Fair or not, and whatever the implications of depending on ads, free access is just table stakes. Period.

But putting aside the mental barrier that something that's always been free should now cost money.

I could maybe have been convinced to pay a small amount for access to 2010-2015 era Twitter.

The 2015-Elon era would have been a harder sell. The experience was going downhill before the acquisition. Not his fault. And also we'd become less naive about the effect of social media on our lives and on society. Being asked to pay would have triggered a reexamination of the necessity of social networking in my life that should have happened around then anyway.

But the idea of paying for what Twitter has turned into post-acquisition? Ask me again next week when I stop laughing.

I've always wondered what percentage of "users" are "lurks" who never login, occasionally check a profile or click on a tweet on another website.

One of the previous uses of twitter was "announcements". Government, corporate, emergency, community, software, etc.

The previous move to require logging in was already a massive blow to that, requiring a payment would decimate it was a use-case.

I don't see company's/governments putting announcements on a paid platform. You can't expect people to pay for twitter for announcements.