No Choice For Twitter: It's Paywalls or Bust

In mid 2016, when OnlyFans set up as a simple, paywalled Twitter clone and invited its handful of initial entertainers to "earn money doing what you do already", it was really saying: "come and monetise what Twitter is too stupid to realise has value". Six and a half years later, Twitter still hasn't joined those dots...

If you haven't been riveted to Twitter this week, you've been missing the greatest real-life soap opera in Internet history. Barely has there been time to digest one plot climax, before the next one dropped onto the timelines in a pyre of flames. And at the centre of the story, one Elon Musk - the new owner whose leadership has been so breathtakingly abominable that there's now a conspiracy theory claiming he deliberately set out to destroy the company.

We have to remind ourselves that this is probably the first time in Musk's life when the people upon whom he relies for survival have been in a position to flick him the vees. His core mistake, it seems, has been a failure to realise that the millions of people who provide his site's real product - the entertainment - are not on his payroll and don't care a jot about his needs or desires. The obvious solution is to put them on the payroll. Make them care. Make Twitter mean something to them. Make it into their job.

The Ethics and Consequences of Dodging Paywalls

"Some paywalls are so weak that those of us who adhere to high privacy standards online don't even realise they're there."

Photo by Dima Pechurin on Unsplash

It's a really interesting question. Is dodging an online paywall worse than blocking ads? What are the potential consequences when we bypass paywalls and access "premium" content without compensating the provider? If publishers tell us we must pay to read their content, do the technical means by which we evade their 'digital checkout' even matter? Is bypassing paywalls akin to stealing books - something we can do, but know is wrong? That really depends on how "paywalled" the content is.

There are different strengths of paywalling. Some paywalls are rigid lockouts that genuinely do solely let in those who pay. Others essentially employ a sucker-gate, which only monetises the visitors who don't realise they have a choice. The site may, for example, let you in for free if you're hitting a link on Twitter or Facebook, but not if you're responding to an email nudge from an existing subscriber. Let you in for free if you're using this browser setup, but not that one.

Big Tech's Secret Fear: The Disappearing Web

"Why would both Facebook and Twitter ignore 99.99% of successful startup ideas, but suddenly jump aboard with newsletters? On closer inspection, the answer is obvious..."

Photo by zhang xiaoyu on Unsplash (image modified).

The World Wide Web is slowly disappearing. No, really. It is! I mean, obviously, it's all still around somewhere. It's just that with every week that goes by, a little more of it closes off unconditional access. And the conditions are getting more demanding as the hourglass runs down.