this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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166
Will you be willing to pay for using Twitter? (variety.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Elon Musk said he will charge all X/Twitter users a fee to be on the platform. He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.

“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots," said Elon. I can’t believe that this is the only solution he can think of.

Dealing with bots would be Elon Musk’s responsibility, considering he’s the only one profiting significantly from X, not us. Elon Musk steals our data and censors each of our posts, now he even expects us to pay to clean up the mess he created.

Plus, the problems with X go beyond just bots. The algorithm and programming decisions are negatively impacting user experience and manipulating people’s minds.

We want a town square where everyone is free to have & voice an opinion. I do not believe we have to pay ”a small monthly payment” for such a place, especially in a country that should value these freedoms & suppressing ideas.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

  • The entirety of the English Wikipedia can be stored in a single commodity hard disk. The entire database (with revisions and all) is less than 1TB. All other wikipedias combined amount to something similar. This is probably less data than what Reddit ingests every day.

  • Less than 0.05% of the Wikipedia users have done any type of contribution to the content. The absolute majority is just visiting to read it.

  • The content of an encyclopedia changes way less often than any social network. Any page written can be a resource used for any high-school student doing research for an assignment. How many people bother to revisit week-old memes on Reddit or imgur, let alone something written decades ago? Yet, both Reddit and Wikipedia need to store all their content forever.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  • most data on WMF servers is media files, most of them photos; Wikimedia Commons has at this point nearly 100 million of those; probably still less than many social media sites, though
  • this is true, but many people on social media are also only lurkers
  • the WMF projects get lots of changes every minute, just look at the recent changes page
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The "rule" of social media is that users split 1%/9%/90% on creators (prolific posters), participants (comments and reshares content that might be interesting to them) and lurkers (don't necessarily signup and only visit to read). That means that we have 200 times more "active" (0.05% vs 10%) users on social media relative to wikipedia. The operational costs and the staff required to moderate these sites should follow this proportion as well.