How to avoid social media enshitification, if no one pays for it?

Yeah, this is a big problem. The EU solution would be to fund it with taxes but obviously that won't work everywhere. Maybe a few megacorps could run social media as a loss leader but it's hard to imagine why they'd want to.

Perhaps serving plain text data is cheap enough so that it can be done as a non-profit/hobbyist project?

The problem is that people don't like to read text, and thus the above proposed social network might not have widespread adoption, thus reducing the network effect.

> if every company that offers free services is "evil" and people do not want to pay for access to networks, how the hell is this whole thing supposed to work?

Seems pretty simple, to me; cut "companies" out entirely.

The problem with Twitter isn't so much paying for it as monetizing it. Monetization is an endless user-experience sinkhole that optimizes for the lowest-common-denominator and never ends. Locking users in a sinking ship is a bad business model, Twitter only got away with it because it took 10 years to sink and Dorsey had a great poker face.

Platforms like Mastodon decimate this problem, for me. Instead of engineering for monetization, people optimized for user experience. Advertisements don't exist, because they harm the UX and get optimized out; you're not a competitive Mastodon server if you run ads.

I've heard convincing arguements that decentralized platforms lack real-world celebrities, but I only see that as a plus in a post-Musk world.

I disagree that charging for usage is guaranteed to kill Twitter.

Charging is a non-starter for a newcomer due to the chicken & egg problem (nobody would pay for a platform with no users, thus it never gains any users), but it's not clear what will happen if an established platform with significant influence starts charging. It's worth a shot.

It could very well be that charging a reasonable amount for access ends up being sustainable and actually improves the platform, both in terms of fighting against unauthorized spam (bots, etc) but also "authorized" spam aka ads and other dark patterns since user-hostile features no longer make sense if it's those same users who now pay for it.

When it comes to monetizing social media without ads, one solution could be to get businesses/commercial entities to subsidize everyone else - using the network for personal use is free but no commercial content is allowed; for that a paid "business" account is required which in turn subsidizes free users.

First, Twitter just isn't as much fun as it used to be. People are there out of inertia and inability to port their followers, not delight.

Second, Twitter Blue still has ads so you're still the product.

> how the hell is this whole thing supposed to work?

Twitter was relatively recently profitable. Surely they got bloated and through layoffs could have gotten back there or close. And the prior ownership would have stayed centrist enough to avoid pissing off either side's advertisers or users at scale.

And maybe the prior ownership could have launched a paid tier that people felt good about, rather than taking away features and APIs and selling an experience that was lesser than what we'd been used to getting for free.

I don't mind paying for things that are worth paying for at all. I do it all the time.

However, when it comes to services, they tend to spy on you whether or not you pay for them. I won't pay for a service solely on the basis that it would improve the privacy situation because I don't think that it generally does.

As to Twitter specifically, I don't find value in it sufficient to be worth paying for, so I wouldn't. But I don't use it anyway, so I wouldn't count as a lost customer.

who would pay to get yelled at by some guy who thinks your opinion on toasted sandwiches is not that amusing?

you want people to pay to communicate online? then you have to separate out the communication from the 'outside', and charge for access to that bubble. and you can't lie about the degree of separation, or it all breaks down to free-services again.

twitter as a free-for-all across society into people's tweets (readers, bot scrapers, governments, market researchers, moms, journalists, ai bros, ect) has killed it's ability to charge for access. well it never had the capability to charge for access.

if you make a bullet proof bubble and then open up the communication to market forces and government spying, (even in name only) then people will publicly say it's okay but the service will lose it's value and the service will descend into freedom again where nobody values it enough to pay.

the craving for security and the belief that all computer communications must run through the government and market scrapers, at all costs, has destroyed the ability to charge for access to information, the basic lifeblood and commodity of the internet.

the west and the western internet is in a bad place, because you cannot have a truly private conversation, for free and for money.

The idea isn’t bad because it’s making people pay for stuff; it’s bad because people won’t, by and large, pay for Twitter specifically.

By taking it out of the commercial sphere altogether. The most ancient networks on the planet, religious institutions, do it pretty well still. There's a world that's perfectly within reach where decentralized social networks have organizations/chapters in every city, town, are funded on a need basis by lifelong members based on their means and ideally other diverse sources including public funds, take on active social roles that actually deserve that adjective, and so on.

To me the funny thing is that isn't particularly utopian given how many networks operate literally like that right now, it just takes one mental switch imagining yourself not as some passive consumer and everything you use as a product.

There’s a deep paradox in our industry: software and software services are extremely expensive, yet people have been conditioned to expect them to be either free or very cheap.

This pretty much forces indirect business models and that usually means something sleazy or user-hostile: surveillance, addictionware, paid propaganda, etc.

"Enshitification" is a trivial but pessimistic meme that mostly just means Internet services are not forever. They will change over time, sometimes for the worse. Most other things in the world change, too.

But this can take years to happen! If a website has good services for now, you can use them for now, and then shop around for a better deal if they get worse, or something better comes along.

Instead of trying to stop the world from changing when you can't, better to learn some resilience. Learn to live with transience.

It's also possible for websites to improve. Who knows?

But wait, you're talking about building a social website?

My advice is that more users means more problems. Many users are pretty deranged these days, by this and many other terrible memes. Don't worry about scaring them away, they'll scare themselves away regardless.

Build something for yourself and a few people you like. Explain up front that it's not for everyone, and you're not going to run it forever. Why commit to something that's not fun?

Charging for Twitter makes sense because spammers will not pay and average users will pay.

Whereas spammers have financial or ideological incentives for having accounts, the average user does not.

Because spammers stand to profit by paying for Twitter, they will not pay for it. Conversely because the vast majority of normal users do not have anything tangible to gain, they will pay for it.

It is possible that spammers might try to game the system and find ways to give Twitter as much money is necessary to continue using the platform. In that case, Twitter would logically spend any resources necessary turning away as much Bad Funds as possible while maintaining Good Funds from Good Users.

I do not see why anyone could find fault in Mr. Musk’s plan to charge everyone — it would simply be an expansion in the explosion of quality and user trust that resulted from the Twitter Blue program.

> How to avoid social media enshitification, if no one pays for it?

Paying for it is orthogonal. Social networks can be widely used, or they can be high quality (or they can be neither). They can't be both.

I see a little bit of an accusation in OP that the media made up these stories about him considering charging all users. Elon seems to have some strong gaslighting abilities over some people here is where he claims it is fake:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1704459036547059852?s=20

Am I taking crazy pills or is he not, in the timestamp the community note pointed to suggesting exactly what the community note says the media made up? Is the community playing some kind of prank? Did his followers not click the link or am I missing some nuance?

Let’s just choose to not have social media — let’s consciously delete it as a society.

Just because we experiment with a technology doesn’t mean we can’t change our minds.

At the very least, we can have completely decentralized systems that don’t have an Elon or a Zuck running them and enshitifying them.

We have eliminated this possibility from our thinking, as if it’s inevitable we have to go in this direction and if only we could figure out the “right way” the technology wouldn’t be used for casual enslavement if populations and exploitation of social phenomenon for centralized control.

There is no good model for social media at this time, but we sure have been able to find some downsides.

Social networks lead directly to opinion and societal conformity and will eventually be used for social control and credit systems. We should turn them off before they enshrine themselves in the center of daily life.

Mark my words. You merely have to look at the Eyghurs in China to see where this technology is going.

Charge for what exactly? Pay to view? Pay to share? Pay to hide???

> all of the reports are about how stupid the idea is and how such a move would kill Twitter.

Because, _for a service like Twitter_, it _is_ stupid and it _would_ kill Twitter. Paid social networks can and have worked (examples would be SomethingAwful, plus a lot of dating sites, and things like Patreon as marginal cases), but it's not going to work for the social network that _everyone's_ on, and Twitter wouldn't be viable as a social network with like half a million paying users And as we've seen with the blueticks, the tiny minority of users who are willing to pay tend to be completely insufferable. As you'd expect; they're largely doing it for self-promotion purposes.

But in general, "situationally, this is a stupid idea" should not be read as "anything which looks vaguely like this is a stupid idea". There likely is a place for paid social media (and donation-supported social media, and so on); it's just that that place is probably not _Twitter_.

This is an incomplete question. Xitter does not exist in a vacuum. Xitter is heavily damaged. It is unclear if any moves Musk makes now can save it.

But even in the abstract, even stipulating the damage Xitter has suffered can be washed away, it is unclear if a free-to-use social network can be converted to a subscription model without a long, deep, negative cash flow interval that could readily kill it. Ask yourself if Reddit could make that transition without failing.