Report Suggests Elon Musk Is Considering Paywalling Twitter, And Users Believe It Would Actually Doom The Site

It's been a couple of weeks since Elon Musk let that sink in to Twitter, and in that time, that "sink" flooded the site with ideas that have largely been viewed as catastrophically bad or at least highly contentious.

While the $8 Blue Checkmark and widespread banning of parody accounts can be viewed as signs that Musk's leadership has led the site off the rails, a report from Platformer has people thinking that Musk could seriously kill the site if he implements his latest purported idea — putting Twitter behind a paywall.

CONFIRMED: Musk has discussed the idea of putting ALL of Twitter behind a paywall.

one option discussed is giving users a limited amount of time on the app each month and then having to pay when that time is used up to keep browsing the app.

— sto | Artist Development | Writer | Label Owner I (@BigSto) November 8, 2022

The report states that Twitter is essentially a "circus" right now. On Friday, Musk forced managers to lay off huge swaths of employees, only to ask some of those laid-off workers to return to Twitter hours later when they realized they needed their help or were "accidentally fired."

Also, Musk's first signature feature, the $8 Twitter Blue plan, has been a "financial disaster," according to the report. One way Musk thought to make paying money for Twitter Blue appealing was to reduce the number of ads users saw on the app by half. This would lose the company $6 per person in ad revenue sales.

While these are alarming details to those rooting for Twitter's success, the report that Musk and adviser David Sacks are discussing putting Twitter behind a paywall was perhaps the most alarming of all.

The report suggests that the two had discussed giving users a limited free amount of time on the app a month and continued use would require a paid subscription. It does not sound imminent, as Twitter's skeleton crew is hard at work at making Twitter Blue both profitable and an attractive thing for people to purchase, but once the paywall idea hit Twitter itself, many users seemed sure it would kill the site.

what if this whole scenario is a kind of civilization-wide immune reaction to us figuring out how to give ourselves prolonged brain damage for multiple hours a day. the right factors align and suddenly it becomes too expensive to do that and we walk out into the sunlight anew. https://t.co/aH2rlZby66

— Compulsory Heteropessimism (@griph) November 8, 2022

If Elon Musk wants to put all of Twitter behind a paywall, I’m out of here. I won’t give one cent to that asshole.

— Canadian Resistance 🇨🇦 (@CdnResistance) November 8, 2022

If Elon Musk really does put all of twitter behind a paywall I'm definitely leaving, I'm not spending shit on this hell site, much less for him to become richer 🖕🖕 I'm pissed off

— 💜 Violet 💜 (@VioletMadness7) November 8, 2022

It is unclear if Musk will actually follow through with the rumored paywall, but considering Musk's perceivably erratic behavior and grating tweets in the past two weeks, it seems no idea is too outlandish for the billionaire to attempt.

Meanwhile, Tumblr and Mastodon are looking more and more like viable alternatives every day in the eyes of many.