[HN Gopher] Twitter has a new CEO - what about a new business mo...
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Twitter has a new CEO - what about a new business model?
Author : oedmarap
Score : 144 points
Date : 2021-11-30 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| freediver wrote:
| A better business model would be to charge progressively based on
| number of followers. This way users pay not for consumption, but
| for amplification of their messaging.
|
| Something like
|
| 0-100 followers : free
|
| 100-1,000: $5/mo
|
| 1,000-10,000: $20/mo
|
| ...
|
| 1M+ : $10,000/mo per 1M
|
| The aligns the incentives and value provided. Someone having 1M
| followers on twitter has a powerful platform for their agenda
| whatever it may be. This should come at a progressively higher
| cost to them (not their followers).
| matwood wrote:
| I agree with the method, even if not with the bands directly.
| The value for a user is in the number of followers. Anyone with
| a huge following is deriving a large value, and it's the most
| obvious point for Twitter to cut into.
|
| All of the large accounts will pay a reasonable fee.
| i2infinity wrote:
| I wouldn't bet on this! For this, Twitter would have to divulge
| how many among the say 1000 followers are bots. Also, this is
| prone to abuse! An unnecessary follow will now be considered
| spam, and Twitter would have to build toolings to prevent that.
| It will drive creators out of Twitter. Sharing ad revenue with
| creators will be an excellent first step
| blawson wrote:
| I like it, but that might encourage the top profiles to take
| their audience off platform entirely. Unlike say Youtube, I
| don't think Twitter creators are able to monetize directly on
| platform?
| freediver wrote:
| I do no think that would happen. Someone having 1M followers
| usually has $10k/mo to spare. And the value they are getting
| from amplifying their message for branding purposes certainly
| outweighs the cost by couple of orders of magnitude.
|
| I'd probably pay $10k/mo for my brand if it allowed me to
| talk to 1M people interested in my products as frequently as
| I wanted. How much would the same cost me on other platforms?
| A comparable business is something like mailchimp where you
| pay $300/mo to message just 10,000 contacts.
|
| And yes, Twitter would need to get better at purging bots,
| but that is a good thing and a nice incentive to have.
| riffic wrote:
| I agree with you here. There's a huge value in the
| amplification of messaging and Twitter's pretty much giving
| this away for free.
|
| Media and institutions have the budget to pay here.
| artfulhippo wrote:
| Is Twitter a platform or a publisher? If Twitter is a platform,
| it might make sense to charge the most prominent users the
| most. But if Twitter is thought of as a publisher, it makes
| sense for Twitter to pay its top creators big bucks.
|
| Free-to-use is somewhere in between: the notable users get
| compensated with access to attention, and Twitter benefits from
| the attention-time of their audience.
|
| So, the underlying point that I think you're making -- that
| notable users get a fantastic deal on social media at the
| expense of society -- is well taken.
|
| Let's hope that a new mass communications technology emerges to
| disrupt this dynamic.
| freediver wrote:
| It tried very hard to be a publisher all these years, when
| deep down it is a platform.
| floor2 wrote:
| This seems like it would get abused instantly.
|
| It's like the ultimate DDOS opportunity- tell everyone to go
| follow <account you don't like> to drive up their costs to
| bankrupt them or force them off the platform. Create bot
| accounts to follow all the up-and-coming politicians of your
| opposition party or your startup's rival or the media company
| with a bias opposed to yours.
|
| Then the arms-race component would kick off, and you'd have
| secondary accounts retweeting primary accounts to spread the
| followers over hundreds of alt accounts.
|
| The fun part would be they'd have to place caps so hobby users
| didn't accidentally go viral and get lots of followers, which
| in turn would create scarcity for the users who follow the now
| capped account. Imagine someone bragging they're part of the
| elite 1,000 first followers of whatever random account is
| popular at that moment.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It seems crazy that people bemoan the fact that twitter _only_
| does 4.8 bill or whatever the current run rate is. Since when is
| that awful? It 's only awful when you compare it to Facebook and
| a few others. Compared to _almost all businesses ever_ , it has
| grown to be a giant in an amazingly short period of time and is
| doing well on every dimension, including financial.
|
| It's popular, engaging and has a solid business model. Again,
| only when you compare it to some of the most freakish outliers in
| the history of business does it look less than amazing.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I combined two draft blog posts and wrote an intro to give some
| context to why people may see Twitter as not having lived up
| enough. It's going to be very long. Heh. No worries if it isn't
| read: ------
|
| Many growth/tech stocks are off by 10-40% from higher peaks or
| averages since the market went bananas in April & May 2020.
| Almost all growth/tech stocks are off by over 10% from late Oct
| or mid Nov.
|
| Twitter as you stated with its run rate, will top $5B rev in
| 2021. The stock price opened at $45.5, $36.5B market cap.
| Twitter is off ~30% from most of 2021. Which is $65/share and a
| $52B market cap.
|
| *Comparisons*: - Pinterest market cap is ~25% less. Not well
| monetized so far. ~$2.5B rev in 2021.
|
| - Snap's market cap is more than double. Rev could hit $4B for
| 2021. So ~22% less.
|
| - LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Announced in
| June, completed December 2016. It was trading at a $17.5B
| market cap before acquisition. Rev for 2016 was $3.7B. This
| year the run rate has topped $10B. 2021 rev will top $11.5B. -
| For context, Twitter was worth $13B in June 2016 with $2.5B rev
| for 2016.
|
| - Github was bought for $7.5B in stock. Announced and completed
| in June and Oct 2018. Microsoft shares were $99 in June 2018.
| They opened at $335 today. Those $7.5B acquisition shares are
| worth $25.5B today. - Gitlab, a partial competitor to Github,
| closed its 1st public day on Oct 14, 2021 above $15B. It's
| valued above $14B today. Annual run rate above $200M. - Gitlab
| has no overlap with Twitter. GitHub does with its social
| network and other trends. GitHub's valuation, whether under
| Microsoft now, or as a hypothetical public company, is likely
| 3x+ Gitlab. Or ~$45B. Github 2018 rev was likely above $300M.
| These numbers won't line up with Twitter because of both
| getting a lot of SaaS, subscription, and enterprise revenue.
|
| - Telegram allegedly has been bank rolled by its founder since
| inception. I personally doubt this, but regardless, its bank
| roll has been limited. It didn't get the vast capital or
| marketing/namespace an SV company gets. Telegram's burn rate is
| lower than Twitter or any other company listed. Rumors say
| Telegram has turned down funding at a $30B valuation. Other
| rumors speak to a $30-50B IPO in 2023.
|
| - LINE, a messaging app with some social network features, is
| based in and most popular in Japan. It was a subsidiary of
| Korean company, Naver. LINE went public a few years ago. It did
| a 50/50 merger with Softbank's Yahoo Japan. The combined
| company, Z Holdings, has a market cap of $45B. LINE is most
| popular in a couple of South East Asian countries and with
| expats.
|
| - KakaoTalk, a messaging app with some social network features,
| is based in and most popular in Korea. It is much smaller than
| the others. 50M active users in 2021 with 90% in South Korea.
| KakaoTalk's parent company, Kakao, merged with Naver's
| competitor Daum with the current company called Kakao and
| valued at $45B. KakaoTalk only represents a fraction of this
| value.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Well you've just outlined the problem.
|
| Twitter's Board of Directors is a listing of people who've come
| to _expect_ the projects with which they 're involved - either
| directly or tangentially - or with which they invest, to
| perform in such a ridiculously obscene manner that even
| _exceptional_ growth and profits _appears_ to be
| "underperforming".
|
| For many of these people, there's no problem - where "problem"
| is defined as 'not being a 1000x bagger stock 5 - 10 years from
| IPO launch' - that cannot be solved through some alchemical
| combination of AI/ML, automation, aggressive user engagement,
| monetization, etc.
|
| Compared to Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc., Twitter is
| an _also-ran_. Which is absolutely, utterly, unabashedly
| _insane_ to think.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| I just did a super take with a sibling comment to yours
| comparing Twitter to other social media and comm products.
|
| > Twitter is an also-ran. Which is absolutely, utterly,
| unabashedly insane to think.
|
| Yes, this is absolutely crazy!
|
| The other problem is how much Twitter is brought up by people
| and the media. Data shows a minority of the already minority
| of people who use Twitter, talk politics. Yet you can't go
| any time without people pointing to Twitter as a
| representation of a huge population to prove their points.
|
| For example, reactions to "cancelling" someone will have
| droves of people and media point to a tiny portion of Twitter
| saying things that can't represent the massive demographic
| people are critiquing.
|
| All of this makes Twitter seem so much more important even to
| people not constantly around tech, startup, or SV circles.
| nicce wrote:
| I wish that one day, there is a non-profit organization which
| provides social media and almost everyone uses it. Direct ads
| are forbidden. There are set of some high level rules and any
| country can be part of moderation as long they follow these
| same rules.
|
| Maybe money could come selling from some anonymized data.
| Even partially government funded. Infrastructure should be
| decentralized. Maybe you can pay 1EUR per month to get more
| some features.
|
| It takes only tiny fraction what these current companies are
| making money, to maintain such environment.
|
| Forbidden dystopia...
| [deleted]
| streamofdigits wrote:
| Maybe the global newspaper folk, who seem to be the most serious
| users of the platform, should form a joint venture, buy up
| twitter, disseminate microblogging news (ad)free and simply use
| the embedded links to drive traffic to their web platforms (for
| subscriptions and more in-depth news coverage).
|
| So twitter becomes a sort of neutral preview / public
| announcement forum, like a kiosk with folded newspapers on the
| street: you can see the headlines, but you need to buy to read.
|
| Alternatively, they could do the same from scratch without
| twitter...
|
| The problem is not what happens to twitter. The problem is how to
| have healthy, representative, inquisitive journalism
| riffic wrote:
| There's absolutely nothing stopping a consortium of news
| outlets from adopting the W3C recommendation ActivityPub to
| push out microposts directly from their own content management
| systems, with an existing audience open web audience.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| that is in principle possible (essentially replace twitter by
| RSS aggregator clients) but is not exactly equivalent: for
| example some entities could microblog on "next-gen twitter"
| without having a website and there is also the question of
| reactions from readers to posts (whether those are seen
| centrally by all users)
|
| that centralization and processing of responses is by-and-
| large part of the social media problem (both generating the
| twitterstorm dynamic and having spawned the shadowy
| "sentiment" industry) but I suspect a lot of addicted users
| are quite keen to keep it going
| 12xo wrote:
| Charge accounts with 100k followers $100 a week. 1m 1000 a week.
| If they don't pay, they don't have the followers and cannot prove
| their own business/brand. These are the people who NEED Twitter.
| Make them pay for the right to access the audience like every
| other media.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > Twitter makes an average of $22.75 per monetizable daily active
| user per year
|
| That's plenty to pay for hosting and even a few moderation cases
| per year. Cool, so they're fine!
| zhdc1 wrote:
| This reminds me of when everyone found out during the dot com
| bubble that Booking.com[1], at the time a unicorn startup, was
| run out of a single office with something like a dozen or so
| employees.
|
| It didn't lead to the stock market crash, but it always stuck me
| as the first time that the general public started to really think
| that the whole dot com scene was a little out of whack.
|
| Twitter has a monopoly and 3B+ in revenue. It's hard to see how
| this justifies a 36B+ market cap. It's in a much better position
| than many, many other unicorns.
|
| [1] I'm going off of a twenty two or twenty three year old
| memory, so I may have gotten the company wrong.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Just the low employee count is not a bad thing in itself.
| Whatsapp had I think 50 employees when it was sold for $19
| billion.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > It didn't lead to the stock market crash, but it always stuck
| me as the first time that the general public started to really
| think that the whole dot com scene was a little out of whack.
|
| That's because the general public, and frankly even the non-
| general public, have never fully understood the digital
| computer: it's a leverage machine. It allows the exceptionally
| intelligent and/or insightful to leverage code to do what would
| have taken thousands, or even millions of workers to achieve.
|
| That's why a billion dollar photo startup can be created by
| three people and sold to Facebook.
|
| It looks like alchemy to the people without knowledge, because
| it's complex, difficult, requires a bit of luck (the right time
| / right place combination), and frankly, _does_ require a
| certain level of intelligence that 's well above average in
| order to fully exploit.
| karatinversion wrote:
| ...Twitter has a monopoly?
| zhdc1 wrote:
| On what they do? Absolutely.
|
| If you combine all of the different 'social media' platforms
| together into a single category? No.
| viro wrote:
| I want to remind you that ur definition of monopoly would
| make every niche business a monopoly. Social media IS a
| single category.
| mbg721 wrote:
| What is it that Twitter does exactly? It mostly seems to
| exist to put out short one-to-many messages that other
| media organizations can then cite as Zeitgeist. That may
| not be a monopoly, but it certainly isn't benevolent to the
| user, and it isn't how it was billed when it was new.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > What is it that Twitter does exactly?
|
| Break news and sic mobs on people. Both activities many
| people are extremely interested in being a part of.
| [deleted]
| yunohn wrote:
| > Booking.com[1], at the time a unicorn startup, was run out of
| a single office with something like a dozen or so employees.
|
| Ironically, they still have the same business model now - but
| with severe bloat (20k employees).
| m4rtink wrote:
| Don't their employees handle communication with the myriad
| accommodation owners and tourists that often don't speak the
| same language? Sure, often you can just do everything using
| the web interface, but sometimes you need to ask questions
| and Booking handled that quite quickly in the past.
| vmoore wrote:
| Jack had his hands in so many pies. Cash App, Square, and also
| evangelizes cryptocurrency every chance he gets. His Twitter Bio
| just has one word in it: `Bitcoin`. I think he was spreading
| himself thinly being involved with Twitter too. Focus.
| curiousfiddler wrote:
| Absolutely. For a platform with a relatively high engagement
| early on, they made so many missteps: awful photo/video tools
| (instagram, tiktok), messing up live, messing up developer
| experience, stagnant product (awful thread management for
| YEARS).
|
| However, I still believe it can be fixed. As an example, my
| consumption of news related information has moved significantly
| to Twitter. Why not do a better job there, in trying to provide
| a kick-ass way for content creators/consumers, and charge them
| for it.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Cash App is just a consumer payments app made by Square, not a
| separate company.
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| If Twitter was worth paying for, they wouldn't have used an ad-
| supported model to begin with (because people would have found it
| valuable enough to pay for in the first place). In some ways,
| Twitter has the "news" problem in that people just aren't willing
| to pay for it. As this says, Internet advertising really isn't
| that effective, especially on a site that is the equivalent of
| standing in town square with a megaphone. I think Twitter is
| tapped out on how much money it can make and drastic changes will
| just drive users to other places. If you're looking for higher
| returns a different company might be a better idea.
| nindalf wrote:
| > If Twitter was worth paying for, they wouldn't have used an
| ad-supported model to begin with
|
| Twitter doesn't cost $0 because no one thinks it's worth paying
| for (demand side), it's because if they did charge they'd be
| replaced by someone who didn't (too much potential supply).
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| If there was a market of people who would pay for such an
| app, there would be one on the market to satisfy the demand
| for it. Supply is irrelevant if there is no demand for it in
| the first place.
|
| Even taking this assertion, it means there is effectively
| infinite supply so Twitter's service has effectively no
| monetary value to the consumer. It's still impossible to
| charge a consumer for it then (and the costs to provide the
| service have to be paid by a 3rd party in ads).
|
| Edit: It's very difficult to build a network and get to a
| critical mass like Twitter. I'm still arguing it's demand
| constrained (people unwilling to pay) because you would see
| more viable competitors if it were supply.
| mdorazio wrote:
| They could also boost profits by lowering their OpEx. I
| genuinely don't know why they need to spend a billion dollars a
| quarter for a product that really doesn't change that much and
| isn't massively complex.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| It would be fascinating to see their engineering backlog.
| sulam wrote:
| What counts as complex? Is Facebook complex? Google? How
| about Netflix?
|
| By the measure of "I can explain how they work in a blog
| post" none of these are complex. But trust me, operating
| internet scale services is complex, regardless of how simple
| they seem from the outside.
| TheTrotters wrote:
| What kind of logic is this? Plenty of companies and services
| which people would pay a lot for choose to be ad-supported.
|
| Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but, if
| they weren't, I'd pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye.
|
| Most media companies started with ad-supported websites and
| plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid subscription
| model.
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| > Plenty of companies and services which people would pay a
| lot for choose to be ad-supported.
|
| I don't think that's true, because they would charge for
| access and have ads. These are fairly rare.
|
| >Google, Bing, and other search engines are ad-supported but,
| if they weren't, I'd pay a lot for them in a blink of an eye.
|
| Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and
| increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google,
| they make most of their money in ads.
|
| >plenty of them successfully transitioned to paid
| subscription model
|
| That's not really true, you have massive consolation because
| their business model is nonviable any other way.
| TheTrotters wrote:
| > Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and
| increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google,
| they make most of their money in ads.
|
| They make money from ads... which people see when they use
| search.
|
| Ad-support allows for a _much_ greater userbase which is a
| key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good
| social network. It doesn't mean people wouldn't pay a lot
| for those services if they were paywalled.
|
| Of course if, say, Google charged for search, users could
| defect to Bing.
|
| But the argument here is that Twitter's users won't defect
| anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a
| coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible.
|
| EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to
| pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps.
| And that's only a different (presumably better for the
| buyers) front end, not the core service.
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| > Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is
| a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good
| social network.
|
| This logic is backwards. Having a large userbase allows
| them to sell ads in the first place to the user base that
| won't pay for the service in the first place.
|
| Pretty much every large tech website has a building phase
| where they make no money and sell no ads while building a
| user base large enough to start selling ads. None of the
| large web companies today have charged to use their
| product and at this point it's unlikely they could.
|
| >But the argument here is that Twitter's users won't
| defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for
| them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline
| impossible.
|
| Which is a terrible argument written by someone who
| doesn't understand the market. It's like saying no one
| will move away from AIM in 1999. Yes, people will. There
| are lots of historical examples, including the Digg to
| Reddit exodus. Even Facebook itself has had the problem
| of users migrating away from Facebook. Facebook has
| literally bought companies where users have migrated to
| (Instagram/WhatsApp).
|
| > EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are
| willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different
| Twitter apps.
|
| Virtually none. No one was paying for TweetDeck and now
| it's part of Twitter. Consumers aren't using HootSuite or
| Sprout Social, they target businesses. Going down the
| Android list most Twitter apps are free, the few that
| cost anything have small install bases (Fenix 2 <100k
| purchases, Talon for Twitter is ~ 100k purchases).
| Twitter has an daily active users of over 300 million
| users. So maybe 0.1% are willing to pay a one time fee
| for a client? I don't think Twitter can do much with
| that.
|
| Virtually no one,on a consumer level, is willing to pay
| for a messaging service. WhatsApp (one-to-one) is free,
| Facebook is free (broadcast), Instagram is free, Snapchat
| is free, YouTube is free, TikTok is free, Skype is free,
| Zoom is free (to individuals), Google Chat is free,
| SMS/MMS/RCS usage is free (depending on how you look at
| the service cost).
|
| On a business level you can extract payments (think
| Slack), but on a consumer level, messaging has no value
| people are will to pay (so it's ad supported instead).
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| What I don't fully subscribe to here is the statement on
| Stratechery that:
|
| >and given that some of Twitter's most hard core users
| use third-party Twitter clients, and thus aren't
| monetizable, the revenue per addicted daily active user
| is even lower
|
| I don't see how this must be true going forward, either
| by having a standard cost for open access to the API or
| through inclusion of twitter ads and metrics in the
| endpoint streams.
|
| As pointed out they are just in the middle of re-opening
| the API developer ecosystem & it would be a shame to have
| this reversed by activist investors for the second time.
| rp1 wrote:
| You're ignoring the competitive landscape. You might pay for
| Google, but a lot of people would choose to use a free
| alternative if they needed to pay. The loss in users would
| give Google less data and make Google less effective as a
| search engine.
| TheTrotters wrote:
| You're absolutely right about Google but, I think, it's not
| necessarily true for Twitter. Their social graph is so
| important that it wouldn't make sense for any one person to
| go to a free Twitter clone.
|
| And everybody moving at roughly the same time is probably
| an insurmountable coordination problem.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > it wouldn't make sense for any one person to go to a
| free Twitter clone
|
| True, but they may leave microblogging behind altogether
| rather than pay. Twitter just isn't that valuable. Then
| again, I deleted my accounts four or five years ago.
| syshum wrote:
| >>everybody moving at roughly the same time is probably
| an insurmountable coordination problem.
|
| If this were true we would not have a long long list of
| defunct once popular platforms where people used to be,
| but moved away from in mass after poor decisions by the
| platform operators.
|
| To believe twitter is immune to the digg, myspace, etc
| effect is hubris not backed by reality
| raydev wrote:
| Myspace was for young online people. I was on Myspace. It
| was tough to even convince half of my friends during that
| time that being online was fun, let alone being on a
| social network that didn't really facilitate
| communication.
|
| Digg was for nerds and nerd-adjacent people. Not sure why
| you'd even mention it in the same breath as Twitter.
|
| Twitter's scale is so massive, the social graph so
| varied, that a true replacement is probably years away.
| It's not impossible for a competitor to take over, of
| course. Just unlikely.
| TheTrotters wrote:
| That's of course a fair point.
|
| But there are key differences. Twitter is used as a key
| communication channel for politicians, public officials,
| business executives, journalists, academics etc. all over
| the world. People's careers and influence are built
| partly on their follower count and who those followers
| are. Key users post under their real name.
|
| Digg and MySpace were very different from that.
| syshum wrote:
| >>twitter is used as a key communication channel for
| politicians, public officials, business executives,
| journalists, academics etc. all over the world
|
| I think this is over stated, Twitter is used to amplify,
| or bring attention to some announcment, event, or other
| communication but twitter itself is not the communication
| channel, it simply links to the communication channel
| which is often another platform (youtube as an example)
| or a website, or some other communication type.
|
| Twitter is advertising, be it paid ads, or the
| "politicians, public officials, business executives,
| journalists, academics " advertising their own work
| directing people off twitter to consume more of that work
|
| Personally I have found very little value and very little
| substantive communications coming out of twitter, in fact
| the only time I even visit twitter it is look at meme
| accounts not to find actual information or news
| jpindar wrote:
| >the only time I even visit twitter it is look at meme
| accounts
|
| Funny how the people who don't use something always know
| all about it. (Science Twitter is not meme Twitter.)
| syshum wrote:
| >>Science Twitter
|
| Well if science is being conducted over twitter that goes
| along way to explain the terrible state of modern
| science...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _social graph is so important that it wouldn't make
| sense for any one person to go to a free Twitter clone_
|
| Twitter doesn't have as connected a graph as _e.g._
| Facebook. This lets a few hyperconnected users credibly
| threaten defection.
| paulcole wrote:
| The amount of money I'm willing to spend on jeans, electronics,
| etc. is much higher than the amount I'm willing to spend on
| Twitter. Makes sense that a service can sell ads for more money
| than I'm willing to pay for the service.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Maybe twitter can't make (more) money. Email or Instant messagers
| don't make money, but they are essential protocols. I think any
| change to its free model will instantly change its character so
| much that it will lose relevance and drive people to simpler open
| source solutions.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| > Maybe twitter can't make money.
|
| They had 3.7B in revenue last year. They're doing ok.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Chat with the crypto bros ... they've got some ideas ...
| robofanatic wrote:
| dont know if twitter charges $$ to people with large number of
| followers. that would be a good way to make money.
| gvv wrote:
| I'm curious what will happen to Twitter's stance on BTC and
| crypto in general, given recent favorable developments.
| user-the-name wrote:
| New guy is drinking at least as much kool-aid as the old guy,
| so crypto bullshit will continue to burn the world and user
| goodwill.
| nasseri wrote:
| When will people like you begin to realize how foolish you
| sound?
| sremani wrote:
| I wish crypto people HODL-ed their opinions.
| nasseri wrote:
| Are you familiar with the phrase "laughing all the way to
| the bank"?
| pjc50 wrote:
| But you're your own bank. So you're just laughing at
| yourself.
| nasseri wrote:
| Lol this was pretty good I have to admit.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Yeah, and it doesn't apply to cryptocurrency traders, as
| by simple mathematics, they lose money on average.
| Cryptocurrency trading is a negative sum game. Any wins
| you make are either imaginary, or come straight out of
| somebody else's pocket who loses more.
| shukantpal wrote:
| If the market cap starts falling, yes
| user-the-name wrote:
| No, it has nothing to do with market cap or price at all.
| Mathematically, _whatever_ the price does, investing in
| cryptocurrencies means you will, on average, lose money.
| Even if the price is currently skyrocketing.
| z3rgl1ng wrote:
| +1
| EarlKing wrote:
| Attempting to paywall Twitter at this late stage is a recipe for
| disaster. People have become accustomed to receiving information
| 'for nothing'. Telling them that they must now pay for it will
| lead to a grand exodus elsewhere. It's not that you _cannot_
| create a paywall across a service like Twitter, but that you
| simply cannot do it on Twitter if for no reason other than the
| fact that Twitter has operated for fifteen years already without
| a paywall, and no one is going to start paying for what was
| already adequately paid for without a subscription.
|
| TL;DR Paywalls are for new services, not Twitter.
| mherdeg wrote:
| My favorite options for Twitter to make money are
|
| * Early access to tweets -- send an API call with Elon Musk's
| latest tweets 1000ms before they are public to algorithmic
| traders for $1M/month
|
| * Blue checkmark next to profile pictures that OpenSea verifies
| you own
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Elon would then instanly cease twitting on order not to
| alienate his fanbase.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Or undercut Twitter by selling folks access to his tweets
| 2000ms before they hit the API. His fanbase would eat that
| up.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| How about: Elon's tweets get sent to Teslas 5 seconds
| before Twitter shows them.
| kbelder wrote:
| In an ideal world, Elon's tweets would be sent to Elon's
| lawyers 24 hours before Twitter shows them.
| rp1 wrote:
| How would the second idea make money?
| mherdeg wrote:
| Maybe only some images get flagged with the metadata that say
| that they work with Twitter, and OpenSea pays Twitter a 10%
| cut of any works-with-Twitter image rights they sell?
| detaro wrote:
| make it only available to accounts that pay for it. Could
| work with that crowd. (or make it a paid thing on the seller
| side, pay to opt an offered series of pieces in). But
| probably overall not that much money to be had.
| everly wrote:
| If a user has already spent money purchasing an NFT that they
| want to use as their profile picture, they will almost
| certainly spend a bit more for proof of ownership.
| gandutraveler wrote:
| I use Twitter is to get the latest pulse in real time for any
| event (news story, episode). I hope they retain that. Problem
| with highly curated feeds like FB, LinkedIn is that it doesn't
| give you the the current snapshot and hence I don't even trust
| it.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Twitter need better relevancy. Their ads are some of the worse
| I've seen on any platform. The other thing they need, as pointed
| in the article, is other streams of revenue. Like LinkedIn for
| example. They sell a premium subscription to a small subsets of
| overall users (Twitter Blue is trying to do the same), have a
| successful job board, etc. The article mentions Twitter is making
| money of selling data. That's a good stream of revenue but they
| can do much better. I doubt the new CEO would make a big
| difference though. I think it's a bigger management issue than
| just replacing the CEO. We'll see how things turn out.
|
| So to respond to the original article by Ben Thompson, I don't
| think it makes sense to charge all users, but it does make a lot
| of sense to charge a subset of the users. People (companies) who
| use twitter for marketing for example.
| jollybean wrote:
| The author is risking being a bit glib without much more detailed
| data check.
|
| People don't like to pay for stuff, and while surely Twitter has
| many users for whom $4 would be irrelevant, it's going to be a
| surprisingly small number - and - we've already established a
| price of $0 in people's minds for the service.
|
| Charging $25/month for the blue check and a bunch of other pro
| services (including priority in feeds) might be some kind of
| opportunity.
|
| Where the author is correct and also reasonable in being more
| generalized about it ... is the lack of a good Ad Program. That
| should be embarrassing. Twitter has enough data to be able to
| offer something approaching targeted, actionable Ads like
| Facebook. And I think they can do it in a reasonable way.
| artfulhippo wrote:
| Twitter's success derives from how well it serves the people who
| work on Twitter. Think politicians, business leaders, investors,
| celebrities, influencers, tech workers, journalists.
|
| People who work on Twitter, who have built a large following, who
| use Twitter to propagate messages, to network with peers, and to
| learn facts and rumors, would pay not just $4/month but $4000.
| Whatever the price Twitter would charge journalists, they would
| gladly pay; it's a cost of doing business.
|
| Actually, in addition to being a business expense, Twitter is a
| super-addictive dopamine hit ego booster, a game that makes it's
| high-scoring players feel important.
|
| Twitter's problem is that it makes the low-scoring players feel
| bad. To use Twitter without a Blue Check is just not that
| valuable to most people. Just like the Twitter elites derive a
| sense of self-importance from their internet followers, the
| Twitter masses feel a sense of illegitimacy, an angst against the
| platform for driving the public discourse into a dumpster fire.
|
| As long as Twitter provides news and entertainment, it'll get
| used. But Twitter insiders and power users (Blue Checks) would be
| well-served to heed the infamous advice: "Don't get high on your
| own supply."
| dsalzman wrote:
| I agree. It really is becoming the Bloomberg Terminal 2.0.
| 3maj wrote:
| Twitter will never replace bbg.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Cap the number of followers free accounts can have.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I'm not sure a blue check is very important for engagement. I
| don't have a blue check, and easily drive more engagement than
| many verified accounts I follow. And I'm not the only one.
| riffic wrote:
| Blue checks are an arbitrary decree from above that someone
| inside Twitter likes you. The whole thing is a sham.
| solarkraft wrote:
| It's even a badge of shame in some circles.
| paulcole wrote:
| Which circles is it a badge of shame in?
| dymk wrote:
| This one
| jdavis703 wrote:
| The folks who rage against the media and political
| establishment (blue checkmarks are basically granted
| automatically to journalists at traditional media outlets
| and to anyone running for office.)
| ctdonath wrote:
| Blue check used to mean "identity objectively verified",
| useful to confirm the twiterati using the name is the
| actual person/group others think they are.
|
| Then came the Great Bluecheck Purge, where anyone
| exhibiting opinions not preferred by Twitter management
| had their blue check revoked/denied - which in practice
| was applied generally to Republicans, who constitute
| about half the USA. (We're talking mainstream views, not
| just weirdos.)
|
| Ergo, anyone with a blue check is, by Twitter decree, not
| a Republican. For Republicans, blue check now amounts to
| a "badge of shame" indicating Twitter-approved
| opposition.
|
| Blue checks were changed from "identity confirmed" to
| "one of us, not them".
| kbelder wrote:
| Sure, but it wasn't so absolute. They didn't uncheck all
| conservatives, they just applied standards unevenly (but
| probably, in their minds, justifiably), which results in
| disproportionate results.
|
| It's an echo chamber problem, but I'm not sure it's
| deliberate.
| fragmede wrote:
| In an organization with hundreds, possibly thousands of
| people, how would you get human-defined standards to be
| applied evenly when other people are actively existing in
| the grey area between what is and is not okay? Eg how do
| you define pornography that won't also get eg breast
| exams for cancer blocked? Now imagine that someone stands
| to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if they
| can get something past your very human operators that
| both is (according to viewers) and is not (according to
| the censors) pornography.
|
| The problem's even harder with text - sarcasm and satire
| just don't come off in pure text. Emoji and "/s" helps,
| but they're not requisite.
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| So they stopped verifying racists? Sounds fine to me.
| jlawson wrote:
| The world must be so simple and straightforward to you
| when you can just throw millions of people in a slur-
| labeled category and then treat them as non-humans
| deserving of unlimited suffering.
| riffic wrote:
| this happens to leftists, journalists, and other critics,
| not just repubs:
|
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-
| account-ba...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
| jlawson wrote:
| No, you're confused. Those are suspensions. We're talking
| about removing the blue check mark or denying it. This
| happens to people who aren't morally-approved by Twitter
| for moral reasons.
|
| For example, the blue check was _removed_ from Milo
| Yiannopolous (the gay conservative provocateur who was
| canceled a few years ago), after he was previously
| verified.
|
| Every "rule" on Twitter is no more than a tool used to
| create the appearance of left-wing consensus by
| suppressing alternative views through selective
| enforcement. Nothing is even-handed, and it's incredibly
| obvious when you're the target.
| ghaff wrote:
| Blue checks are mostly reserved for some specific
| categories of users: celebrities, mainstream media
| journalists, and politicians. It's not absolute but my
| experience is that being only reasonably well known
| (thousands of followers) in, say, tech circles isn't enough
| to get a blue check. So it's not so much being liked but
| being in a category which Twitter has determined is
| important to avoid people faking identity.
|
| I had someone spoof my profile a while back. (Chose hard to
| tell apart user name and used my profile pic etc. to do
| some crypto spamming.) Twitter promptly nuked their account
| but wouldn't verify me afterwards.
| jlawson wrote:
| While there are many factors, an essential one is that
| someone in Twitter finds you morally acceptable.
|
| If Twitter thinks you're not morally good, they will
| actually _remove_ a blue check which they previously
| granted (e.g. they did this to Milo Yiannopolous). If
| blue checks were just about identity veritifaction, this
| would make no sense since Milo 's account's identity was
| never in question. Ergo, it isn't just about identity
| verification.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| This has been my experience as well. A perfect example is
| podcasters - Anna [1] hosts a relatively popular and
| occasionally politically inconvenient podcast called Red
| Scare. No check. Alexandra [2], the host of Call Me
| Daddy, also a popular comedy podcast, naturally has a
| check. This is pretty openly discussed by e-celebs of
| middling fame. Until one reaches a critical mass of
| popularity, you won't get a check if you don't correctly
| toe the culture line.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/annakhachiyan [2]
| https://twitter.com/alexandracooper
| artfulhippo wrote:
| Assuming that you "work on Twitter", ie, your career is in
| part built on Twitter, what do you think the value of a Blue
| Check is? I would bet it's worth more than $1000/yr to the
| average person in the "Twitter Middle Class" (someone using
| Twitter for work but not at mega scale). Even a single digit
| percentage point boost in engagement is worth a lot, or do
| you disagree?
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Twitter is worth about the same as say a Bloomberg News or
| WSJ subscription to me. Perhaps slightly more. That is to
| say I'd pay a few hundred bucks for it.
|
| But there's no way I'm spending $1,000 a year on it if I
| can't expense or write it off taxes (right now my usage is
| a mix of personal and non-personal, so it's hard to
| correctly account for it).
| brnt wrote:
| > Twitter's success derives from how well it serves the people
| who work on Twitter.
|
| Black Rock and Cato pushed Dorsey out. I thought this was
| common knowledge and a clear sign of where Twitter is headed
| (and indeed where some notorious Twitterers would have liked it
| to go a while back).
|
| Getting high on ones own supply is precisely the point. Its
| meant to be addictive, for Twitterers and followers alike.
| boldslogan wrote:
| Can you give links for further reading. I think I read about
| certain investors but never saw black rock names as one who
| wanted him out.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Who is Cato in this? Presumably not the Cato Institute? Lol
| siruncledrew wrote:
| I would be surprised if Twitter doesn't already have some kind
| of behind-the-scenes payment arrangement for these "VIP" level
| users to protect their accounts and do whatever other special
| things.
|
| If Twitter doesn't already do this, then it's dumb, quite
| frankly, from a business sense due to all the extra labor (in
| terms of engineers, support, etc) to provide services for these
| VIPs compared to normal users. Like you said, if these Twitter
| VIPs are having their cake and eating it too with monetizing
| Twitter for their own benefit, why wouldn't Twitter ask for a
| cut.
|
| Twitter's already done what even other major social platform
| has done and become dependent on advertising revenue. If
| Twitter becomes all paid and charges even $1/mo, that would
| wipe out a huge amount of "normal" users that are accustomed to
| paying the price of free, and then that's going to impact the
| ad revenue because of lesser targeted normal people to
| advertise to.
|
| I think the problem Twitter is going to face is how to balance
| all the plates they have in the air with realistic
| expectations.
|
| It's the "classic" problem that these platforms want to solve
| to keep up with investor expectations. So far, there's mostly a
| bunch of 'little' approaches to this like selling some random
| digital trinkets or paying for some 'meh' extra features, but
| these things are like side-dishes that don't reap enough
| benefits to compensate for appetites of continuous profit
| expansion.
|
| This is sort of like being torn different ways. From one angle,
| if Twitter "changing the formula too much" makes the platform
| worse and people leave, then they don't grow and face
| shareholder backlash. From another angle, if Twitter hits a
| wall on monetization and can't figure out how to boost their
| cap, then Twitter becomes an unattractive investment and will
| just kinda flatline growth. And finally, people could still
| just find a new thing to go to anyways and if Twitter does not
| and stays Twitter, people still might get bored and move over
| to TikTok or Reddit or whatever.
|
| Basically, even Twitter shows it's still hard to balance
| reality with desire with mission.
| bingohbangoh wrote:
| You could offset the costs of building "customer" filters for
| super users as well -- ones that do a lot of work to ensure
| certain people never comment or their comments are
| downweighted.
| rhino369 wrote:
| >If Twitter doesn't already do this, then it's dumb, quite
| frankly, from a business sense due to all the extra labor (in
| terms of engineers, support, etc) to provide services for
| these VIPs compared to normal users. Like you said, if these
| Twitter VIPs are having their cake and eating it too with
| monetizing Twitter for their own benefit, why wouldn't
| Twitter ask for a cut.
|
| They probably drive a ton of engagement, which benefits
| twitter.
| riffic wrote:
| > behind-the-scenes payment arrangement for these "VIP" level
| users
|
| Twitter licenses premium data APIs. Twitter's "VIP level"
| users are those that pay significant amounts of money to
| consume these data APIs to extrapolate whatever sort of
| information the data can provide.
|
| You can research and confirm this yourself but sources for my
| assertion:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/business-24397472
|
| https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/19/what-will-
| happen-t...
|
| If you're paying money to Twitter for this sort of info,
| Twitter bends over backwards to support you.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Why is there this assumption that people will pay for
| something that's currently free?
| vmoore wrote:
| > Think politicians, business leaders, investors, celebrities,
| influencers, tech workers, journalists.
|
| I always found it amusing that common people who are not that
| interesting share the same platform with influential people /
| thought leaders / celebrities. The fact you can just cold tweet
| and @mention a famous person out of the blue is highly
| parasocial and strange.
| handrous wrote:
| Well--you can @ their social media manager, anyway. Not much
| different than "calling your Senator" and getting some
| secretary in their office.
|
| Though I'm sure some do actually use it themselves (Musk
| seems to, for instance)
| solarkraft wrote:
| A lot of them seem to and that's the big deal. Though they
| likely won't see your mention if they don't follow you.
| artfulhippo wrote:
| Verified Users get a separate priority queue; the real
| benefit of being a Blue Check is that other Blue Checks
| will see when you mention them.
| authed wrote:
| > Think politicians
|
| Twitter is biased, that's what I think.
| [deleted]
| gandutraveler wrote:
| I would monetize the reach of a post if i were Twitter CEO.
| Today leaders politicians, celebrities, corps etc have such a
| wider reach through Twitter due to their following, so Twitter
| can set a default max threshold on the how many audience the
| post will reach to and allow users to pay for boost their
| reach.
| javajosh wrote:
| I like this because "reach" scales with "moral hazard" and so
| adding default network decay would help dampen the
| outragememes. But if you pay to take the dampening off you
| can be accurately judged for paying to propagate helpful or
| harmful things.
| scotu wrote:
| this is literally ads.. and we saw how well that works (for
| say Facebook)
| glintik wrote:
| New business model from me - $0.01 per post/comment, $1 - per
| hating post/comment.
|
| Make world happy again!
| klyrs wrote:
| Don't silence dissent, just charge for it? This is the dystopia
| that scifi taught me to expect..
| riffic wrote:
| I've proposed a business model for a while for Twitter: take
| their software and whitelabel it for institutions, media, or
| whoever's big enough to own their own domain name and wants to
| have their own @namespace @example.com
|
| this would be a good fit for large media sites (journalism
| twitter is huge), government, businesses. let them pay.
|
| examples of this being expressed here by me:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21159283
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25895654
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| That's great but I just don't see the value there
| riffic wrote:
| Governments don't get value from Twitter?
|
| Journalists don't get value from Twitter?
|
| Influencers and other business users don't get value from
| Twitter? Sports teams? Non-commercial entities?
|
| I appreciate your insight but I disagree with your analysis.
| Talanes wrote:
| That doesn't mean they'd get value by running their own
| namespace though.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| You might be surprised to know the NSA has already cloned
| versions of Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter onto US classified
| networks so IC and DoD agents can use them to publish and
| exchange classified information the same way influencers use
| normal social media. I can't remember what they call the Tumblr
| clone, but the Twitter one is eChirp and the Facebook one is
| called Tapioca.
|
| It's not like there's anything all that complicated about the
| basic tech model of "loosely synchronized, eventually
| consistent live data feed algorithmically sorted with the
| ability to follow and group sources." Where these services earn
| their valuations is in sheer scale of the user base combined
| with the backend telemetry and machine learning services that
| drive user profiling and personalized ads, but government
| institutional use would not want or need those features. As far
| as I know, eChirp and Tapioca are maintained by volunteers and
| functionally equivalent to Twitter and Facebook if you stripped
| out the features built for serving personalized ads and
| maximizing reader engagement.
| gargron wrote:
| You are describing Mastodon [1]
|
| [1]: https://joinmastodon.org
| riffic wrote:
| hah, yes in a way I am.
|
| edit: Eugen, you can steal this business model from Twitter
| if they don't want to play in this space. Run Mastodon-as-a-
| service and sell it to institutional actors. I don't know who
| runs Masto.Host but they seem to be positioned to offer your
| software as a service to these groups.
|
| There are other AP implementations that can be sold (as a
| service) to these large pocketed groups, not just your own
| software product.
|
| another edit: this may leave a sour taste in your mouth but
| you now have a notable political user of your software, one
| that more than likely does not have the technical competence
| to be running it on their own. Someone could be making money
| off of them by providing a managed, white-labeled Mastodon
| instance (and then be responsible for scaling, security,
| availability, all the devops shit, etc). Not saying that
| should be you, but someone could.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense. If people are willing to pay
| for a Twitter like service they are going to pay Twitter
| before they pay for mastodon instances
| m4rtink wrote:
| And companies already run their own Mastodon instances - the
| Japanese imageboard/artist website Pixiv runs a Mastodon
| instance called Pawoo. That's apparently how elephants and/or
| mammoths sound like in Japanese. :)
| riffic wrote:
| sounds like Pixiv has the ops expertise to potentially run
| Mastodon-as-a-Service to those who would pay to host a
| managed instance.
|
| There's value in managed services (security, keeping
| updates applied, uptime, scaling, etc etc)
|
| If there's someone at Pixiv reading this and looking to
| pivot, I won't feel bad if you take this idea and run with
| it.
| danguson wrote:
| I have read from an article that they will enable NFT-based
| profile pictures in the near future, I wonder how will the new
| CEO act on this feature.
| lekevicius wrote:
| The question is, which aspect is monetized: reading or writing?
| If it's reading, then I see Twitter quickly losing out to a
| platform that is free to read. Politicians and celebrities
| wouldn't make announcements on a platform that requires payment
| to read. If it's writing / having an account, then the suggestion
| is a lot more reasonable. I would pay $4/mo, and would be very
| glad to not have spam comments below every tweet I read.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Twitter is a first-responder medium. If people had to pay we'd
| miss so many breaking events that make it valuable to
| journalists et al in the first place. That model would work for
| a newsletter , but not for a live medium
| barkerja wrote:
| They already have a subscription model for this: Twitter Blue
| https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/introduci...
|
| It enhances the experience on Twitter for those that desire
| more features: a thread feature (which is /really/ nice IMHO),
| ability to cancel tweets after send, more color themes and
| customizable icons, etc.
|
| The Twitter "as we know it" will likely always remain free and
| ad-driven, but if you want an enhanced experience, you're going
| to have to pay for it. And that's fine by me.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| I'd buy twitter blue right now if it didn't still have ads.
| I'd pay 3 times its cost if it was just ad free. Sure it's
| not a problem on my computer because I have adblock but I
| primarily use twitter on my phone, and I'm too lazy to set up
| an adblocking DNS like pihole.
| lekevicius wrote:
| You can try to use a third-party client like Tweetbot. They
| don't have ads.
| yunruse wrote:
| A carefully-applied monetisation model could be quite helpful
| for the community as well as Twitter's bottom line. Private
| accounts - perhaps with an extended network, friends-of-friends
| - could still remain free and generate ad revenue.
|
| The one issue is that chipping off existing features would
| cause major backlash. While removing low-quality replies and
| other spam is nice, it relies on even higher-quality
| moderation, to provide adequate incentive not to lose out on a
| purchase, but also to avoid regulatory issues, as this now
| becomes a product.
|
| When it comes to adding features to sweeten the deal, however,
| there are very few that can really be added that provide a
| tangible benefit. The only feature I can think of is being able
| to edit tweets - or more accurately, embed a second tweet,
| similar to a quote-tweet, to provide an update. This would
| allow people to provide context, retract claims, or other uses,
| especially when a tweet gets attention or controversy, and
| could go a small way in reducing toxicity.
| [deleted]
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million
| daily addicted users -- which I think vastly overstates Twitter's
| elasticity of demand amongst its core user base_
|
| Am I reading this correctly, that he believes Twitter would
| retain considerably more than two thirds of their daily addicted
| users if they asked them for ~$4/month? Even two thirds sounds
| grossly unrealistic to me. I would be astonished if even one in
| _ten_ stayed. I'd even be more than a little surprised if one in
| ten stayed if you asked them for $1 /month.
|
| (I'm mostly a non-spender and non-user of social media. All I'm
| basing this on is my feelings and observations of the fickleness
| of consumption and people's commonly-irrational behaviour around
| free things.)
| kibibyte wrote:
| I wonder if the author remembers App.net.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| The very reason why much of the internet is financed by
| advertising money is because users do not in fact want to pay a
| subscription.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| > I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed.
|
| Yep. They don't even need to go to subscription model to be
| profitable. Keep on doing what they're doing, maybe trim the
| employee headcount to something more reasonable, and continue
| to enjoy modest - as in, unsexy but consistent - year-over-year
| ad revenue gains.
| pram wrote:
| This might work if Twitter was a private company. Their stock
| has been an enduring stinker and frankly I would bet on it
| being sold rather than the owners being satisfied with
| 'unsexy consistency'
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| And that is totally fine when looking for the "unsexy ad-
| revenue gain" and not stock appreciation.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Which isn't what anyone is looking for with twitter. That
| strategy leads to the CEO being fired.
| ldehaan wrote:
| Yeah I quit everything but IRC. Twitter was so gross, I don't
| miss it, but actually actively wish that it would die. It's SO
| gross. I can't believe I used that trash for as long as I did,
| talk about a tool to destroy commonality man. The sooner people
| quit, the better the world will be, I hope one day it will be
| seen as akin to smoking in public, the more smokers the more
| dangerous. Maybe like cigarettes one day it will only be
| popular in France where all the wokest freaks live.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| I was with you until the 'woke France' stuff.
| xmprt wrote:
| Which is ironic because France strikes me as one of the
| least "woke" countries in Europe.
| TillE wrote:
| No country is perfect, but French society is pretty
| notoriously sexist and racist.
| ladon86 wrote:
| What about $7.99/mo to apply for and keep a blue check? It's
| only displayed if you're verified _and_ a subscriber.
| robofanatic wrote:
| or charge few cents per post for users with large number of
| followers. if you have thousands for followers you should be
| little careful in terms of what you post. charging money
| would put some control.
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aaron-
| Ahuvia/publicatio...
| mortenjorck wrote:
| The blue check, calling card of the Twitter cultural elite,
| is such a highly coveted status symbol that it's almost
| incomprehensible to me that Twitter hasn't come up with a way
| to directly monetize it. It's an incredible amount of value
| just sitting there.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I'd expect it to be more like 1 in a hundred staying. Certainly
| I'd take it as an excuse to cut the tie and try to find which
| discords people had fled to. They'd probably lose a third of
| their users _simply by annoucing the plan_.
|
| There is one plan which they've never considered and probably
| never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay for the
| "content creators" you like.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Mind you, this is talking about daily addicted users, not the
| total user base.
| abernard1 wrote:
| > There is one plan which they've never considered and
| probably never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay
| for the "content creators" you like.
|
| They will never do this.
|
| Twitter has become a self-absorbed status tool for people who
| believe the supposedly correct things. These days, one of
| those things is thin-skinned censorship. Allowing payments
| would reveal that their most popular users are people that do
| not agree with the worldviews of the Twitterati.
|
| If it comes down to charging marketers for some hand-wavy
| conception of "reach" that can't be attributed, or _direct_
| attribution that would definitively show that Twitter is a
| biased dumpster fire, Twitter will always pick the former.
| Akronymus wrote:
| I don't even think that discord is that good an alternative.
|
| Matrix and/or IRC works REALLY well for me, for the most
| part.
|
| I am on discord mostly because pre-existing communities/not
| having any alternative.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| Discord is great because of community discoverability and
| ease of joining IMO. My main gripe with IRC is that I need
| to add a whole separate server with a separate login to
| access different channels (which is, ofc, a feature and not
| a bug). This means I end up with like 4-5 different servers
| coexisting in my irssi instance. On top of that, I need
| access to a persistent server session, as some of these
| servers ban cloud IRC providers like IRCCloud.
|
| Overall, Discord is just a lot better for getting small
| groups spun up quickly. That said, I also have to use
| Discord for certain work client communities (mostly in the
| crypto space), and it's annoying to maintain a separate
| professional Discord identity from my social one. The
| compromise I've settled on is that I use social login in
| the web client and work login on Desktop, but on mobile I
| have to pick one or the other, or do a lot of annoying
| login switching. So, to some extent, I totally agree.
| Ironically easier to SSH into my server on my phone and run
| tmux if I need to access my various IRC sessions.
| basscomm wrote:
| > There is one plan which they've never considered and
| probably never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay
| for the "content creators" you like.
|
| Twitter rolled out Super Follows[1] and Twitter Blue[2] a few
| months ago
|
| [1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introd
| uci... [2] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021
| /introduci...
| moralestapia wrote:
| And it was pretty much DOA, IIRC.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Super Follows work well, Twitter Blue just doesn't have
| much pull to it since it doesn't allow editing tweets.
| People won't drop Patreon immediately, but over time
| we'll see Super Follows more since Twitter can provide
| more chances of discovery over Patreon.
| notatoad wrote:
| twitter blue launched in the US on november 9. i think
| it's a little early to call it DOA.
|
| super-follows launched widely around the same time, after
| being in private beta since september. at least in my
| anecdotal experience, i see quite a few high-profile
| twitter personalities have enabled it - no idea how many
| people are actually paying them though.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| Not just Discord, every little social circle would spin up
| local mastodon instances. It would be really good for
| decentralization actually, I kinda want them to do this lmao
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Not just Discord, every little social circle would spin up
| local mastodon instances.
|
| The Hacker News force is strong in this one.
|
| on edit: born of familiarity with the genre here, but no
| there is not going to be a great upswelling of everyone
| running to spin up local mastodon instances. Except in some
| of the techie market, and not even all of us have the time
| for that.
| Kye wrote:
| masto.host is pretty much the standard managed platform
| for people who don't want to run their own Mastodon. $7
| is only a little more expensive than this proposed price,
| and you can host a few friends on it.
| tata71 wrote:
| Second this, hosted private (allowing interop with
| public) spaces will become ubiquitous.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| While i agree with you that this is an unlikely future,
| trump is launching a mastadon instance for himself and
| his followers, so it is totally a thing that people are
| doing - slowly.
|
| In fact, the domain of your account could actually be a
| huge social symbol of how important you are. Maybe
| celebrities use @verified.social while everyone else gets
| @twitter.com or @trump.social or whatever.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| > The Hacker News force is strong in this one.
|
| Since I don't have enough karma to downvote I'll say why
| I hate this kind of comment.
|
| 1) It violates HN's comment guidelines, "Be kind."
| "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the
| community. "
|
| 2) It tries to put you above all the "nerds". As if
| you're so much smarter than the borderline asperger nerds
| that are somehow incapable of putting any thought into
| usability of products.
|
| 3) You're one of us, you're here on Hacker News. This is
| a giant non-monolithic forum.
|
| 4) It lacks imagination and it's stuck in the status quo.
| Innovation doesn't just appear fully formed out of a
| slick FAANG press conference. Innovation happens one
| curious motivated hacker at a time pushing barely usable
| tech forward while people like you sneer at them.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| My main point is that "Free" is a strong force to reckon
| with, in the face of a monthly subscription fee. Of
| course, Mastodon isn't actually free, but it's the sort
| of situation like IRC, where only one ops guy willing to
| spend a little bit can host the space for everyone.
|
| At least, this is the logic I and the rest of my Twitter
| circle (which is fairly large! I've met probably 50-100
| people irl through Twitter, got my job through Twitter,
| have two accounts with follower counts in the thousands,
| etc) would likely use if planning to jump ship. People
| who treat Twitter as a pure feed rather than as a social
| space might be willing to pay, but part of what makes
| Twitter such a great news source is that _anyone_ can
| post current happenings, and how many of those _anyones_
| with small accounts will be willing to pay just to use
| the platform once every week or two?
|
| Of course, Twitter could get around all this by having
| paid accounts for power users only, but then many of the
| most important and largest accounts would jump ship and
| devalue the platform for everyone else, leaving only paid
| marketing accounts that cater to fans and brands. Not a
| great situation.
|
| Point being, it's a hard problem, for Twitter to monetize
| without losing the thing that makes it a great platform,
| and my guess is charging all users a flat subscription
| fee ain't gonna cut it, and would produce an exodus to
| the next-most-similar platform, i.e. Mastodon.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| Maybe a bit tangential to the original comment, but
| starting my potentially controversial rant on Mastodon
| and Twitter:
|
| The real problem with Mastodon, is that it's too similar
| to Twitter! People try out new sites because they have
| something different in terms of content creation or
| consumption (Discord, with its real-time communication
| and flow of conversations, Tiktok for its instant video
| creation and consumption, etc...) But Mastodon has
| nothing new to show off, since it's basically a Twitter
| clone (yeah, with some extra features like federation,
| but seriously why use it when you have Twitter?)
|
| Mastodon has basically become Twitter for ex-Twitter
| people who don't want to deal with ratios and wild crowds
| and have their own "cozy" space. And I've observed people
| trying to move to Mastodon and realize it's a very quite
| place and immediately jump back in on Twitter after a
| month... I understand that there is a niche of people who
| dig that kind of cozy stuff, but most people still just
| love the wildness of Twitter where anyone can be
| commented on, retweeted, quote-tweeted, "ratioed", and
| "get judged and fucked by the audience". Yes, it's also
| one of the most horrible and deranged places of the
| Internet, but people accept that and still log in because
| we have our own death drives to fulfill. We know that
| cigarettes and drugs are harmful, but isn't that the
| point?
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| Oh, I totally agree on all counts. I have no reason to
| use Mastodon while Twitter still exists and is free. OTOH
| I'm currently working at a company building a social
| platform specifically targeted at crypto communities, and
| it's fun to think about what sorts of different features
| we can offer to that space of users and their specialized
| needs.
| rapnie wrote:
| There is only so much that one microblogging app differs
| from another, or one chat app from yet another chat app.
| But there's more to Mastodon than what you describe. The
| fact that you have chronological timelines, and not some
| random algorithmically generated list and recommendations
| flying in from everywhere, is really refreshing. This
| means too that when you first use Mastodon, your UI is
| mostly empty. It seems quiet. The impatient ones then
| already leave. If you take the time to build your
| following, then you get a great personal timeline. And
| the server instance you choose can already give you a
| nice community in the server timeline. The fediverse is
| small compared to Twitter user base, but with millions of
| users there's plenty to explore and engage with. And
| there's better netiquette in general.
| [deleted]
| mejutoco wrote:
| A move like that could make very transparent how many of those
| accounts are bots. It seems risky if the active users are
| inflated (idk if it is the case but it could very well be)
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| I think they should try it. What's the worst that happens? A
| horrible blight on society goes under or it becomes something
| worthwhile for the first time in its corporate history. Either
| way it improves the world!
| adventured wrote:
| Your take is correct. Twitter would be decimated by requiring
| $4/month to use it, and that might be generous. Could they even
| get 5-10 million paying subscribers? Probably initially,
| however the network would erode rapidly and those paying
| subscribers would drop off.
|
| Someone else would simply step in and fill their shoes with an
| ad model. The ad model works exceptionally well. Twitter's
| primary problem is and always has been cost bloat. They should
| have 30-40% operating income margins; instead it's more like
| 7%. They have always been very poorly operated and very poorly
| structured as a business. They did $357m in operating income on
| $4.8b in sales the last four quarters. When Facebook was that
| size they had 25-30% operating income margins (while growing
| very fast), there's no reason Twitter shouldn't be able to at
| least match that at this stage of their business life (there
| isn't some great 80% growth surge coming next year that they
| need to be prepared for, staffing up ahead of time).
| zuminator wrote:
| They could limit their free tier to say 1000 characters and
| 10 retweets a day, while retaining unlimited browsing and
| "likes." If you want more than that, subscribe to Twitter
| Blue. Or watch a 30 second ad to reload your
| character/retweet inventory. If they do it right they could
| get obsessive Tweeters paying $99.99 a pop like free-to-pay
| gamers trying to max out their gear.
| 3maj wrote:
| Twitters Revenue/Employee Headcount (not counting any
| contractors) is currently around 636k/employee. As far as
| FAANG companies go Twitter has an over bloated workforce.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| Agreed, I just don't see it.
|
| Subscriber counts for a handful of subscription companies:
| Netflix: 209M Amazon Prime: 200M Spotify: 165M
| Disney+: 118M Youtube Premium/Music: 50M Hulu: 44M
| Charter: 30M NY Times: 8M WaPo: 3M
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Except for youtube premium you don't have any alternative for
| the sites available for free. For twitter there is sea of
| alternatives that does the exact same thing.
| nicce wrote:
| Sea of alternatives and I have never heard about one.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Parler popped up pretty quickly. I would be very
| surprised if everyone didn't immediately migrate if
| twitter announced this.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > there is sea of alternatives
|
| None of them even remotely have Twitter's reach, and more
| importantly content creators ranging from heads of state to
| Nobel Prize winners to A-list celebrities.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Right, but people are not paying $4 to read this. At
| least 99% of the market would drop off. I literally just
| log on to see what hilarious things papa elon tweet,
| without it I would just... do something better with my
| time.
| logifail wrote:
| > heads of state to Nobel Prize winners to A-list
| celebrities
|
| I'm reminded of my OH's retort to someone reportedly
| claiming fluency in multiple languages, "Great, but do
| they have anything interesting to say in any of them?"
|
| I'm just not interested in Twitter as a source of
| information. For me, it's a last-ditch-saloon means to
| complain to companies who can't or won't publish a
| customer services email address. That's all.
| Closi wrote:
| Absolutely agreed - what's the thing in common all the
| listed 'paid for' subscriptions have? Good quality
| content.
|
| What's twitters general concept? 140 word tweets that are
| intended to have very little thought go into them in
| general. That to me is poor quality content.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Twitter is the first place every piece of information has
| been posted on the internet for a decade. Seeing it asap
| might not matter for you, but it does for many people.
| distances wrote:
| Spotify has a free tier too of course, with a bit more free
| users than paying ones according to Wikipedia.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| The key is that none of these have free alternatives, besides
| NY Times and Washington Post (I don't know what Charter is).
| Twitter has many free alternatives so it'd be closer to the
| bottom of this list.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Maybe they could charge people $1 to label other's posts as fake
| news. And $1 to remove one vote that a post is fake news.
|
| Capitalize on the flame wars. Ya, it won't make the world a
| better place but does Twitter do that now?
| cletus wrote:
| A better title might be: How to Kill Twitter With This One Trick
| (Paid Access)
|
| Twitter is IMHO only a communication platform for celebrities and
| brands. This is <0.1% of the user base. For most people, your
| Tweets are even less noteworthy than Youtube comments.
|
| What users use Twitter for seems to be three things:
|
| 1. As a de facto notifications platform;
|
| 2. As a news feed aggregator. This then means consuming content
| off platform; and
|
| 3. "Voting" on content you agree or disagree with. Ultimately
| this is what liking and retweeing really is: no different to
| liking a Youtube video. That's all it does.
|
| Users are famously unwilling to part with even small sums of
| money for Internet services. Twitter seems no different here.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I really don't think Twitter could afford to charge for reading
| or writing. There is too much competition for eyeballs in social.
| What they need to do is continue making it free, and enable
| creators to grew new businesses on top of Twitter and take a cut.
| The issue here is Apple and Google taking 30%, but growth is
| growth, even if that cost exists.
| a-dub wrote:
| twitter would be a lot more fun if they just accepted what
| they're actually useful for, an attention game. they should hire
| a large team of writers and ban links to the real world- turn the
| whole thing into a giant fantasy larp game and charge people to
| play.
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