Guessing the post read throttling implemented back at the end of June didn’t help with the ‘bot issue’. So now Elon Musk’s next idea is to charge everyone a small monthly subscription fee. Somehow his logic is this will stop bots in their tracks.
Elon Musk has indicated that X, formerly known as Twitter, is considering charging all users for accessing the platform.
The X owner said erecting a paywall around the business would ward off the bots, or automated accounts, that have become a bugbear for Musk.
That is the lamest excuse I’ve seen. Couldn’t he come up with something better…I don’t know…perhaps to help with their legal fees. Oh wait that one is already being used by Activision-Blizzard Microsoft. All those in-game cosmetic purchases in World of Warcraft and their other games are (allegedly) to help towards the CEO’s legal defense. While on the subject of World of Warcraft, bots are an issue there too and the $15 USD monthly subscription does not deter them. The bots’ creators make a lot more money before the bots get nuked (and the $15 USD is just a barrier to entry since if the bot does last more than a month, in game gold can be used to cover the monthly subscription fee). A $5 USD month fee hardly seems like a deterrent if the bot creators are making more money from said bot.
Even if they are forced to use a new payment method for each bot, they are likely using compromised payment information. The $5 per month fee is likely going to slip under 80% of the card holder’s radar. Either it is such a small amount they won’t notice the transaction or it is not worth the hassle of canceling the card and updating all their auto-pays. Been there…done that a few years back. Had a 3rd party account get compromised (the merchant blocked the purchase as the IP address were the order created was in India). Still had to contact the credit card company, shift all my auto-pays to a backup account. If that was not bad enough my ISP tried to process my monthly auto-pay shortly after I had shut off the card. The transaction of course was declined, but they charged me a ‘return payment fee’ (not a late fee as I paid the bill later that day) because of the decline. Now, I could understand if I had initiated a charge-back then a returned payment fee would make sense. I called and asked them to explain how a payment they never obtained could be returned. They couldn’t explain and credit the fee back to me as a ‘one time courtesy’.
Is this another ‘hype’ statement by Musk? If it is, he is running a huge risk of some of the 550 million Twitter/X users not waiting around to find out and canceling their accounts. Well, at least you can read Tweets on Twitter/X again without having to be a registered user.
via The Guardian
