New users in New Zealand and the Philippines will be the first to pay the new fee as X rolls out its “Not A Bot” test program for unverified accounts. The $1 USD or $1.43 NZD/₱42.51 PHP, per year fee is part of X’s latest efforts to prevent bots and spam accounts from getting onto the social media platform and it has been stated the fee is not a profit-revenue measure. Existing users will not have to pay the fee. New users in these regions who opt out of paying the fee will have minimum account functionality.
Starting today, we're testing a new program (Not A Bot) in New Zealand and the Philippines. New, unverified accounts will be required to sign up for a $1 annual subscription to be able to post & interact with other posts. Within this test, existing users are not affected.
— Support (@Support) October 17, 2023
This…
Not A Bot Details (per Twitter help page):
“As of October 17th, 2023 we’ve started testing “Not A Bot”, a new subscription method for new users in two countries. This new test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity. This will evaluate a potentially powerful measure to help us combat bots and spammers on X, while balancing platform accessibility with the small fee amount. Within this test, existing users are not affected.”
As X rolls out its “Not A Bot” beta program in New Zealand and the Philippines it has added that new users in those regions who opt out of paying the fee will be unable to do anything but read posts or watch videos on the platform. In other words, they will not be able to post, reply, quote, or use other common features for the platform from their new accounts.
“New users who opt out of subscribing will only be able to take “read only” actions, such as: Read posts, Watch videos, and Follow accounts.
This new program aims to defend against bots and spammers who attempt to manipulate the platform and disrupt the experience of other X users. We look forward to sharing more about the results soon.”
Not-a-Bot Program Description (via Terms and Conditions page):
“The Program is a recurring subscription service from X that provides your account with write-level functionality on the X platform, such as the ability to post content, like posts, reply, repost, quote, and bookmark other accounts’ posts and take other write actions on the platform as defined by X in our Help Center documentation. Upon payment you will be immediately provided with the write-level functionality for use. This constitutes a paid feature as described in X’s Terms of Service.”
The “Not A Bot” program marks the second measure in recent weeks by the platform to combat bots and spam accounts. Chairman and CTO Elon Musk announced in September that new monthly fees would be forthcoming for the same reasons.
Discussion (13 replies)
Join Discussion →Yes, start paying for something that is worse than when it was free.
My thoughts exactly.
I've posted a grand total of 10 tweets since 2017 when I created my account.
I'd never pay Twitter/X/Whatever it's called this week any money under any circumstance.
I honestly don't understand why it became so popular to begin with. It's a shit service limited to shitty low-character content.
As Eric Schmidt said in 2009, it's a "poor mans email"
And if a service has been around for 17 years without anyone figuring out how to monetize it, it is never happening.
I've been rooting for the death of twitter ever since I first heard of it 16+ years ago, the fact that moron Musk took over the reigns has only made the process even more filled with glee :p
Twitter is something I understand even less than more traditional social media.
I'm not using it, never will so don't care whatever they charge.
I think twitter is closer to the traditional forum format than any other social media.
This is only for new registrations, but they'll backtrack it as soon as they realize that the only ones paying for it are using it to create sockpuppet accounts. This will kill the influx of actual new users, the exact opposite of what it is supposed to do.
Except that you can barely convey a coherent thought in 140 characters or less.
I thought they got rid of that limitation a while ago
Someone was bound to do it ... you did with 79 characters (with spaces). :ROFLMAO:
They didn't get rid of the character limit, but they did up it to double, 280 characters, back in like 2017, I think.
Only for paid 'verified' users. The limit for regular users is 280.
People often circumvent the limitation by typing out their message and then post an image of the text.
The limit is 280, it forces you to cut the fat and avoid digressions.
You can't even fit a paragraph worth of thought into 280 characters.
This is one of the reasons why Twitter is so toxic.
Nuance is really important in any conveying of ideas. As far as I am concerned, almost nothing in life, no idea, no opinion, no technical specification is fully black and white. There is always nuance.
Twitter and its forced brevity through character limits forces us into this shorthand where the nuance has to be dropped, and everything becomes black and white, and I think that is very destructive to society as a whole, and feeds the cycle of constant political disagreement, attacks talking around each-other rather than addressing the nuance of everyone points.
I would argue - rather vociferously at that - that society would be better, and the world would be a better place if services like Twitter, or TikTok that force things to be boiled down for brevity were to die a horrible death. They have done horrible damage to the public discourse.
People need to be forced to abandon the tweets and to think in essay-sized ideas again.
I don't disagree.
However,
In a society where everyone has to have their say - no one is going to take the time to read your essay. Just like no one really takes the time to read your tweets either. No one really cares about what you have to say, it's just a contest to see who can get the bigger audience.
Where 99.8% of all posts are drivel, at least they are short and don't take up much bandwidth.
Let's face it, the attention span of most people is not even 280 characters.
It is toxic because of the algorithm. If you interact with a post it will feed you similar posts falsely creating the impression that everyone holds the same position as expressed there, when in reality it is the algorithm amplifying it while it suppresses everything else.
Nuance can be discussed in follow up posts or threads. I don't like the 280 limit, but I don't think it is the biggest issue of the platform, or even among the top issues. Compared to the original 140 it is much more usable. By forcing me to be more concise I often found that my message improved by focusing on the point without bloat and thus more likely to register for people, as opposed to writing a wall of text that hardly anyone will read.
Nuance very much can be addressed on twitter, I've had great back and forths there, what is often missing is the willingness of people to even let their ideas or stances challenged. Most refuse to engage in conversation, they just want a feedback loop, or instant gratification through likes which twitter is happy to provide.
I don't think there was any widespread public discussion of ideas before twitter. Forums and message boards always attracted a very small group of people who are connected through their interest in one thing.
Some people love walls of texts, but often it only dilutes the original point they were trying to make.