easier to filter
         | out.
        
       | jrflowers wrote:
       | I want a tier where users cannot navigate away from my tweets
       | until they reply with "good post" or the thumbs up emoji
        
       | beoberha wrote:
       | 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 :)
        
       | monkaiju wrote:
       | Twixter? Xitter? Xwixter?
       | 
       | Wtf do we call the bad blue site!?!?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-10-27 23:01 UTC)