 The social media site, formerly known as Twitter, might soon undergo a change even more dramatic than its Prince Lake renaming. In an interview that Elon Musk did with Benjamin Netanyahu that was livestreamed on Twitter last Monday, Elon floated the idea of putting the entire Twitter platform behind a paywall where he would charge users a small monthly payment to use the social media site at all. And the reason for this change is totally not for Elon to recoup the billions of dollars that he spent acquiring the platform. No, the real reason he said this may be necessary is to deal with the problem of bots on the platform. Ah, those darn Twitter bots. You know, I vaguely remember when the Twitter files were first coming out, it was actually less than a year ago, talking about how old Twitter, you know, before the Elon Musk takeover was overrun with bots and people trading CSAM and other nefarious users. And this is despite the extreme censorship that old Twitter had from the outside looking in. And Elon Musk stated publicly that his goals when he took over Twitter was to banish all the bots and turn it into an actual free speech platform. But none of that ever happened. And now not only was Twitter never actually a free speech platform by the definition of the First Amendment, but now it might not even be a free as in beer platform soon. And if he does that, I really think it'll finally be the true death of Twitter because I can't even picture 1% of the current users on Twitter paying to use the site. Twitter's already been put into a limited viewing mode for free users. Like if you have a new account on Twitter, you're only able to view 500 posts per day. And if your account's a little bit older, you can view up to 1,000 posts per day. And this might be okay for most people, but let's say you're gonna go on a long flight. You could easily view over 1,000 Twitter posts on a flight to Hawaii or something like that. But with that move alone, the Twitter addicts, they were then forced to either buy Twitter premium for $8 a month to keep getting their fix or they had to switch to a new drug like Meta Threads. And it doesn't look like people are actually buying what the Musk is selling. Elon is constantly talking about how popular Twitter has become under his leadership and the talk with Net and Yahoo, Elon actually mentioned that Twitter currently has about 550 active monthly users who generate 100 to 200 million posts per day. Now it's unclear whether those numbers include the bots that are still running rampant through Twitter so much that he needs a paywall, but it's obviously a number that Elon is proud of. And even though the metrics used now for measuring engagement on Twitter are different than that of old Twitter, the claim numbers still seem to indicate that there is more user interaction on the site than there was on old Twitter. But despite all of that, an independent study found that only about 872,000 people are currently subscribed to Twitter premium. So putting the entire platform behind a paywall really just seems like yet another way for Elon to try and make some money off of the $44 billion investment that he made or hell, even just break even because you gotta take what you can get on a purchase like that. But let's take his words at their face value, okay? How effective would putting up a paywall for every single user to use Twitter be at mitigating the botting issue? In my opinion, the paywall is really only gonna be effective at blocking the script kitty bots, like people who aren't making their own bots who are probably just buying ones off the internet and so they're easy to ban anyway, or people who deploy bots for targeted harassment because there's not really a monetary investment and for just low budget spammers who aren't actually making a lot of money. But people who are botting to run scams like lucrative scams and spread ransomware and the more high level blackhead SEO spammers, they're still gonna be able to turn a profit off of botting even if they have to make a small monthly payment. Like if somebody has a bot account let's say it's a cute girl that uses a large language model to flirt with strangers and catfish them, right? To get some money out of them. If that bot is able to make more money before it gets banned, then the cost of Twitter premium or whatever the new paywall is gonna be, I doubt it's gonna be more than Twitter premium, which is only $8 a month, then the paywall that's introduced to that hacker is meaningless, he's still going to turn a profit and he's gonna be able to scale his operation, albeit maybe a little bit more slowly. I mean just take a look at RuneScape to get an idea of how well paywalls are at stopping botting. Some of the largest and most lucrative bot farms in existence in RuneScape are in the pay to play worlds. Like in this game people can make money that's called gold pieces and then on black markets they can sell those gold pieces for real world cash and in the pay to play worlds your bot can make even more GP per hour or if you're playing the game legit you can make more GP per hour and maybe it's the size of the world or the number of the members worlds there are in RuneScape but for some reason the pay to play bots seem to get reported less often and they seem to get banned less often. You know it's one of those things where I guess if you're just good at making bots like if you're good enough at making bots that Jagex's automated software doesn't detect you and you log out when players go near you and stuff like that then you can actually have a bot farm where you're going to make several times your investment in RuneScape membership I think it's like five or $10 a month something like that you're gonna make several times that off of your bots once you're able to sell the GP on the black market. Sure it's not exactly an equal comparison between a video game and a social media platform but I would argue that the consequences or paywalling Twitter could actually be much more severe than the botting consequences in RuneScape because these botters on Twitter they profit by running scams and by basically stealing money from people and in the dark web market places where people sell things like hacked accounts for various social media platforms and stuff like that the price of Twitter accounts could go up dramatically if a payment is required to use the platform at all people might be more likely to then hack those accounts so that they can sell them scammers and hackers that run phishing sites they will be more likely to actually use these hacked Twitter accounts for their spam activities on the platform instead of them like using a credit card or spending their own money to register a legit account because it's probably gonna be cheaper for them to just buy hacked accounts also Elon mentioned that buying an account and using it for spam would basically burn that payment method which is somewhat true like I guess if you use a regular credit card they could track that if you use it again but Twitter is also supposed to become this everything app, right? It's supposed to become like WeChat plus plus and so they're actually getting into financial services and most likely that's gonna include crypto as well so if crypto payments are added as a way for you to purchase I guess your user verification on Twitter then burning through crypto wallets is not gonna be a problem since most cryptocurrencies have practically unlimited number of wallets but all of these issues with hacked accounts and pay-to-play botters are only gonna be a problem if the platform is still relevant after this paywall is implemented because if these independent statistics about the number of people who bought Twitter premium are accurate and if Elon's own claims about how many active monthly users are accurate then that tells me that less than 1% of people are actually buying Twitter premium they're actually paying to use Twitter despite all the perks that you get with Twitter premium and all the nice things that you have to purchase now that are put behind a paywall but what do you guys think? Will Elon actually implement this paywall? Do you think it's gonna be very effective at stopping bots or do you think it's gonna be too effective and just stop people from using the platform altogether and cause the bird to join the social media graveyard? Let me know your opinions in the comments below. Please like and share this video to hack the algorithm, follow me on Odyssey and check out my merch on base.win crypto payments are available right now see I'm actually ahead of Twitter in that sense and I actually give discounts store-wide for friends of Monero Chan. Have a great day, thanks for watching.