Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. No political ads to worry about. No interference with the product experience. And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year.
Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product — our data not for sale — and the companies would make more money! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail).
It's almost a running joke, up there with Daft Punk playing at the trash fence, that Twitter just won't release an edit button. With a move towards paying subscribers, maybe Twitter will listen to its real customers -- content writers -- rather than advertisers.
I am not that up to date with Twitter. Are they in the same class as FB and Google?
yep, I remember when cable tv was ad-free (because who would've dreamt people would be ok with paying a subscription fee while still getting ads shoved down their throat?)
So am I. The problem is that the paying members are also the same members that are most valuable to advertisers (because they have disposable cash and are probably 'power users' of the platform), so there is an incentive to 'sell them' to advertisers as well.
I think Windows (10 especially) is Exhibit A here (its “users” are definitely the product, but MS is happy to take their free money — or not, you can download it for $0 from their site, and cheap activation keys are easy to find), and the world’s first trillion dollar company is Exhibit B — its end-users are customers in many senses of the word, and they’re not the product, but a product that they offer to their walled garden’s developers with strings attached.
I also would never pay for participation in a monolithic user-generated content platform with questionable "curation" (e.g. Youtube Premium), but directly paying for hosting/moderation/admin work is still the way forward IMO.
I wish that paying for Spotify meant that my privacy would be respected, but I have zero illusions that they basically gather at least as much data as free customers.
Deleting and reposting hurts and would eliminate engagement statistics.
From a product experience, edited tweets, similar to Slack, could show an "(edited)" that when clicked on let's a user see the version history. That way, it can't be abused, but does allow for minor typos (e.g. https://twitter.com/sir/status/1353737949729468416)
I'd love this honestly. Even if it was just a delete and repost under the hood, generally I find I want an edit button just after posting and noticing all the typos.
As long as the interface interacted like an edit form rather than have me copy and then rebuild the tweet I'd be good to go.
So my inbox is the product? I think the number of people willing to pay $36 per annum to not see sponsored content in amongst all the organic marketing spam in newsfeeds is a negligible proportion of the user base, especially since ad blockers can be configured to hide it anyway.
I don't. Centralization of censorship ability in a small number of platforms is a bad thing for everyone. Twitter and Instagram or any other centralized censor becoming a "better service" makes our whole society worse.
It's time to leave Twitter and never look back. Only assholes tell other adults what they're allowed to see or read.
I tolerated Twitter deciding what I was allowed to write for a dozen years. When they started censoring search and dictating what I was allowed to read, I deleted my account.
Sharecropping on someone else's platform is a dead end.
Twitter's willingness to silence users for political reasons will ensure this service never competes with Substack in any meaningful way.
I don't doubt that it will be popular, but you won't see top-tier independent journalists building their houses on a Twitter's land after what we learned in the past year.
It's easier for a service to say "We'll always stand by our users" when they have like two users, and none of are heads of states, controversial personalities with huge audiences, diplomats, operatives, etc.
Let's wait and see what Substack's position will become when it becomes a service that matters.
Inciting a coup is technically a political reason, but I think most people agree that's a valid reason to silence someone.
A price for FB in Brazil? R$ 1 ($0,2). And the free option would still get a huge market share.
Not to say it couldn't work, but I'm guessing the reason it hasn't been tried is at least partially do to there being no going back
You’re not the product in the Fediverse, where Pleroma says you can run a small server for ~$4/month (https://pleroma.social/blog/2021/01/13/the-big-pleroma-and-f...). Or you can join someone else’s instance and donate eg. to GNU Social’s lead developer on Liberapay (https://liberapay.com/diogo/donate) or Mastodon on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/mastodon, $1/month gives you access ironically to a Discord channel).
I am also not convinced that people would pay to just get rid of ads, especially when there are free and easy alternatives available.
I _am_ convinced that a company like Facebook will try to launch a paid content service with their own exclusives since that seems to be the thing that big content providers are doing.
The problem is that they are making the bulk of their money from the top tier of their users (which is a really tiny percentage); and the rest is not monetize-able. If your are making $80-100 from your top guys (who will probably, gladly, pay $5/month subscription), you still come short. And the mass that makes you $0/year is not going to pay at any price, anyway. They are just there to keep the higher value audience.
https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3...
FB is on the high end of ARPU. Most other services are cents to low dollars.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/facebook-towers-over-rivals-...
Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter.
I think it would be a good thing. This sounds harsh but honestly most of the the types of people that are unwilling to pay $1-3 per month for the service are probably the types that don't make the service a better social network.
It would also hopefully disincentivize government agencies and maybe even politicians from using it as a channel of communications since it's more along the lines of a traditional business arrangement and not a "free, TV-like" service.
tl;dr twitter giving up on ads ain't happening
> I'm saving the Substack mailing list regularly to my hard drive, and if I go somewhere else I'll let you all know.
So this is possible on Substack at least.
Some Substacks also use a custom domain name, which would make migration off the platform even easier.
> You own your list, forever > Bring the audience you’ve built, and take it with you anytime. You are in control.
...and there goes Substack's entire business.
Overall, this is great for writers however. The missing component to Substack was the discovery/social mechanism. From a strategic perspective, it's easier to bolt on newsletter sending than it is to build a new social network.
So this was always a huge risk for Substack as a platform. But hey, there's also an alternate universe where Twitter stays dumb and lazy and never crushes Substack. So I see why investors took the risk.
But I see no path forward for Substack if Twitter manages to not completely botch this.
I think it's the same thing with Slack, Slack only exists because Microsoft teams is made by Microsoft.
I swear to God it's mostly a placebo effect, but you're like oh yeah we're using slack we're the cool kids now. Many companies will have a single breakaway team that uses slack just to feel cool.
But if $10 a month makes a developer happier she might produce another $500 in value.
Can you explain? I use Twitter daily (hourly) and haven't read anything that lessened my opinion of them. Are you talking about censorship / Trump stuff? Personally they have not gotten on my bad side with any of that.
> Slack only exists because Microsoft teams is made by Microsoft
I'm also not sure what you mean by this. Microsoft Teams exists because of Slack.
I see "current press sentiment" as an irrelevant factor. Just wait until some prominent right winger heads to Substack and the journalists start aiming their sights.
The point is, if I'm going to start a paid newsletter, am I willing to give up an extra 5% of my income for the same feature set?
The answer is hell no. Substack will have to lower their prices, and then the feature war will begin. Twitter will always have the upper hand given they can directly integrate newsletter sign up forms into twitter.
But hey, bureaucratic incompetence is endemic at Twitter, so they might screw up this obvious path to victory they have in front of them.
Substack will certainly lose a lot of writers, but I think it'll be safe as a profitable niche alternative.
Maybe, but two of your three examples clearly would be allowed, and quite active, for quite a while "on a Twitter-owned platform":
> Writers like Greenwald,
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald (1.5M followers, since Aug 2008)
> Yarvin,
The only one without an obvious verified account on Twitter. There's a no-activity @CurtisYarvin regular account, though.
> and Taibbi
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi (0.5M followers, since May 2009)
The thing I’m curious about is how creative Twitter will get with integrating the platforms. There have been a lot of missed opportunities with previous Twitter acquisitions IMO.
Job #1 for twitter should be making it easy to subscribe to Revue newsletters from within Twitter. Please do not put the team that rolled out Fleets in charge of Job #1 ;)
I am a pretty heavy Twitter user and have been for a long time. It's really the only "social" thing I use.
I know Fleets is a Twitter thing... I remember seeing it someplace, maybe a story on Hacker News or something? Was it something like a replacement for Vine maybe? Or was it something with threaded conversations? Am I seeing Fleets in my feed? What do they look like? Are they being used at all?
I really have no idea what Fleets is and I use Twitter all the time. Whatever Fleets is I agree with pboutros, don't put that same team in charge of anything else, this rollout didn't work.
(I may be missing something totally obvious and awesome here! Maybe Fleets is the greatest thing since Google+ and I'm to set in my ways to notice or care? This could very well be another "It's not you, it's me" thing and I'm too dense to see it.)
For example, curated.co seems nice, but $25 bucks a month for sending a newsletter that doesn't even have a single subscriber?
Most authors are not going to be "purged" full stop.
But I'll still keep subscribing to the best mailing list, so...
Twitter is also an amazing community, I've had many good interactions there that are simply not possible in other social media platforms. Where else can you get Paul Graham or Balaji Srinivasan to reply to you?
The reason I raise this issue is because the important characteristic of Twitter is that others can call out the misinformation quickly. It's not perfect, of course, but it's better than a newsletter, where it's just a blob of misinformation with nobody able to call out the BS.
Like a rideshare company will pick up groups of passengers from a location and drop them to the same location in the direction you're going - oh, you just discovered buses. That kind of thing?
This is heading towards a you just discovered online magazines/newspapers jokes.
Consider: - bundle the best writers together
- pay them a salary so they feel some comfort
- have an editor who decides
- brand it so people trust the name
etc
Now, regarding character limits, beyond linking to a personal website or having a newsletter, I have seen avid content creators posting images containing small essays directly on Twitter to allow a deeper in-app reading experience.
Maybe this should be a next, and less trivial, problem for Twitter to work on.
It does, enormously. I've reached out to people via Twitter and had nothing but great experiences. I've had dialogue with people I would never have had access to before. IME, so long as you stick away from politics, Twitter is fine but, of course, this depends on who you follow and interact with.
The only interactive we have as users is positive (a heart or retweet) vs negative (thumbs down on Youtube, downvote on reddit).
I think a broken heart, </3, essentially as a downvote, could do a lot to make Twitter more of a community that rewards and punishes, rather than just allows people to exist in their own eco-chamber. The politicians of the last month would have likely seen way more downvotes / broken hearts than favs and retweets, and that might have done something for them personally...it's at least worth a test if anyone at Twitter reads this :).
God please no, that's the reason I love Twitter. The day people start downvoting Tweets because they disagree, instead of replying, is the day I make my account private, or leave the service.
And guess what? "the whole world", taken as a whole, isn't so great.
Works pretty well. Main drawback is that it’s just singular focus nerds.
A drawback is that people don’t always seem charitable in their thoughts of why I choose to unfollow.
I guess I could just as easily follow their blogs instead of Twitter though.
I’m bummed that Twitter limits the mute list to only 200 words. I’m maxed out and have to remove a word when I want to mute a new one.
I don't think twitter's tactics are as nefarious as you make them out to be.
Joining indicates some come goal or success, but it has become Silicon Vally slang for: Our product is dead but at least we made some money.
I understand why Twitter wants in on a lucrative game, but I don't understand the value proposition for writers or readers. I struggle to see how, as a regular person on the internet, I benefit from a "public square" that will hijack my brainstem to maximize engagement, sell my attention and browsing habits to 3rd parties, and suspend my account with no warning if I run afoul of a black-box censor.
Other than that, not much but an easy setup... if you're from a country that supports receiving money from Stripe. If not, sucks to be you!
Nobody knows what RSS is either. Even back in mid-00s, I would sometimes struggle to add a blog to my Firefox feed (this was pre-Chrome). On some sites you'd click the RSS button and it would work. On other sites clicking it would display incomprehensible XML markup, causing me to abandon the site.
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I am instinctually skeptical of micropayments for a whole host of reasons:
- First, you have to have attach a payment method; it is hard to overcome that level of friction for just a few cents
- Secondly, if said payment method is a credit card, you need to deal with the fact the fees on a credit card transaction start around $0.29
- Third, there is the psychological burden imposed on customers who need to continually choose whether or not to make a purchase
To date the only sort of business that has succeeded with micropayments are free-to-play games: the App Store supplies the payment method (and eats the credit card fees), most games obfuscate the money spent (by selling in-game currency), and even then the strategy succeeds by hooking a small number of “whales” who play the game compulsively; most never pay.
This, in my estimation, would never work for a newspaper or magazine: there is too much competition when it comes to content, the price of any one piece couldn’t be priced high enough to overcome fees, and getting people to pay is hard. Moreover, while a subscription model caps the amount of revenue you earn per customer, it also reduces the likelihood said customer will explore alternatives: it is set and forget, while a micropayment asks for consideration every single time.
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https://stratechery.com/2016/blendle-launches-in-the-u-s-an-... (paywalled)
Although, I can already feel the cancel-pressure building up in and around Substack, just by writing this.
I do still have a blog but I mostly publish on various platforms that have fairly heavy-duty promotion machinery. But depending upon how Revue is integrated into Twitter, I'd take a look again.
To me, media seems to be trending towards quick, consumable, visually stimulating content, ie YouTube, TikTok and the like. The reason such content is more engaging and profitable is because it's a lot easier to turn it into a feed: one does not scroll through a newsletter for hours on end, and long form content tends to be the type that you put more thought into reading instead of simply moving on to the next piece.
Advertising runs on eyeballs but subscriptions do not, and it feels to me like Twitter seem to think that creating a well integrated platform to drive more Twitter discussion is a good idea, but really to me it feels like blogs and Tweets run perpendicular to each other: anyone who's read a decent amount of Twitter conversation knows that deeply thought out and sensible it is not.
Maybe they see being able to be "in" conversations about paywalled content will incentivize people to pay up, and will subsequently start pushing Revue content on people's feeds to try and create such a mentality? Or maybe Twitter don't care about making Revue "part of" Twitter and just think it's a growing market worth capitalising on. Only time will tell.
In a way it sort of reminds me of podcasts. They work well only for a group of people who have the time to consume long content, and while it works as a large niche, I can't see it growing into a Twitter-scale mass market, so I wouldn't trust it to be around for a particularly long time.
TWEET 2/7: Writers use Twitter begrudgingly because that's where the eyeballs are, but it is a terrible communications platform for any writing longer than a single tweet.
TWEET 3/7: Microblogging is core to its brand, but I shudder whenever I see a thread marked 1 of 22. Because of the character limitation, the writing on Twitter has a wooden cadence.
TWEET 4/7: The best thing Twitter could do for writers is give them some way to go beyond the standard character limit within the core platform.
TWEET 5/7: The limit doesn't need to be lifted entirely; maybe anything beyond the limit can be hidden by default, but with an option to reveal it.
TWEET 6/7: Restricting how writers write can sometimes encourage better writing. But Twitter is one of the largest communications platforms in the world, and it's got to reckon with that.
TWEET 7/7: Imagine if, instead of a char limit, you could only write rhyming couplets! It would be fun as a niche site, but not as a site used to communicate breaking news and longer, more thoughtful writing.
COUPLET 1/1: Twitter's a major communications hub, like it or not. Its restrictions on writing are a big blind spot.
To the degree that even the sitting President, right or wrong, can be shut down?
Yeah, pass...
It's interesting that the tech giants keep tagging their names onto the brands they acquire. Does that really help?
I know that the tech crowd exists in a bubble and that the hatred for the tech giants on HN doesn't really reflect the feelings of the general public... but even outside the tech sphere, are there really many people who like Twitter as a company? Most people just seem to tolerate the companies behind their preferred platform. It doesn't seem to me like there would be many who would be more likely to engage with a new brand as a result of its association with Twitter. If anything, I'd expect the opposite effect.
They're slowly working other, less-Microsoft-branded proprietary stuff into them, like Azure and VSCode.
GitHub and NPM however remain without even a mention of their ownership and decisionmaking entity.
Some of the marketing for these things they've even taken to posting on unaffiliated domains, like we saw on HN yesterday:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903358
They're trying really hard to not remind people that the same people who put ads in your start menu also own and control your favorite free code host, too.
Call it Microsoft GitHub whenever you can.
Or perhaps I just don’t understand the point they’re trying to make? I’ve yet to come across this antitrust/branding argument where the rationale has been explained but I’d definitely be curious to hear the legal theory.
this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool.
This post has just over 1800 characters (copy/pasted everything visible into Notepad++), no images whatsoever, and it takes 776ms to load and transfers 238 kilobytes.
Why are minimalist seeming web sited often so obese (https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)?
writefreely, https://github.com/writeas/writefreely
this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool.
AGPLv-3.0 goodness
But yeah, that friction got to be a little too much.
Or
Will this be Twitter's Tumbler?
My money is on the latter.
So Revue is what, Substack minus fees plus twitter viewpoint-enforcement? In any event I think this topic (censorship) at least bears discussion and I encourage users here not to downvote the discussion in the name of "suppressing right wingers" or similar. Twitter does not just ban right wingers. Take a look at the list of prominent people banned from twitter[0], it includes people such as Talib Kweli, Zuby (both rappers), "The IT Crowd" creator Graham Linehan, numerous political satire accounts, numerous feminists, and numerous artists and others for death threats towards such potential victims as "the Planters mascot Mr. Peanut," "a dead mosquito" and "the country Austria" (issued by an Austrian artist).
If you have strong contrary views, you are probably in the danger zone for getting a twitter suspension or ban if someone wants to make a point of reporting you. Censorship should definitely be part of this discussion of Revue.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#List_of_no...
I fear the internet will bifurcate due to problems like this.
I’m not judging either way, and there is certainly something ironic about Apple using slave labour while taking the moral high ground against hateful assholes and their refusal to moderate.
But it’s the way the wind blows, and you’re honestly not going to be able of resisting.
In the EU we’re certainly going to regulate big tech, but the result wouldn’t lead to Trump not getting banned for inciting violence, if anything it would probably have happened sooner and with a public mandate.
And good luck building a marketable platform out of the users who get kicked off the mainstream internet.
I assume this was discussed as part of the acquisition? Will publishers have free reign to discuss topics that they want to publish on or do Twitter "rules" govern what's allowed to be discussed?
