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It's time to rethink twitter and launch another service. Readers want to see the content they select, in the order they select, from people/posters they find i

It's time to rethink twitter and launch another service. Readers want to see the content they select, in the order they select, from people/posters they find interesting. Have conversations and maybe connect with people they follow. Posters want to control their feed and who sees it, control the conversation a bit more, perhaps pay for better tools to curate replies, get rid of spam/trolls etc, have their complaints about stalking/nazis/trolls taken seriously by someone who cares. Advertising is at the root of the problems of Twitter because advertisers are their only customer - they are forced by their bottom line to find ever more inventive ways to boost impressions (the overwhelming notifications, the dystopian 'home' view which shows you content selected by twitter, showing likes, plays for engagement/eyeballs rather than quality, and now this new 'interest-based network' idea which lets twitter select content). Facebook suffers from the same disease - they must own your feed and your attention, any user control hits their bottom line. The solution is of course the radical option of removing advertising entirely. Readers should always be free as they donate their time and attention. Posters with thousands of followers (whether businesses or individuals) would happily pay for better tools to manage their readers, manage the feed, manage responses to posts etc. Some of them would pay quite a lot for more control/access. Journalists, traders, businesses, developers would pay for access to a firehose of data and ways of working with that data (public data with user permission of course). I'd pay to broadcast on a version of twitter without ads, nazis and trolls, wouldn't you?

pjc50 8y ago
No no no, the content producers are the ones doing the work and the readers should be funding the platform somehow. And possibly the creators too. I'd like a "Reddit gold"-like system. (I know I wouldn't pay to post because I have lurked on metafilter for most of its life but never paid the $5 to post)
- panarky 8y ago
  Make the readers pay and you'll lose your audience. Make the posters pay and you'll lose your content. Without advertising, that means the service cannot make a profit. Maybe that's the solution to the puzzle.
  - grey-area 8y ago
    Make the posters pay and you'll lose your content. I think that's only true if you try to charge all posters. Advertising is actively damaging our social networks, as it did newspapers before them.
    - panarky 8y ago
      If the service is built to maximize the benefit to users (instead of to maximize benefit to advertisers, or to maximize a corporation's profits), then I'd argue that you cannot charge even some posters. Maximizing the benefit to readers means getting the most and best content. Charging posters will eliminate some posts which is bad for readers. And when a poster is willing to pay, that means the poster is profiting from the content, which means there's some motive other than writing the best content for the reader. So my argument is that any financial gain for the operator, whether from advertising or directly charging users, will diminish the value of the service for both readers and posters. If the goal is the best possible conversation, then let's look to non-commercial models that remove the distorting and corrupting influence of profit.
      - grey-area 8y ago
        An unfunded service has zero benefit as it doesn't exist. So propose a non-commercial model which would work and cover all costs (including hosting).
  - your-nanny 8y ago
    Seems like posters with many thousands of followers have different needs than the typical one; sell premium tools to handle their use case
    - grey-area 8y ago
      Yes thanks, that's what I was trying to say, but this says it more succinctly.
- grey-area 8y ago
  Readers will never, ever pay. That's not sustainable and you need them to attract posters. Content producers on the other hand are an assorted mix of businesses (make money from attention/clicks), personalities (make money from attention), influencers (make money from attention), academics (no money). If you have an audience many of them would pay. You could charge the top 10% of content producers/businesses for better tools they would use and ask for all the time (moderation, blocking, shadowbanning etc), and also sell the public data of a popular service like this (for sentiment analysis, trending topics etc), and have a very healthy business model. There is no need for advertising, it is actively harmful, and it results in misaligned incentives, but if you try to make it reader funded it would IMO fail too - several services have, I think I saw one on HN a few months ago, but the now defunct app dot net is the most prominent example.
  - eitland 8y ago
    > Readers will never, ever pay. That's not sustainable and you need them to attract posters. You guys on HN keep saying this. I keep paying. I pay for the local newspaper that I disagree wildly with. I pay for one of the big national ones (that I could mostly read for free anyway). I pay for Spotify, for Linux magazines, a couple of donations to the Guardian and sometimes I pay for Netflix as well (rarely have time to watch and they "forget" to copy half their content to European servers.) In addition I've supported Wintergatan on YouTube lately. I could even pay more if it wasn't that almost every newspaper and what not seems obsessed with the subscription idea, I cannot subscribe to all of you but I'd be happy to pay 1/4, 1/2 or even $1 for a single story that I want to read. Am I alone? Is everyone else so "smart" to sit back with their adblockers, torrent clients and what not and just complain about how it seems to get worse?
    - massysett 8y ago
      Maybe that should be more narrowly read as “Twitter users will never pay” or “Facebook users will never pay” which is probably true because the simple reality is that these services offer low-value content that is cheap to produce and easy to consume. It’s not valuable so readers won’t pay. Consumers do pay for valuable content like Netflix, New York Times, books, etc., because they actually take effort to produce and are thus actually valuable. Twitter and Facebook and much of the free Web is dreck that is not worth paying for.
panarky 8y ago
> Advertising is at the root of the problems of Twitter This is true, but it's not only advertising. Replace ads with any revenue generator large enough to sustain the service and you'll find that (1) the audience disappears or (2) big compromises in user experience or privacy. Maybe some services just can't be delivered by profit-maximizing corporations at all. A big reason for the wildly improbable success of Wikipedia and Craigslist is that they are non-commercial. No ads, no subscriptions, no selling firehose data, no paying for more access, no "freemium". We need an alternative asymmetrical social media service that is free for readers, free for posters, fosters deeper discussions than Reddit, and ruthlessly purges scammers, haters and trolls. Maybe the only way to accomplish that is with a community-driven collective effort, not a commercially-driven corporate service.
- grey-area 8y ago
  Interesting idea. Paying for the service/hosting could be a problem, but is not insurmountable if users take on moderation.
- chillacy 8y ago
  Woah wait a minute, Craigslist is definitely commercial, they charge to make posts about certain subjects like employment and housing in certain cities. Now granted it's not super high growth but consider this: > Last year, Craigslist took in upwards of $690 million in revenue, most of which is net profit, according to an estimate by the AIM Group, an Altamonte Springs, Florida-based research firm. Based on valuations of comparable publicly traded companies including eBay EBAY +0%, Forbes conservatively estimates that Craigslist is worth at least $3 billion. That makes Newmark, 64, who owns at least 42% of the company, worth at least $1.3 billion. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/05/03/how-does-craigslist-make-money/#48fb1f6a27b1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/05/03/how-does-cra...
- lightedman 8y ago
  "and ruthlessly purges scammers, haters and trolls." And there you become one of the haters. Purge thyself.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
chipotle_coyote 8y ago
I am. It's called Micro.blog. Micro.blog has been discussed on HN before and people were, well, skeptical, in part because we've seen App.Net fail at this before -- but also because I think a lot of folks don't quite understand what Micro.blog is doing. (To be fair, I don't think they're particularly good at explaining what they're doing.) In short form: Micro.blog is built on IndieWeb principles. You can pay to have your blog hosted on the service (in which case you're paying for a full-featured Hugo-backed blog with themes, pages, full posts, themes, etc., not just a $5/month Twitter clone), but you don't have to -- if you have an existing blog which can meet Micro.blog's requirements (an RSS/Atom/JSON feed, webmentions, etc.), you can connect it up for free and get a Twitter-like timeline. There are no advertisers. Micro.blog doesn't have "better tools for managing readers," per se, but for the time being they're just not about the model of "celebrity tweeter with a million followers." Micro.blog supports comments and follows, but favorites are private (i.e., mostly just bookmarks) and does not support quotes or reposts. This is by design. In theory IndieWeb principles would allow some or all of this to be added down the road, though. Because this is, again, really a set of individual blogs doing traditional bloggy things woven together with bloggy standards, there's no way to do locked accounts or private posts. Micro.blog has a full-time community moderator. No, that's not going to be enough to scale if it gets huge, but for the time being that's not a big deal. Micro.blog has an API and has mobile clients available for both iOS and Android. And, last but not least: yes, Micro.blog does support ActivityPub and Mastodon. You can follow Mastodon users on Micro.blog and they can follow you from Mastodon, and replies Just Work (tm).
- grey-area 8y ago
  That looks really nice - thanks for trying to fix this. I really like your straightforward home page. In case this is useful my concerns would be on seeing your home page - Is this going to go out of business in 2 years and lose my stuff? Do I want to pay to post drivel about my life, and retweet the odd thing? I don't really use twitter for personal blogging, and don't think I'd pay for it, but it's really interesting to see that there are probably several different audiences using twitter for such different things and your service is aimed at a different segment. The value in twitter for me is the posts from prominent people in various industries who expose what they're really thinking, their foibles, interests and links to interesting research they've just read. I put up with all the drama, nazis and ads for that alone. I use several accounts to follow/promote different interests, and for some businesses, but wouldn't pay for personal use. Personally I'm really skeptical of a federated network, it's a solution to a problem I don't have, which introduces other problems, but it's not a blocker, I just think it's a distraction to the real problems of social media.

pjc50 8y ago

No no no, the content producers are the ones doing the work and the readers should be funding the platform somehow. And possibly the creators too. I'd like a "Reddit gold"-like system. (I know I wouldn't pay to post because I have lurked on metafilter for most of its life but never paid the $5 to post)

panarky 8y ago
Make the readers pay and you'll lose your audience. Make the posters pay and you'll lose your content. Without advertising, that means the service cannot make a profit. Maybe that's the solution to the puzzle.
- grey-area 8y ago
  Make the posters pay and you'll lose your content. I think that's only true if you try to charge all posters. Advertising is actively damaging our social networks, as it did newspapers before them.
  - panarky 8y ago
    If the service is built to maximize the benefit to users (instead of to maximize benefit to advertisers, or to maximize a corporation's profits), then I'd argue that you cannot charge even some posters. Maximizing the benefit to readers means getting the most and best content. Charging posters will eliminate some posts which is bad for readers. And when a poster is willing to pay, that means the poster is profiting from the content, which means there's some motive other than writing the best content for the reader. So my argument is that any financial gain for the operator, whether from advertising or directly charging users, will diminish the value of the service for both readers and posters. If the goal is the best possible conversation, then let's look to non-commercial models that remove the distorting and corrupting influence of profit.
    - grey-area 8y ago
      An unfunded service has zero benefit as it doesn't exist. So propose a non-commercial model which would work and cover all costs (including hosting).
- your-nanny 8y ago
  Seems like posters with many thousands of followers have different needs than the typical one; sell premium tools to handle their use case
  - grey-area 8y ago
    Yes thanks, that's what I was trying to say, but this says it more succinctly.
grey-area 8y ago
Readers will never, ever pay. That's not sustainable and you need them to attract posters. Content producers on the other hand are an assorted mix of businesses (make money from attention/clicks), personalities (make money from attention), influencers (make money from attention), academics (no money). If you have an audience many of them would pay. You could charge the top 10% of content producers/businesses for better tools they would use and ask for all the time (moderation, blocking, shadowbanning etc), and also sell the public data of a popular service like this (for sentiment analysis, trending topics etc), and have a very healthy business model. There is no need for advertising, it is actively harmful, and it results in misaligned incentives, but if you try to make it reader funded it would IMO fail too - several services have, I think I saw one on HN a few months ago, but the now defunct app dot net is the most prominent example.
- eitland 8y ago
  > Readers will never, ever pay. That's not sustainable and you need them to attract posters. You guys on HN keep saying this. I keep paying. I pay for the local newspaper that I disagree wildly with. I pay for one of the big national ones (that I could mostly read for free anyway). I pay for Spotify, for Linux magazines, a couple of donations to the Guardian and sometimes I pay for Netflix as well (rarely have time to watch and they "forget" to copy half their content to European servers.) In addition I've supported Wintergatan on YouTube lately. I could even pay more if it wasn't that almost every newspaper and what not seems obsessed with the subscription idea, I cannot subscribe to all of you but I'd be happy to pay 1/4, 1/2 or even $1 for a single story that I want to read. Am I alone? Is everyone else so "smart" to sit back with their adblockers, torrent clients and what not and just complain about how it seems to get worse?
  - massysett 8y ago
    Maybe that should be more narrowly read as “Twitter users will never pay” or “Facebook users will never pay” which is probably true because the simple reality is that these services offer low-value content that is cheap to produce and easy to consume. It’s not valuable so readers won’t pay. Consumers do pay for valuable content like Netflix, New York Times, books, etc., because they actually take effort to produce and are thus actually valuable. Twitter and Facebook and much of the free Web is dreck that is not worth paying for.

panarky 8y ago

> Advertising is at the root of the problems of Twitter This is true, but it's not only advertising. Replace ads with any revenue generator large enough to sustain the service and you'll find that (1) the audience disappears or (2) big compromises in user experience or privacy. Maybe some services just can't be delivered by profit-maximizing corporations at all. A big reason for the wildly improbable success of Wikipedia and Craigslist is that they are non-commercial. No ads, no subscriptions, no selling firehose data, no paying for more access, no "freemium". We need an alternative asymmetrical social media service that is free for readers, free for posters, fosters deeper discussions than Reddit, and ruthlessly purges scammers, haters and trolls. Maybe the only way to accomplish that is with a community-driven collective effort, not a commercially-driven corporate service.

grey-area 8y ago
Interesting idea. Paying for the service/hosting could be a problem, but is not insurmountable if users take on moderation.
chillacy 8y ago
Woah wait a minute, Craigslist is definitely commercial, they charge to make posts about certain subjects like employment and housing in certain cities. Now granted it's not super high growth but consider this: > Last year, Craigslist took in upwards of $690 million in revenue, most of which is net profit, according to an estimate by the AIM Group, an Altamonte Springs, Florida-based research firm. Based on valuations of comparable publicly traded companies including eBay EBAY +0%, Forbes conservatively estimates that Craigslist is worth at least $3 billion. That makes Newmark, 64, who owns at least 42% of the company, worth at least $1.3 billion. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/05/03/how-does-craigslist-make-money/#48fb1f6a27b1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2017/05/03/how-does-cra...
lightedman 8y ago
"and ruthlessly purges scammers, haters and trolls." And there you become one of the haters. Purge thyself.
tomjakubowski 8y ago

chipotle_coyote 8y ago

I am. It's called Micro.blog. Micro.blog has been discussed on HN before and people were, well, skeptical, in part because we've seen App.Net fail at this before -- but also because I think a lot of folks don't quite understand what Micro.blog is doing. (To be fair, I don't think they're particularly good at explaining what they're doing.) In short form: Micro.blog is built on IndieWeb principles. You can pay to have your blog hosted on the service (in which case you're paying for a full-featured Hugo-backed blog with themes, pages, full posts, themes, etc., not just a $5/month Twitter clone), but you don't have to -- if you have an existing blog which can meet Micro.blog's requirements (an RSS/Atom/JSON feed, webmentions, etc.), you can connect it up for free and get a Twitter-like timeline. There are no advertisers. Micro.blog doesn't have "better tools for managing readers," per se, but for the time being they're just not about the model of "celebrity tweeter with a million followers." Micro.blog supports comments and follows, but favorites are private (i.e., mostly just bookmarks) and does not support quotes or reposts. This is by design. In theory IndieWeb principles would allow some or all of this to be added down the road, though. Because this is, again, really a set of individual blogs doing traditional bloggy things woven together with bloggy standards, there's no way to do locked accounts or private posts. Micro.blog has a full-time community moderator. No, that's not going to be enough to scale if it gets huge, but for the time being that's not a big deal. Micro.blog has an API and has mobile clients available for both iOS and Android. And, last but not least: yes, Micro.blog does support ActivityPub and Mastodon. You can follow Mastodon users on Micro.blog and they can follow you from Mastodon, and replies Just Work (tm).

grey-area 8y ago
That looks really nice - thanks for trying to fix this. I really like your straightforward home page. In case this is useful my concerns would be on seeing your home page - Is this going to go out of business in 2 years and lose my stuff? Do I want to pay to post drivel about my life, and retweet the odd thing? I don't really use twitter for personal blogging, and don't think I'd pay for it, but it's really interesting to see that there are probably several different audiences using twitter for such different things and your service is aimed at a different segment. The value in twitter for me is the posts from prominent people in various industries who expose what they're really thinking, their foibles, interests and links to interesting research they've just read. I put up with all the drama, nazis and ads for that alone. I use several accounts to follow/promote different interests, and for some businesses, but wouldn't pay for personal use. Personally I'm really skeptical of a federated network, it's a solution to a problem I don't have, which introduces other problems, but it's not a blocker, I just think it's a distraction to the real problems of social media.