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!
I haven't seen much commentary on this yet, but there is certainly a taste of what is to come beneath that post:
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
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
Read My User Guide for Hive Here
Powerful insights into the Hive blockchain are available at my website, Hive Alive.
Including the only way to track downvotes on Hive - The Untrending report
I think that these measures by Musk are affecting the network, Twitter, despite the censorship and control of some topics, was free and allowed millions of people to express ideas, now the reach is much smaller, the idea of subscription payment and even the number of messages that you can read seems like real censorship to me, all platforms need users to spend as much time on them and without restrictions on who to see or how much to read, HIVE is an alternative but many people still do not understand the options of decentralized networks or Since there are more options than those that everyone knows, it remains to do marketing and teaching work on the use of the network so as not to fill it only with spam that abounds in X.
Twitter was extremely censored on certain topics, moreso than I had previously seen on a social network, with the exceptions of Facebook and Youtube. I agree, though, that the insertion of a subscription model that renders all accounts that do not subscribe as virtually invisible, is another form of censorship - but one that is applied in a blanket way to anyone that doesn't have enough money to pay for the subscription. So we have gone from censoring specific groups/topics to a wider limiting of free speech according to economic status. This is essentially a move by a technocrat that benefits those of his ilk.
In other words, Twitter censored thoughts based on their content and their potential to upset certain corporations and technocrats. The new model allows a certain amount of this, but limits the visibility of it according to the economic status of the speakers - resulting in those with less money being negatively effected. The claim is that this is the only way to fight spam, but when it comes to important societal topics it is often the poorest people who are ignored and receive the harshest end of things. Many times people will not want to pay money to a technocrat such as Musk out of principle, so we are left with a skewed and biased environment, where 'Musk-like' people have a louder voice and even so, still, certain topics are censored anyway!
Yes, education and outreach are key for Hive. I am reminded of the race between the hair and the tortoise.
Hive adoption is going to be orders of magnitude lower than Twitter. It takes significantly more effort to understand the mechanics here than Twitter - although my initial assessment is that the average person on Hive can reach a larger percentage of Hive users, compared to a similar ratio on Twitter.
I originally signed up for a Splinterlands account some years ago to play, noticed something about a laundry list of keys, copied them to notepad and played a few games of Splinterlands, and then didn't touch Hive for several years.
I've used Twitter for political causes to large success in the past, I've also used it to promote crowdfunding projects. Much of the userbase of Twitter either wants reactionary content - or wants something to be angry about. Twitter is effectively a dopamine trap.
My primary passion/hobby is performing classic literature on Youtube along with promoting a community of artists. Twitter isn't fantastic for promoting non-reactionary content. Beauty, or more thoughtful content get's lost in the noise.
In my experience, the censors really step into action when you are 'over the target' - meaning that they will allow topics and threads that generate controversy, provided that the main thrust doesn't actually expose topics that could cause their own controllers and 'team' to lose power/wealth or get into trouble. They present as if they are protecting 'the world' but predictably they are protecting themselves and their cronies.
I've noticed you speaking about Hive as a free-speech platform again.. excuse me if I missed something somewhere - but what has changed since the last battles which demonstrated there was a few at the top attempting to soft censor and degrade the reputation of anyone that spoke up about current issues in a non-mainstream way?
Not trying to be antagonistic - actually hopeful. I really want something like the ideal of what I considered Hive represented from the beginning to exist.
Great question! Hive is not yet perfect for free speech, that is certainly true - and it's clear that some of the most important pieces of the free speech puzzle are still incomplete here. However, if you listen to the developments being made by the various Hive projects towards support for self governing layer 2 communities, you might conclude that some of the most important parts are not far away.
Even though I do still agree that there is a major sense of unfairness in the current landscape when it comes to 'the few' being able to remove rewards and soft censor authors via downvotes - it is also true that anyone can launch their own front end for Hive and ensure total visibility for their content, relatively easily - untouched by downvotes. So really, the problem is not exactly censorship, but is more of a problem of 'reach' and the limitation of it for some users. This is precisely the same problem that we face on X/Twitter, where they claim that free speech rights are not 'the right to be heard'. Hive does not yet solve the problem of reach adequately, but it is better than X/Twitter and all centralised Web 2 solutions.
With the intelligent development of layer 2 communities, we will all be much better placed to grow audiences in whichever way we prefer, with tokens that we direct ourselves and free to use our own ingenuity to overcome problematic downvoters. Even without these features we are still able to virtually guarantee that posts will be served by the blockchain and visible through whichever sites want to publish them.
It's sad to say, but the state of free speech on web 2 sites is so terrible that it doesn't take much to beat them. Hive is already beating them, even with the potential to downvote posts. In it's current state, the problems stem from financial inequality in the wider world, resulting in an imbalanced downvoting 'game' playing out here. However, we can address this with changes to the core blockchain code, developing layer 2 communities and other strategies.
It may seem unfair to have to put in so much effort to guarantee our own free speech and in some ways it is - however, it's also true that while I personally do know that 'some things in life really are free', there is also truth to the sentiment behind the phrase 'there's no free lunch'. The truth is that, in the context of social media, unless we put our own energy/resources into a project, there will generally always be someone who will be seeking to exploit and profit from us. Hive does at least provide the tools to correct this to those who invest sufficiently. I remain confident that these problems will be more completely resolved soon.
Thanks much @ura-soul for your post, weird things happen with our contacts or connections and shadow banning and reach restriction or directed happens a lot on X it seems
100% yes, it's always been the same - they just seem to have made it a bit harder to detect.
The irony.
I haven't really been able to grow my account on X yet, but I'm working on it by making some tutorials and things like that. I guess the only thing holding me back from promoting HIVE on X more is... myself. I promise I will make videos of me paying at shops and clients paying at my studio using Keychain & Keychain store.
Good luck with it - I think everyone gets different results depending on their network and the topics they cover.