As one of the richest entrepreneurs in the world today, Elon Musk undoubtedly has a very complex impression on the outside world, he not only manages many companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Boring and so on with his genius creativity and superhuman energy, but also surprises people with absurd words and deeds from time to time. Especially after joining the social media X (formerly Twitter), Musk has "nerves" on this platform every once in a while, which has already surprised the people who eat melons.
Last fall, Musk suddenly said that X would start charging new users $1 per year, and new users would only be able to post, reply, quote, retweet and other key functions after paying. At first, the outside world thought that Musk's move was just an excuse to complain about X's proliferation of bot accounts again. But what I didn't expect was that after more than half a year, Musk actually wanted to come for real.
A few days ago, some users discovered that platform X quietly updated some of the terms, including that new users need to pay a small annual fee to access the platform. According to the relevant terms, X is currently piloting in New Zealand and the Philippines, and local users need to pay an annual fee of $0.84 and $0.75 respectively to make the account have these features. In addition, this new policy is limited to newly registered local accounts, and existing users will continue to have free access to all features except for the Premium subscription service at no additional cost. If the user is unwilling to pay, then he can only browse the content on the platform within three months of registering an account, and can only like, comment, forward and other operations after three months.
Immediately after that, Musk retweeted the tweet and said, "Unfortunately, the only effective way to curb bot accounts is to charge a small fee for write access to new users." At the moment, AI can easily pass the 'Are you a robot' test." It seems that he believes that only by making users pay can he effectively curb the "bot accounts" on the X platform, rather than improving the company's financial situation by discovering new methods of forced payment.
New users have to pay for the basic features of the platform, which is undoubtedly rare. In general, there are two types of payment models in the software industry, namely buyout and subscription. Pay once and use it permanently, which is the characteristic of the buyout system, but the disadvantage is that consumers need to pay a relatively considerable amount of money at one time, and the subscription system is that users need to periodically continue to buy the services or goods provided by the merchant.
However, due to the strong scale effect of the Internet, manufacturers have found that providing basic services to users for free, and then selecting users who are willing to pay for value-added services, can tap greater commercial value, so there is now a popular "free + subscription" model.
Provide users with the basic functions of the product for free, and then attract users who are willing to pay to buy advanced services, whether it is a large domestic manufacturer or an overseas giant, in fact, they are doing this. But now, X's approach is obviously a "bad rule".
So the question is, why does Musk challenge the habits of users? Of course, because the "bot account" has greatly challenged the commercial value of X. When the acquisition was originally made for $44 billion, Musk announced without warning that the acquisition would be put on hold for the time being, because the bots and fake accounts on the X platform accounted for more than 20% of the total number of users, which was a far cry from the 5% claimed by Twitter at the time.
It's a pity that the acquisition agreement has been signed, and even if it is true, the flood of bot accounts on the platform in Musk's mouth can only indicate that there is something wrong with his background check. However, it is an indisputable fact that "digital life" is rampant on X, and even as the platform's most well-known influencer, more than 40% of Musk's account followers have neither published content nor followers. In fact, in a sense, the proliferation of "digital life" is a "parasite" that all platforms with social attributes will have.
Since Internet manufacturers discovered the business of traffic monetization, where the traffic is, it means where the user's attention is. When the user's attention has value, traffic becomes something that all Internet products will chase. What's more, in the asset-light Internet industry, how to value a company, in addition to the special business model, the scale of users is also a common criterion for judging today. For example, the reason why ByteDance has become the top unicorn in the global Internet industry, with a valuation of $225 billion, is due to the fact that Douyin and TikTok have hundreds of millions of daily active users at home and abroad, respectively.
In this way, Internet vendors have good reasons to ignore the existence of bot accounts. Moreover, not only manufacturers, but also third parties who want to dig gold on the Internet are also the main force in buying robot accounts. Such as Internet celebrities, YouTubers, UP hosts, anchors with goods, etc., what measures their value is the size of their fans. After all, the same advertisement may only cost 10,000 yuan to the waist creator, but the head Internet celebrity will multiply the offer dozens of times.
Of course, whether it is an Internet manufacturer or an Internet celebrity, their behavior of conniving at bot accounts often occurs in the grass-roots period, and after "going ashore", bot accounts will inevitably be cooked with rabbits and dogs. The reason is actually very simple, because there is no corresponding living human behind the bot account, so they can only be content producers, and can never become consumers. When it comes to monetization, the bot account becomes a negative asset, for example, the bot account obviously will not click on ads, let alone subscribe to X Premium.
The problem is that the operators of bot accounts are not going to be killed, and they are also gradually upgrading their technology. Especially with the maturity of AIGC-related technologies in recent years, the reason why chatbots represented by ChatGPT have become popular is that their understanding of natural language can be comparable to that of humans, and at the same time, they also have output content that is more human-like, so the reason why AIGC is polluting the Internet is because the information it produces is no different from ordinary people. In this case, it is also becoming more and more difficult to identify bot accounts by technical means.
In this way, it is not an option to distinguish between real users and bot accounts by paying for them. Although the annual fee of less than $1 per year is just a drop in the bucket for ordinary users, for the operators of bot accounts, under the effect of scale, they may have to face sky-high bills. In fact, as it becomes more and more difficult to identify bots at the technical level, it is almost the consensus in the industry to curb bot accounts by reducing the rights and interests of normal users.
For example, Blizzard's popular MMORPG "World of Warcraft" updated a new policy earlier this month, that is, characters with new accounts registered for less than 30 days cannot trade, cannot use auction houses, and cannot send emails (including mailing gold coins). This move has been interpreted by players as Blizzard's crackdown on the scripted bots needed by studios to make money, by raising the cost of using scripted bots in order to squeeze these studios out of the player base.
It's just that "World of Warcraft" has been a monthly card fee since 20 years ago, but Musk's X has always been free, so it may not be difficult for Blizzard to convince players, but how can Musk convince users of the X platform to spend an extra cup of coffee every year?