For the last 2 months I have been paying for a subscription to X.com (Twitter) in order to explore how the monetisation compares to Hive's and whether X is legitimately a 'free speech' network as claimed by 'free speech absolutist' Elon Musk. I have discovered that things at X are definitely not as Musk has been selling to the world!
When Elon Musk bought Twitter he proudly claimed that he would make it the 'only' free speech social network on the web. He has since made several other grandiose claims but since I am writing this on Hive, which excels at both free speech and monetisation, I'll focus on these in this post. I'll be diving into some of the details of what I have learned about X, but to summarise - for most people X does not live up to Musk's sales pitch.
Here are just a few of the ways that the reality of X does not match up to Elon Musk's advertising of it:
X will lead the way in free speech (paraphrasing): In reality the free speech improved for a period following his purchase of Twitter, which was not difficult since the previous controllers were rabid censors of almost the worst kind. However, it did not take long before this was reversed to some extent, with new rules being applied to the shadowbanning and 'reach restriction' behind the scenes. This topic is huge, but in short he installed an 'ex' World Economic Forum stooge as a CEO and things rapidly went downhill from there. I have never seen him comment on this blatant conflict of interests between free speech and WEF type agendas, despite many people trying to get him to speak on it. This in itself speaks volumes.
X will introduce a transparency dashboard to support free speech: Following on from generally respecting free speech, Musk promised users - prior to them buying blue tick subscriptions - that they would be receiving a transparency dashboard that would fully explain who was shadowbanned and why. This never materialised and despite me personally, repeatedly highlighting this in places under his own threads that would be hard to miss, he has never replied or commented on the subject, to this day (to my knowledge). Why bother building a transparency dashboard when you have no real intention of supporting real free speech!?
Paying for subscriptions is a good idea: Well, it could have been a reasonable idea - except that the reality of how it has been implemented is ridiculous. If I compare my reach and engagement levels with and without a subscription, it's clear that I receive only 1% of the views on my posts if I do not have a subscription. This effectively means that X is a 'freemium' service that is virtually useless without a subscription if you want your posts to be seen by other people. Additionally, my channel is still hugely reach restricted even WITH the subscription! How do I know? The subscription service boosts my posts but ONLY when I reply to other people. If I start my own post thread then I get almost no engagement or views - this is despite me gaining significant amounts of followers continuously due to my replies to other people getting likes and retweets etc. When I complained about my profile being blatantly 'throttled', despite me paying them - they gave me a stock reply that they have 'rules', but didn't offer any insight whatsoever as to which 'rules' were causing the issue.
You can make money from posting: When compared to Hive this is an absolutely absurd claim. In order to monetise posts on Twitter, the account has to have received 5 million views per month, for 3 months in a row. I managed to get my account on X to 2 million organic views per month, despite the blatant reach restriction on my account - yet for me to boost the performance to 5 million would probably require me to spend half of each day (or more time) every single day and might take several months. So in other words, for most people, monetisation on X is impossible. Only those who already have substantial followings ('celebrities', brands and other such profiles) will be likely to be able to receive payouts. Additionally, there are many reports of accounts meeting all the requirements but receiving close to zero payouts. The only explanation given for this is that advertisers elect to not place ads on those profiles. To my knowledge, there is no way to validate this claim and so it would be trivial for the controllers at X to simply demonetise targeted accounts and claim that advertisers deliberately elected to avoid their accounts due to keyword or other targeting settings. In any case, this is a bad look for X.
What's more, only a week ago X made the following post that effectively announces a chargeable fee for API access of $100 per month!
https://twitter.com/ura_soul/status/1707307058473877517
- ura_soul
I haven't seen much commentary on this yet, but there is certainly a taste of what is to come beneath that post:
https://twitter.com/lnation_jah/status/1705821065514254413
- lnation_jah
Conclusion
I wish I could say that Elon's blatant exploitation of the X userbase and deceptive advertising will be enough to cause it's retention to drop off and for users to look elsewhere. Sadly though, we know very well that social network users have a tendency to repeatedly adopt the worst possible platforms while ignoring those that truly innovate.
None the less, the situation is ripe for promotion of Hive powered sites on X. As long as Hive sites are not blacklisted (more than perhaps they are already are), all we need is a combination of correctly designed marketing material and enough people to share them on X - we should then see an upswing in the Hive active user count.
I imagine that @anomadsoul will be closely monitoring the situation as the @leofinance marketing drive ramps up, however, the rest of the Hive communtiy can certainly help out too. If we look back at the rise of Steem, it was actually Jerry Banfield's ads on web 2 that pulled a lot of users in to Steem, so there is absolutely space for Hive personalities to replicate that approach on X, with or without paid ads. Note: Jerry's approach was FAR from optimal, yet worked anyway because Steem soothed people's pain points, just as Hive does today.
UPDATE: A new thread shows Elon getting allegedly censored himself due to their system marking posts as 'sensitive', which is meant to be a voluntary label applied by the author themselves. lol
https://twitter.com/hodgetwins/status/1707591548425171028
- hodgetwins
Comments?
What are your experiences on X/Twitter since Musk took over? Have you been able to grow your account in an uncensored way? What help do you need to promote Hive on X?
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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