So, after trying it out in a few places to see if it made any difference, X-formerly Twitter-now seems bent on charging every new user to sign up for an account in the app.

Well, at least if you want to post, or to interact with posts, that is.

Under X's "Not a Bot" program, launched in New Zealand and the Philippines last October, every new account will pay a $1 annual fee if it intends to perform any write actions in the app.
Not a huge deal, huh? $1 isn't much, and probably plenty of X users won't care paying that much to be able to engage.

But the bigger question is will they, and also, will it really work, and lastly, provide a mechanism by which X can stem the tide of bots that have long been a significant problem for the app?

The answer? Probably not.

On the first point, as to whether new X users will pay. Given the very small percentage of X users already paying for X Premium (less than 1%) and the persistent negative stories in the press about Elon Musk and his various management decisions, there's not really much to suggest that users will be any more anxious to part with their money or permit a connected bank account to do so.

Which is at least part of the motivation for this new push. As a nod to the "everything app" vision of Elon, he wanted to take X and convert it into a virtual marketplace for all transactions - from banking, even hosting one's bank account, to shopping and paying bills, etc.

One first step toward that might be forcing all users to link a bank account, and it does seem like this is one of the reasons why X is demanding this yearly charge for new accounts.

But with Elon's other company Tesla recently cutting the price of full self-driving from $12k outright to $99 per year, with no reimbursement for those who paid the original full price, any payments to Elon's companies feel a little less reliable these days. Some X Premium subscribers have also reported problems such as X continuing to take payments even after cancellation.

Thus, at a basic level, most users would not pay a penny for the app. But then again, to an overwhelming majority, the price isn't exactly an issue either.

That's because under the "Not a Bot" scheme, you can still sign up to read X posts, you only need to pay of you want to post yourself. And considering that 80% of X users never post or interact in the app, it's really not that much of a disincentive anyway for most people.

Indeed, inspection of the data shows that the change affected X downloads in New Zealand only marginally, and these increased in the latter region after the October announcement.
So it isn't like it impacted sign-ups, but considering that X's active daily user count has remained at 250 million users since November, that also implies that a lot of these new sign-ups haven't stuck around either, which would suggest that a lot of them were probably fine not posting to the app, and thus didn't pay.
So not much in the way of direct, new fee generation here or decreasing sign-up numbers; although there would presumably be an effect in posting activity, again based on new users just not being able to post without it, especially if/when this rolls out into more regions.

So probably, sign-up numbers remain the same, but overall engagement levels decline, and would continue to decline over time based on churn.

But then there's the second element: Will this actually help to combat bots, as Elon hopes?

Again, probably not.

Why?
If this is what X pairs with, that new accounts just cannot post anything for three months, then get full posting rights, free of charge, thereafter, bot farms will just churn out accounts, then wait three months for them to mature and continue doing so in perpetuity.

Which would mean this has zero impact on their operations, and if X actually is going to have just a three months threshold on new account posting, then that will pretty much undermine the whole process.

Although it will give X additional time for detecting the scam accounts and, considering that X is already clearing the 50 million new profiles every month signing up for the platform, it may very well need that additional cushion to catch them before they can post.

I don't really know how X's detection process is working on this front, but essentially what X has said publicly is that it's seeing 1.7 million new sign-ups every day. Still, its active user count, as noted, has been flat at 250 million for months.

Which likely means X is killing off many of these new sign-ups, and perhaps, it does take some time for X's systems to determine if they're bots or not.

But then again, any detection in this sense likely comes down to what they post and how they interact, and if they can't post for three months, that'll mean that X has fewer signals for weeding them out anyway.

So really, this is kind of a dead end, too, and if X wants to actually accomplish anything, it probably can't have a three month delay before allocating posting for free.

If it dropped that requirement, though, could it?
Well, maybe.

Maybe, with bot creators having to pay $1 for every account just to post, that would, as Musk says, make it much more cost-prohibitive. It wouldn't stop government-backed influence operations, though, as $1 per account is likely worth the investment for their programs, while bigger bot farms would likely pass the extra costs on to customers with $1 per account diluted across many clients not really being a heap.

But perhaps, in some ways, that might influence it, at least as those costs multiply, and that might make it more difficult for bot peddlers to sustain their operations viable as a consequence.

But again, charging $8 for X Premium hasn't deterred too many bot sellers from paying up for a blue tick, in order to give their accounts that little bit of extra authenticity.

Hard to see why paying $1 per account would be such a significant disincentive.

Perhaps, by linking up bank accounts, that could be another vector to combat such, by blocking certain credit cards for example. But scammers may steal cards too.

In essence, this does not really work from any angle in some kind of significant way. Maybe, though, as one more small step in the larger anti-bot push, it might have some impact for the X team.

While this might be the case, the real solution is better detection, so investing in both human and systemic detection which can identify bot accounts a lot quicker. No social platform has got this right, with both Meta and X reporting that at least 5% of their users at any time are fake.

On X, however, as Elon himself puts it, it is more of 20%, which is another consideration in this push. If X actually succeeded, and could find a way to get rid of bots, what would happen to X's user numbers, and how would that affect the market perception?

This was always the accusation leveled at Twitter that it wasn't even trying to combat bots because it had no incentive to do so, as the impact on its growth charts would be so significant that negative reporting despite it being a positive action, would tank the share price.

X, which is down 50 percent from its original ad revenue, would also take a hit in the same manner, had it cut 20 percent of its users. Losing 50 million actives, by any definition, would be seen as a step back, and that is another factor that Musk and Co. would have to contend with.

While I don't think this proposal is going to have a big impact in any direction, I also don't know that X could survive the backlash either way, as it needs ad revenue badly, now.

Of course, that's not to say X can just ignore bots as an issue, as they are a major annoyance to users and skew X's usage data. But it is in a tough spot either way.

But even in any event, the $1 fee just isn't the answer.