This has to be the worst news for Elon Musk's X project.

Today, Musk confirmed that X-(former Twitter)-will be expanding its one-time fee initiative to new X accounts as a way of fighting the 'relentless onslaught of bots' on the app.
Elon Musk confirmed the news after a user pointed out an update to the app's back-end code that indicates X will charge all users "a small annual fee before you are able to post, like, bookmark, reply.".

They'll be free to register and free to browse from within the app, but apparently you'll have to pay in order to actually interact. Musk also said that they will be able to interact for free, three months after they create their account.

X rolled out a $1 account launch fee policy in New Zealand and the Philippines last October; the theory here was that by charging a small fee, it would make it much harder for bot farms to open thousands of accounts because that would get too expensive.

X also is looking at "payment verification" as a method to prove that the account owner is actually human. Which isn't really a thing, but….

Still, it's unclear whether all users will eventually be charged to use the service or only those in selected regions at first. Yet it's another step toward charging everybody to use the platform yet another concept Musk has floated around before.

And honestly, the fact that X is still dealing with a lot of bots doesn't surprise me.
For while more sign-ups, by any definition, is a plus, at 1.7M new sign-ups a day, X's overall active users must also have to be increasing, by a lot and in tandem.

They aren't.
51 million additional users per month would be the result of 1.7M extra sign-ups per day, but X is now seeing the same number of daily active users (250M) as it did in November 2022.

So no growth in 16 months, despite 51 million more accounts signing up every 30 days.

Sounds like a lot of bots, doesn't it?

"But Elon said that he'd killed the bots, didn't he?"

He did. Several times.

But obviously, X's bot problem is substantially worse than Musk initially thought, which is why this expanded, and substantial action to deal with the problem for a second time:.
Because you may have to assume that lots of actual people who would want to join X will delay making a decision if they are charged a fee, no matter how small. Nobody knows what happened in the control group and perhaps it didn't slow X sign-ups in those regions too much. But given all the questions surrounding Musk's X project, I could assume that many would be less than thrilled to share their payment data with the company in the first place, especially signing up for the account.

So you'd have to assume that X's bot problem is also bigger than it's letting on, which Elon himself claimed before he was forced to buy the app.

Of course, that was way back in 2022, when Musk is accused of using this and all kinds of other attempts to wriggle out of having to pay $44 billion for his acquisition of Twitter. He'd long before declared the platform wasn't actually worth what he'd paid for it because Twitter's management had lied by saying that fewer than 5% of its active users were bots. Musk and his team have studied it for themselves and determined that it is more like 33%, though Musk settled on having it be a more conservative 20%.

Perhaps that is true, and perhaps X indeed has 20% fewer users than it reports, or more, possibly.

This is such a drastic measure that seems the problem is something other than the touted 5%, which is one other reason in the growth of this push.

It does not seem too great of an omen for the long-term viability of the app. The service is already down 50% on its previous ad revenue and hasn't picked up much steam with its subscription.

If bots are still causing major problems, it could also cause even greater hesitation from ad partners, and unless people really want to use X's Grok chatbot, I don't see how it's going to augment its intake with new streams.