Andrew Torba who runs Gab said the other day that starting next month they will be forcing users to pay for a premium account in order to upload images and videos. He says they are doing this because they can’t afford the storage required to deal with all the uploads.
Here’s his post on the subject.
This is a good way to kill off the site. One of the few redeeming qualities of Gab has been the ability for people to post funny politically incorrect memes and things of that sort. People are not going to pay for the “privilege” of posting images and videos. This is a basic feature that has been available across social media sites for many years. Making it a “premium” feature is ridiculous.
There are better ways of handling this. If storage was an issue they could have implemented some sort of retention policy where after a period of time older images and videos get purged from storage. While not ideal, I think people could at least understand that. Making people pay for this ability just makes it look like he’s doing a cash grab.
Gab has never been a great site. Outside of being able to say words like “nigger” and spreading politically incorrect memes, there’s really not a whole lot that’s been great about it. There’s all sorts of bots that artificially boost boring and uninteresting MAGA posts to the top of its explore page. Plus, the site has been buggy as hell its entire existence. It’s basically a digital ghetto and this move by Torba is only going to make the site less relevant than it is now.
