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mdkubit t1_j96htcl wrote

That might actually work better than you think.

Social Media's cesspool is a natural effect of allowing everyone full unfettered access to communicate with everyone else anonymously with almost no repercussions beyond a banned account, which is zero barrier to entry because you can just create a new account and keep going.

If a pay wall exists, the vast majority of these people won't be spending money just to troll others, and the noise will drop off significantly. Granted, the biggest paid actors that try to flood social media with propaganda might still exist, but then again, they might not if it costs them millions of dollars for accounts that they have to keep re-spending every time the farm gets banned.

TL;DR - Mass Trolling exists cuz it's free and anonymous. Remove both of those and it'll likely either vanish entirely, or get niche'd into oblivion.

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Not_Like_The_Movie t1_j96j7hh wrote

>If a pay wall exists, the vast majority of these people won't be spending money just to troll others, and the noise will drop off significantly.

We saw that this wasn't the case with the massive number of people paying 8 bucks to make fake verified accounts when Elon took over Twitter.

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BODYBUTCHER t1_j97evr8 wrote

That could also be the case of the novelty of it all and not what the actual trend would be

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mdkubit t1_j96op3f wrote

Well social media isn't going away, if a paywall doesn't work, there really isn't a solution beyond everyone adapting.

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GeneralZex t1_j97dpeg wrote

Because that $8 conferred “a benefit”. I dare say if someone had to pay money to use Facebook period they wouldn’t pay at all and social media would die pretty quickly.

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FoamGuy t1_j9bmujc wrote

>the massive number of people

Massive is a stretch, they just got a lot of media coverage.

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LeonBlacksruckus t1_j97m6xd wrote

This is just wrong. The number of bots on Twitter have dropped off significantly. Sure a few people changed their handle to exploit this but all in all it was a good choice.

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idontevenliftbrah t1_j97ubfw wrote

That's actually an interesting point that I hadn't considered. Thank you

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mdkubit t1_j984vdm wrote

A lot of the pre-mass-public social media in the 80s and 90s was actually heavily moderated and fairly civil, because the bar to entry was pretty high.

  1. Afford a PC.
  2. Afford a way to connect PC to an online service.
  3. Depending on the service, pay additional fee for Internet specific access.

You could create anonymous names, but your ISP, your online service provider, would know your real info, so getting banned was a lot more of a threat at the time as a result.

You can raise that bar to entry monetarily, and you'd likely get a similar chilling effect. Not necessarily 'great' as a solution, but it is a solution.

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BiscottiOdd7979 t1_j9b2are wrote

If it helps limit bay shit crazy Americans fall in to echo chambers and not vote for Donald trump or republican types I’m all for it.

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