I can't see this ending well for X.
Forcing all users to pay for access seems a pretty heavy handed way of dealing with bots.
Forcing all users to pay for access seems a pretty heavy handed way of dealing with bots.
With that it's going to push out lots of human users who either can't afford to pay or don't see enough value to justify the price (e.g. casual/occasional users). And with outflow of audience value diminishes for users who might be willing to pay, pushing some of them over the edge.
I wonder whether this would actually increase bot-to-human ratio.
My prediction if would get implemented it would last a week. Like with login-wall last time numbers would plummet too much.
With a monthly subscription you'd be out of pocket for a month, even if your bot is banned the next day. That's terrible ROI for a spammer.
Furthermore getting a supply of "plausible" cards (corresponding to the account's/IPs location) that would pass fraud checks is not as cheap as phone numbers either.
It will be effective. Large state-sponsored actors will no doubt get through it, but it still shrinks the amount of spam significantly.
First, I don't think there ever will be a limitation of 1 (or even small n) account per card. This excludes big corporate clients, media networks, etc. who have legitimate reason to have more than one account but would still pay from the same account. I'd bet a buck these are the accounts that most likely to actually pay for X. It would be unwise to gate them out.
Second, if detecting bots would've been as easy as taking only a day (even a few days) worth of posting then there would never be a need to paywall the whole of X. I believe it's because it's hard (either objectively hard, or just expensive for X) to detect bots Musk considers such a disruptive measure.
Third, cards are probably not a good verification mechanism. More so if there's not card-to-account limitation. Stolen cards don't have to be used directly. Money can be laundered elsewhere and then used with a good card. It is an obstacle but probably only for small/ad-hoc operations. Big bot nets will hardly be impacted by this.