20 ms·

Twitter acquires Revue

227 points by camillovisini 6y ago

geonnave 6y ago
Clearly and unsurprisingly this is to compete with Substack. Great move. Now, regarding character limits, beyond linking to a personal website or having a newsletter, I have seen avid content creators posting images containing small essays directly on Twitter to allow a deeper in-app reading experience. Maybe this should be a next, and less trivial, problem for Twitter to work on.
- d3sandoval 6y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree. Making automatic alt-text available for those types of posts would go a long way in addressing the accessibility issues that plague image posts on Twitter. Their current UX for adding alt-text is painful and content authors are unlikely to use it... Seems like a great place for automation/OCR
  - oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
    If the OCR is good enough to deal with these text posts, isn't it already built into screen reading software that would make the alt-text duplication unnecessary?
    - gnicholas 6y ago
      Not if you’re on a smartphone. This is one of the problems with mobile — no way to have one app interact with another. Many people with disabilities rely on this sort of functionality on desktop and cannot use it on mobile. The only accessibility features that exist are the ones the OS implements.
abinaya_rl 6y ago
This is really great acquisition. Maybe this is the path towards building the paid Twitter service?
seneca 6y ago
Twitter is in an interesting position as a business. They can buy new platforms all they like but I, and many others, will never consider them because they have already poisoned the well when it comes to censorship. I would never consider them a useful platform for publishing, whether long-form or short. They're destined to be a home for partisans that agree with their orthodoxy and perhaps people with nothing vaguely controversial to say. I fear the internet will bifurcate due to problems like this.
- moksly 6y ago
  The internet split long ago, and the vast majority of western consumers won’t give two shits about non-progressive voices getting drowned. I’m not judging either way, and there is certainly something ironic about Apple using slave labour while taking the moral high ground against hateful assholes and their refusal to moderate. But it’s the way the wind blows, and you’re honestly not going to be able of resisting. In the EU we’re certainly going to regulate big tech, but the result wouldn’t lead to Trump not getting banned for inciting violence, if anything it would probably have happened sooner and with a public mandate. And good luck building a marketable platform out of the users who get kicked off the mainstream internet.
thisistheend123 6y ago
Will this be a competition for substack?
- cabalamat 6y ago
  That's what i was thinking -- this is Twitter's version of substack.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Me too. I’m really not optimistic about the content that Twitter will curate here; I worry that they’ll out-compete substack by peddling their usual outrage addiction, perhaps not right away but in time. The content that one might see on substack will be eventually buried on Twitter in exchange for the content that is most likely to make you click links. Here’s to hoping I’m wrong.
    - cabalamat 6y ago
      Substack seem to me to be genuinely trying to build a better online platform, so I expect they will build a better one (for reasoned debate rather than dopamine-drive outrage) than twitter.
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        I agree, but I'm not optimistic that "better platform" is sufficient to win. Notably, Twitter's secret sauce is addiction, thus it's inherently difficult for many people to choose the healthier option (at least in a long-term capacity). Moreover, as a platform, Twitter can provide an audience a lot more readily than SubStack. I'm concerned that there's enough of SubStack's model that Twitter can copy without compromising their addiction-peddling business model that they will be able to out-compete SubStack, to the world's detriment.
pboutros 6y ago
This is a really smart acquisition for Twitter to make. I'm subscribed to a number of substacks (and Patreons) that I only discovered through creators on Twitter. Job #1 for twitter should be making it easy to subscribe to Revue newsletters from within Twitter. Please do not put the team that rolled out Fleets in charge of Job #1 ;)
- nikivi 6y ago
  What did you dislike about Fleets rollout?
  - blakesterz 6y ago
    I don't normally answer questions for others, but I feel uniquely qualified to chime in on this one! I am a pretty heavy Twitter user and have been for a long time. It's really the only "social" thing I use. I know Fleets is a Twitter thing... I remember seeing it someplace, maybe a story on Hacker News or something? Was it something like a replacement for Vine maybe? Or was it something with threaded conversations? Am I seeing Fleets in my feed? What do they look like? Are they being used at all? I really have no idea what Fleets is and I use Twitter all the time. Whatever Fleets is I agree with pboutros, don't put that same team in charge of anything else, this rollout didn't work. (I may be missing something totally obvious and awesome here! Maybe Fleets is the greatest thing since Google+ and I'm to set in my ways to notice or care? This could very well be another "It's not you, it's me" thing and I'm too dense to see it.)
    - shp0ngle 6y ago
      Fleets are Instagram Stories - Now On Twitter. I think they appear just in mobile app, but also not sure, I use the web Twitter on phone.
      - kilbuz 6y ago
        They do appear on the mobile app. One person out of the hundreds I follow uses them, so therefore I am reminded that they exist, even though I never watch them. If that person happened to stop creating them, I would not know what they are or that they exist.
siruva07 6y ago
Excellent acquisition. Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%. I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service. Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. No political ads to worry about. No interference with the product experience. And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year. Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product — our data not for sale — and the companies would make more money! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail). It's almost a running joke, up there with Daft Punk playing at the trash fence, that Twitter just won't release an edit button. With a move towards paying subscribers, maybe Twitter will listen to its real customers -- content writers -- rather than advertisers.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  I am a bit cynical about that Spyware-aaS companies like FB would stop spying just becouse you paid them. I mean I bought a Samsung TV for 1000USD and still it tries to show adds and spy. The temptation to increase margins is high no matter what. I am not that up to date with Twitter. Are they in the same class as FB and Google?
  - RankingMember 6y ago
    > The temptation to increase margins is high no matter what. yep, I remember when cable tv was ad-free (because who would've dreamt people would be ok with paying a subscription fee while still getting ads shoved down their throat?)
    - DavidPeiffer 6y ago
      I knew someone who was an early adopter of satellite TV. She said during the news, rather than ads, you saw the hosts smoking and chatting. That sounds so much more pleasant than what we have today. When cable had no ads, did all programs just run continously? If a channel did a special where they played standard TV programs designed for over the air broadcast (18-23 minutes/episode), did they just play them consecutively or have some other filler to keep on a 30 or 60 minute schedule?
jawns 6y ago
TWEET 1/7: It's ironic that the way Twitter proposes to improve its platform for writers is to move them off Twitter proper. TWEET 2/7: Writers use Twitter begrudgingly because that's where the eyeballs are, but it is a terrible communications platform for any writing longer than a single tweet. TWEET 3/7: Microblogging is core to its brand, but I shudder whenever I see a thread marked 1 of 22. Because of the character limitation, the writing on Twitter has a wooden cadence. TWEET 4/7: The best thing Twitter could do for writers is give them some way to go beyond the standard character limit within the core platform. TWEET 5/7: The limit doesn't need to be lifted entirely; maybe anything beyond the limit can be hidden by default, but with an option to reveal it. TWEET 6/7: Restricting how writers write can sometimes encourage better writing. But Twitter is one of the largest communications platforms in the world, and it's got to reckon with that. TWEET 7/7: Imagine if, instead of a char limit, you could only write rhyming couplets! It would be fun as a niche site, but not as a site used to communicate breaking news and longer, more thoughtful writing. COUPLET 1/1: Twitter's a major communications hub, like it or not. Its restrictions on writing are a big blind spot.
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  Or alternatively (in my humble opinion), they should stop trying to be what they're not (a long form blogging platform) and instead stick to what they excel at (short broadcasts that are hashtag groupable and searchable).
  - thesuitonym 6y ago
    The problem isn't Twitter trying to be something it's not, it's that the short broadcasts that are hashtag groupable just is not a useful platform. People want long form writing platforms, but don't want to choose between Twitter, where people are, and blogging, where people aren't.
    - herodoturtle 6y ago
      I totally agree with this: > People want long form writing platforms, but don't want to choose between Twitter, where people are, and blogging, where people aren't. But this: > short broadcasts that are hashtag groupable just is not a useful platform I completely disagree with. It's been proven to be a very useful platform indeed. Again, not for long form blogging, but for short to-the-point announcements that can instantly reach a wide audience (and that can be grouped with related announcements and quickly searched for) - I think it's incredibly useful.
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
shout out to writefreely, https://github.com/writeas/writefreely https://github.com/writeas/writefreely this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool.
- Tomte 6y ago
  I take a look at write.as (the hosted version), and find one of the first posts in the community section: https://write.as/tmo/5-30-am-coffee-to-kick-things-off https://write.as/tmo/5-30-am-coffee-to-kick-things-off This post has just over 1800 characters (copy/pasted everything visible into Notepad++), no images whatsoever, and it takes 776ms to load and transfers 238 kilobytes. Why are minimalist seeming web sited often so obese (https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)?
  - 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
    dunno. is it due to scripts on html page that does highlighting? or
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  Thanks for the link! Starred / bookmarked, will look closer before jumping onto substack or revue (twitter's new thing).
- andrew_ 6y ago
  Writefreely is awesome, and their devs were highly available in my experience with them. Discovered when Medium went the way of paywalls, I've donated several times to help keep the project alive.
mberning 6y ago
If you write anything important or at all at risk of becoming controversial twitter should be nothing more than a promotion engine.
rriepe 6y ago
Are you allowed to disagree?
cjlm 6y ago
This space is quite interesting. You have the gorilla at the picnic (Substack), the stagnating old timers (TinyLetter), the member management platforms (Memberful, probably Mailchimp), the link dump creators (curated.co) and the spunky indie upstarts (Buttondown).
- asicsp 6y ago
  There's membership feature on gumroad as well: https://gumroad.com/gumroad/p/introducing-gumroad-memberships https://gumroad.com/gumroad/p/introducing-gumroad-membership...
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  Yeah, but I guess by going free, Revue is going to grab a good chunk of the space. For example, curated.co seems nice, but $25 bucks a month for sending a newsletter that doesn't even have a single subscriber?
- Kye 6y ago
  MailChimp owns TinyLetter.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
andrew_ 6y ago
As someone who moved away from Twitter, the last thing I need in my life is another Twitter-owned property. The politics of the last month aside, Twitter is a foul, trite, snide place where the worst of us are trumpeted to the loudest voice and widest audience. The negativity and incentive to waste hours and focus are pervasive in every community I've participated in. Of course, YMMV. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to curate and filter away those things that I abhor about Twitter. A few weeks removed and my mental state feels all the better for it. Color me cynical, but I'll pass on another attempt for Twitter to monetize my attention.
- tentacleuno 6y ago
  I find it somewhat ironic that Twitter has only now banned Trump. They allowed him to stay on his platform so more people would sign-up, follow him and get radicalised. Now he's no longer the President, they've suddenly acquired morality. Fool me once, eh.
  - herodoturtle 6y ago
    Didn't they ban him as a protective measure to curb additional violence after he incited the storming of the capitol? I don't think twitter's tactics are as nefarious as you make them out to be.
    - tentacleuno 6y ago
      They banned him after his Presidency. He did greivous harm and acts of hate before that, but only now are Twitter giving it the attention it deserves. Anyone else would have been banned long before now. He has incited a great deal of violence with racist dogwhistles, and only now he's facing any sort of punishment. The argument of 'free speech' falls apart when you factor this in.
- siruva07 6y ago
  <sigh> I hear you. But Twitter is an incredible service. From the Arab spring to people like @balajis who broke COVID (for me at least) before major news networks. The only interactive we have as users is positive (a heart or retweet) vs negative (thumbs down on Youtube, downvote on reddit). I think a broken heart, </3, essentially as a downvote, could do a lot to make Twitter more of a community that rewards and punishes, rather than just allows people to exist in their own eco-chamber. The politicians of the last month would have likely seen way more downvotes / broken hearts than favs and retweets, and that might have done something for them personally...it's at least worth a test if anyone at Twitter reads this :).
pembrook 6y ago
> Starting today, we’re making Revue’s Pro features free for all accounts and lowering the paid newsletter fee to 5% ...and there goes Substack's entire business. Overall, this is great for writers however. The missing component to Substack was the discovery/social mechanism. From a strategic perspective, it's easier to bolt on newsletter sending than it is to build a new social network. So this was always a huge risk for Substack as a platform. But hey, there's also an alternate universe where Twitter stays dumb and lazy and never crushes Substack. So I see why investors took the risk. But I see no path forward for Substack if Twitter manages to not completely botch this.
- offtop5 6y ago
  Not exactly. The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now. I think it's the same thing with Slack, Slack only exists because Microsoft teams is made by Microsoft. I swear to God it's mostly a placebo effect, but you're like oh yeah we're using slack we're the cool kids now. Many companies will have a single breakaway team that uses slack just to feel cool. But if $10 a month makes a developer happier she might produce another $500 in value.
  - pembrook 6y ago
    > The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now. I see "current press sentiment" as an irrelevant factor. Just wait until some prominent right winger heads to Substack and the journalists start aiming their sights. The point is, if I'm going to start a paid newsletter, am I willing to give up an extra 5% of my income for the same feature set? The answer is hell no. Substack will have to lower their prices, and then the feature war will begin. Twitter will always have the upper hand given they can directly integrate newsletter sign up forms into twitter. But hey, bureaucratic incompetence is endemic at Twitter, so they might screw up this obvious path to victory they have in front of them.
    - offtop5 6y ago
      To each their own, but given the major questions around how much power Twitter has, I don't see a lot of free and open journalism happening there. Ideally the entire reason you pay for this type of content is because you don't want to just read CNN. If Twitter is perceived as controlling your content anyway, why pay for it
doublerabbit 6y ago
And so, we now enter the tumblr phase of Twitter.
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  twittr
sturza 6y ago
Seems like substack discovered a market and now they’re competing
eimrine 6y ago
I tried to use Twitter for advertising my business. Reason why I have chosen Twitter is because somebody has told me that I can tweet via SMS, which fits perfect to my livestyle w/o smartphone. But after I have followed several dozens of similar businesses in short period of time (1 hour to find them all) my account was banned. Also I could not set up tweeting from SMS. That was my first and last experience with Twitter.
bachmeier 6y ago
As a user of Twitter who mainly reads tweets rather than writing them, I hope this isn't just a way to make larger volumes of misinformation go viral. Obviously, that's not Twitter's intention, but they want to make money, and viral misinformation seems to be an effective strategy for making money. The reason I raise this issue is because the important characteristic of Twitter is that others can call out the misinformation quickly. It's not perfect, of course, but it's better than a newsletter, where it's just a blob of misinformation with nobody able to call out the BS.
- Bakary 6y ago
  That's the first time I hear of Twitter as a platform inherently efficient against misinformation. If anything, it seems uniquely primed to spread it and reward users for doing so.
  - bachmeier 6y ago
    Oh, Twitter's definitely not a tool "against misinformation". My concern is actually that it's so efficient at spreading misinformation and now they want to take away the ability to call out the misinformation.
kareemm 6y ago
Curious: was this an acqui-hire? Anybody have intel about deal terms?
devdiary 6y ago
Revue looks amazing. But why so many twitter permissions required to login?
julienreszka 6y ago
At what point are those kind of acquisitions anticompetitive?
ryanwiggins 6y ago
The Creators arms race is in full swing, and the winner will be who can deliver the way to most monetize your existing audience AND expand your audience. Twitter already has a strong interest graph and is well positioned here
jhunter1016 6y ago
This is a smart move by Twitter. Substack has taken off considerably. Rather than watch all their prized users go publish long form content on a platform outside their orbit, Twitter just pulled a platform into their orbit. The thing I’m curious about is how creative Twitter will get with integrating the platforms. There have been a lot of missed opportunities with previous Twitter acquisitions IMO.
- AzzieElbab 6y ago
  I don’t thin substack crowd would trust Twitter with their content.
  - the_reformation 6y ago
    The Substack crowd is already on Twitter, and is where they got their audience from.
    - AzzieElbab 6y ago
      That is an overstatement. I might be a dinosaur, but in my case it is the other way around. I mostly follow people I have learned about elsewhere. Also, if Twitter decides to ban one of them, I will still have access to substack where the articles are.
  - mcintyre1994 6y ago
    I think Twitter would be okay if the history professor with the $1m Substack comes over to them and people like Glenn Greenwald stay at Substack though.
    - AzzieElbab 6y ago
      You are right. I am biased by my substack subscriptions list
    - whiddershins 6y ago
      History professor with 1m substack? Is this a specific reference?
AndrewLiptak 6y ago
It'll be interesting to see what Substack does in response to this. I can imagine that they'll lose some folks because Twitter's taking a lower rate.
- woodpanel 6y ago
  Or they could win some folks because of ... Twitter.
- paulgb 6y ago
  My prediction: bundling. Most of the good content (excluding self-hosted) is now arguably on Substack, but the subscription model is still one-to-one and doesn’t allow them to take advantage of the network effects. There’s a limited number of subscriptions I’m willing to pay for. Bundling economics, if done right, could extract a higher monthly fee from me into the platform. After all, the marginal cost of providing content to me is negligible, so anything I’d be willing to pay for but not enough for to justify another subscription is money left on the table.
  - omarhaneef 6y ago
    You know the joke that tech just rediscovers the pre-tech economy? Like a rideshare company will pick up groups of passengers from a location and drop them to the same location in the direction you're going - oh, you just discovered buses. That kind of thing? This is heading towards a you just discovered online magazines/newspapers jokes. Consider: - bundle the best writers together - pay them a salary so they feel some comfort - have an editor who decides - brand it so people trust the name etc
    - paulgb 6y ago
      Ha, that’s fair, but a magazine-style model is only one way to go. Something like diminishing cost for adding additional subscriptions (with the discount split between the newsletters I subscribe to) would be effective in making me spend more there. (And probably abandon an off-substack paid subscription)
deleted 6y ago
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coreyrab 6y ago
It will be interesting to see what the terms of the deal are. I've used Revue to publish a paid newsletter and it works great. Not quite as polished as Substack, but the lower take rate will certainly be enough for some customers to switch imo.
the_drunkard 6y ago
Curious if Twitter will carry-over their draconian (and selectively enforced) censorship rules to Revue. I assume this was discussed as part of the acquisition? Will publishers have free reign to discuss topics that they want to publish on or do Twitter "rules" govern what's allowed to be discussed?
coldtea 6y ago
While censorship people for their writings (based on whatever the US elites that happen to be mainstream in 2020 consider acceptable)? To the degree that even the sitting President, right or wrong, can be shut down? Yeah, pass...
malwarebytess 6y ago
Interesting they're framing it as Revue joining twitter rather than Twitter acquiring Revue.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  It’s standard “we got bought up” jargon, but it is weird way of saying it. Joining indicates some come goal or success, but it has become Silicon Vally slang for: Our product is dead but at least we made some money.
complianceowl 6y ago
Use Revue, build a sizeable distribution list, so I can get banned for expressing my thoughts? So I can be treated like a pedophile for saying something unpopular that doesn't align with their radical leftist ideology? No thank you. There's a lot of other subscription services for me to take a risk that big with anyone associated with Twitter.
- woodpanel 6y ago
  Probably a win for Substack, as a take-over by less-diverse-on-purpose Twitter will drive away those who seek diversity of opinions. Although, I can already feel the cancel-pressure building up in and around Substack, just by writing this.
  - enos_feedler 6y ago
    I dont think this is a win for substack. Before this acquisition Substack was probably the leading product in this category. Im sure if Substack polled it’s publishers on what they want most, people would say “more paid subscribers”. Twitter is a platform that can offer this from day 1. A chance to have your newsletter promoted to new eyeballs with a strong interest in what you write about. Substack needs to grow the reader side organically and so the race is on. Substack needs to turn into twitter faster than twitter can build substacks tools. Twitter just acquired a company to accelerate this process. How can substack accelerate?
- rchaud 6y ago
  You seem to be more concerned with 'cancel culture' than the actual viability of your hypothetical 'unpopular opinion' newsletter.
  - complianceowl 6y ago
    The "viability of your hypothetical 'unpopular opinion'"?? Are you serious? You're already taking shots and focusing on my beliefs without first addressing the risk that Big Tech and its affiliates pose to merely not being censored or banned? You're the kind of person that should work at Twitter. You'll fit right in, bud.
orliesaurus 6y ago
Will twitter penalize substack users like it had penalized sharing of instagram pictures by removing the preview embedded in tweets?
- pr0zac 6y ago
  Instagram pictures don't show up on Twitter because Facebook blocked it. They did that in response to Twitter blocking Instagram from finding contacts via Twitter. Its FAANG in-fighting from like 8 years ago that I'm still kind of surprised hasn't been sorted out by now.
  - TechBro8615 6y ago
    More like NATFAG in-fighting in this case
    - jsjsbdkj 6y ago
      wow that's a terrible acronym.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        How about FATNAG…oh wait, that's still not not great.
        GreenWatermelon 6y ago
        FANTAG rolls of the tongue.
- mcintyre1994 6y ago
  I listened to a podcast that included this story, it was a Facebook decision. Mark phoned and gave them a few hours heads up that 'Instagram' had decided not to allow the embeds any more. They actually got it delayed 24 hours or something like that to avoid breaking Twitter.
- 6y ago
CivBase 6y ago
"Revue by Twitter" It's interesting that the tech giants keep tagging their names onto the brands they acquire. Does that really help? I know that the tech crowd exists in a bubble and that the hatred for the tech giants on HN doesn't really reflect the feelings of the general public... but even outside the tech sphere, are there really many people who like Twitter as a company? Most people just seem to tolerate the companies behind their preferred platform. It doesn't seem to me like there would be many who would be more likely to engage with a new brand as a result of its association with Twitter. If anything, I'd expect the opposite effect.
- whomst 6y ago
  I’ve heard that it might be for anti trust reasons (but with putting Facebook on all of its properties). Properly establishing who owns what up front makes the average user more aware of the consolidation of platforms
  - enos_feedler 6y ago
    If Revue were a big company perhaps. In this case I think its just to give Revue more value through the brand association.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    I’ve seen that argument a few times recently as well but I don’t find it at all persuasive. Public perception of market competition isn’t relevant to antitrust law. That the public is more aware of a company’s anti-competitive behavior doesn’t somehow absolve or even lessen the potential liability for the anti-competitive behavior. Or perhaps I just don’t understand the point they’re trying to make? I’ve yet to come across this antitrust/branding argument where the rationale has been explained but I’d definitely be curious to hear the legal theory.
    - TimPC 6y ago
      The only thing I can come up with is that being aware of the damages in advance of a purchasing decision might in some cases serve to limit said damages relative to being unaware of them. Not sure it applies in a monopoly setting where awareness of damages doesn't give you an alternative though. It gets more complicated when damage is speech instead of a financial exploit on a product.
deleted 6y ago
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walleeee 6y ago
Why is the Revue model preferable to a blog with a tip jar and RSS? I understand why Twitter wants in on a lucrative game, but I don't understand the value proposition for writers or readers. I struggle to see how, as a regular person on the internet, I benefit from a "public square" that will hijack my brainstem to maximize engagement, sell my attention and browsing habits to 3rd parties, and suspend my account with no warning if I run afoul of a black-box censor.
- input_sh 6y ago
  Well, for one, it's not a tip jar, but more of a blog + exclusive content. Other than that, not much but an easy setup... if you're from a country that supports receiving money from Stripe. If not, sucks to be you!
- rchaud 6y ago
  It's preferable because people don't want to have to click through multiple screens to do PayPal/Visa Checkout authentication to give somebody $3. Nobody knows what RSS is either. Even back in mid-00s, I would sometimes struggle to add a blog to my Firefox feed (this was pre-Chrome). On some sites you'd click the RSS button and it would work. On other sites clicking it would display incomprehensible XML markup, causing me to abandon the site.
  - walleeee 6y ago
    That's fair, although to me that suggests we need to create easier self-hostable blog/newsletter tools, not all migrate to Twitter's next big fishtank
  - nerfhammer 6y ago
    also some would only put a snippet in their RSS feed rather than the whole article
    - rchaud 6y ago
      I forgot about that! That's another reason why I eventually stopped bothering with it.
cercatrova 6y ago
Somewhat related, I use https://typefully.app https://typefully.app to write tweet threads and schedule their posting. Why tweet threads instead of blogging, as many HN users ask? Tweets get traction and build an audience (yes, owning your platform is better than a corporation owning your platform, but you have to go where the eyeballs are) with which I can drive traffic, users and customers to other sites I want them to see. Twitter is also an amazing community, I've had many good interactions there that are simply not possible in other social media platforms. Where else can you get Paul Graham or Balaji Srinivasan to reply to you?
dt3ft 6y ago
What is the product here?
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
second mention of writefreely on HN today... writefreely, https://github.com/writeas/writefreely https://github.com/writeas/writefreely this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool. AGPLv-3.0 goodness
prestigious 6y ago
You would have to be a complete idiot to try and build your revenue on something owned by Twitter. They will shut you down at any time, for any reason, with no recourse.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  In the new era of monopolistic common carrier platforms, you have to BUILD INTO YOUR BUSINESS PLAN what happens when you get screwed by, say, the Apple App Store, YouTube, or Twitter, et. al. It's a business risk, just like fire or flood. You have to have a contingency ready to go at a moment's notice. By example, Parler didn't.
  - rwcarlsen 6y ago
    I read somewhere that parler actually did have a contingency plan, but their backup host pulled out on them too.
    - rubyist5eva 6y ago
      just build your own internet
- gnicholas 6y ago
  With Revue and Substack, do the authors have access to subscriber email addresses? If so, that would somewhat blunt concerns like this, both directly (if you are booted off the platform) and indirectly (presumably the platforms would be less aggressive in their rules/enforcement if it is easy for authors to leave).
  - mshroyer 6y ago
    https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/logistics https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/logistics > I'm saving the Substack mailing list regularly to my hard drive, and if I go somewhere else I'll let you all know. So this is possible on Substack at least. Some Substacks also use a custom domain name, which would make migration off the platform even easier.
vincentmarle 6y ago
Cool, this is a Dutch company right? Congrats!
another_sock 6y ago
This is a good idea with the caveat that twitter gets more sane banning/suspension policies. For any interesting or non-traditional writers/thinkers, the process of building up a platform and having it taken away from you by some tech overlord is a very common experience. Most people with any audience who say anything of value are very wary of anything associated with twitter, so there needs to be some administrative and policy changes before anybody of value uses this.
deleted 6y ago
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cblconfederate 6y ago
I ve seen people talking about owning their twitter audience but the suggestion was to move away from twitter and towards self-hosting. Substack is promoted as a temporary in-between. Interesting that twitter thinks authors want to lock long-form content in there. What happens after the inevitable next Purge?
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > What happens after the inevitable next Purge? Most authors are not going to be "purged" full stop.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    The good ones won't go to a platform that purges speech. It may be OK for content marketers, but i don't see journalists that don't like to mince their words (e.g. greenwald) choosing to host their content on twitter.
    - wbsss4412 6y ago
      Greenwald is an avid Twitter user, and is hardly in any danger of being de platformed for any of his views.
  - adolph 6y ago
    "Most" definitely messes with the business model. The requirement is for only enough to get everyone else to fall in line. It also helps to make selections idiosyncraticly arbitrary to maintain strategic ambiguity instead of drawing a clear line.
mschuster91 6y ago
Fascinating. I wonder what happened to Medium?
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  No idea what happened because I stopped using it after they started adding all the accessibility friction. The UI was decent, original. And giving the reader an idea of the "Reading time" of each article was a nice touch. But yeah, that friction got to be a little too much.
- kbelder 6y ago
  They're blocked for me where ever I can block them, just because I got sick of innocently following a link and being ambushed by Medium and their hassle. Or 'friction', to euphemize.
lesstenseflow 6y ago
Why are comments about twitter's censorious nature being downvoted? The two main topics here (in my view) are 1. Twitter's response to Substack and how this move will impact the two companies and 2. the fact that some of Substack's most prominent users are writers who are refugees from other platforms (Andrew Sullivan from New York magazine, Bari Weiss from the New York Times etc.) who left because of the suppression-of-unpopular-speech trends that Twitter is now famous for. So Revue is what, Substack minus fees plus twitter viewpoint-enforcement? In any event I think this topic (censorship) at least bears discussion and I encourage users here not to downvote the discussion in the name of "suppressing right wingers" or similar. Twitter does not just ban right wingers. Take a look at the list of prominent people banned from twitter[0], it includes people such as Talib Kweli, Zuby (both rappers), "The IT Crowd" creator Graham Linehan, numerous political satire accounts, numerous feminists, and numerous artists and others for death threats towards such potential victims as "the Planters mascot Mr. Peanut," "a dead mosquito" and "the country Austria" (issued by an Austrian artist). If you have strong contrary views, you are probably in the danger zone for getting a twitter suspension or ban if someone wants to make a point of reporting you. Censorship should definitely be part of this discussion of Revue. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#List_of_notable_suspensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#List_of_no...
stakkur 6y ago
Oy. Another company wanting a piece of the 'newsletter' pie, and access to your mailing list.
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  Yeah. But I'll still keep subscribing to the best mailing list, so...
figgyc 6y ago
Am I the only one who sees Revue, Substack etc. as a niche market? I can see why it appeals to Silicon Valley types/HN readers; after all this website is a content aggregator so it makes sense we all have a shared interest in written work. That said I think that the blog "industry" is dying more than it is growing. To me, media seems to be trending towards quick, consumable, visually stimulating content, ie YouTube, TikTok and the like. The reason such content is more engaging and profitable is because it's a lot easier to turn it into a feed: one does not scroll through a newsletter for hours on end, and long form content tends to be the type that you put more thought into reading instead of simply moving on to the next piece. Advertising runs on eyeballs but subscriptions do not, and it feels to me like Twitter seem to think that creating a well integrated platform to drive more Twitter discussion is a good idea, but really to me it feels like blogs and Tweets run perpendicular to each other: anyone who's read a decent amount of Twitter conversation knows that deeply thought out and sensible it is not. Maybe they see being able to be "in" conversations about paywalled content will incentivize people to pay up, and will subsequently start pushing Revue content on people's feeds to try and create such a mentality? Or maybe Twitter don't care about making Revue "part of" Twitter and just think it's a growing market worth capitalising on. Only time will tell. In a way it sort of reminds me of podcasts. They work well only for a group of people who have the time to consume long content, and while it works as a large niche, I can't see it growing into a Twitter-scale mass market, so I wouldn't trust it to be around for a particularly long time.
kodah 6y ago
I'm conflicted about this move. I was listening to Reply All the other day and they mentioned platform diversity and I've seen a number of discussions on here around platform diversity. Twitters ability to buy a feature like this makes it harder to compete with. It benefits writers in a way that it adds in-demand functionality to an existing popular platform but also harms writers and consumers because of the rising demand of platform diversity.
cccc4all 6y ago
Will this be Twitter's Instagram? Or Will this be Twitter's Tumbler? My money is on the latter.
jp1016 6y ago
I was making a tool to bookmark tweets and convert threads into articles , https://twimark.io https://twimark.io , this acquisition could move some users who write long threads to revue. I wonder what the effects will be
nojs 6y ago
I’m curious as to why Twitter chose to do this as an acquisition rather than build their own. It doesn’t seem particularly hard to build from an engineering perspective, and I doubt Twitter needs to acquire the Revue user base given their existing profile and reach.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- machiaweliczny 6y ago
  They buy creators this way. In social networks and winner-take-all market it's logical.
ghaff 6y ago
I used Revue for a while and basically decided I didn't want to do a regular newsletter. (Never had any interest in directly monetizing.) I do still have a blog but I mostly publish on various platforms that have fairly heavy-duty promotion machinery. But depending upon how Revue is integrated into Twitter, I'd take a look again.
alberth 6y ago
Does anyone else find it ironic Revue official blog is hosted on Medium? https://blog.getrevue.co https://blog.getrevue.co
- pier25 6y ago
  Well, a newsletter is not a blog after all. It's intended to be consumed in an email client, not a browser.

227 points by camillovisini 6y ago

Clearly and unsurprisingly this is to compete with Substack. Great move. Now, regarding character limits, beyond linking to a personal website or having a newsletter, I have seen avid content creators posting images containing small essays directly on Twitter to allow a deeper in-app reading experience. Maybe this should be a next, and less trivial, problem for Twitter to work on.

d3sandoval 6y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. Making automatic alt-text available for those types of posts would go a long way in addressing the accessibility issues that plague image posts on Twitter. Their current UX for adding alt-text is painful and content authors are unlikely to use it... Seems like a great place for automation/OCR
- oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
  If the OCR is good enough to deal with these text posts, isn't it already built into screen reading software that would make the alt-text duplication unnecessary?
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    Not if you’re on a smartphone. This is one of the problems with mobile — no way to have one app interact with another. Many people with disabilities rely on this sort of functionality on desktop and cannot use it on mobile. The only accessibility features that exist are the ones the OS implements.

abinaya_rl 6y ago

This is really great acquisition. Maybe this is the path towards building the paid Twitter service?

seneca 6y ago

Twitter is in an interesting position as a business. They can buy new platforms all they like but I, and many others, will never consider them because they have already poisoned the well when it comes to censorship. I would never consider them a useful platform for publishing, whether long-form or short. They're destined to be a home for partisans that agree with their orthodoxy and perhaps people with nothing vaguely controversial to say. I fear the internet will bifurcate due to problems like this.

moksly 6y ago
The internet split long ago, and the vast majority of western consumers won’t give two shits about non-progressive voices getting drowned. I’m not judging either way, and there is certainly something ironic about Apple using slave labour while taking the moral high ground against hateful assholes and their refusal to moderate. But it’s the way the wind blows, and you’re honestly not going to be able of resisting. In the EU we’re certainly going to regulate big tech, but the result wouldn’t lead to Trump not getting banned for inciting violence, if anything it would probably have happened sooner and with a public mandate. And good luck building a marketable platform out of the users who get kicked off the mainstream internet.

thisistheend123 6y ago

Will this be a competition for substack?

cabalamat 6y ago
That's what i was thinking -- this is Twitter's version of substack.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Me too. I’m really not optimistic about the content that Twitter will curate here; I worry that they’ll out-compete substack by peddling their usual outrage addiction, perhaps not right away but in time. The content that one might see on substack will be eventually buried on Twitter in exchange for the content that is most likely to make you click links. Here’s to hoping I’m wrong.
  - cabalamat 6y ago
    Substack seem to me to be genuinely trying to build a better online platform, so I expect they will build a better one (for reasoned debate rather than dopamine-drive outrage) than twitter.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      I agree, but I'm not optimistic that "better platform" is sufficient to win. Notably, Twitter's secret sauce is addiction, thus it's inherently difficult for many people to choose the healthier option (at least in a long-term capacity). Moreover, as a platform, Twitter can provide an audience a lot more readily than SubStack. I'm concerned that there's enough of SubStack's model that Twitter can copy without compromising their addiction-peddling business model that they will be able to out-compete SubStack, to the world's detriment.

pboutros 6y ago

This is a really smart acquisition for Twitter to make. I'm subscribed to a number of substacks (and Patreons) that I only discovered through creators on Twitter. Job #1 for twitter should be making it easy to subscribe to Revue newsletters from within Twitter. Please do not put the team that rolled out Fleets in charge of Job #1 ;)

nikivi 6y ago
What did you dislike about Fleets rollout?
- blakesterz 6y ago
  I don't normally answer questions for others, but I feel uniquely qualified to chime in on this one! I am a pretty heavy Twitter user and have been for a long time. It's really the only "social" thing I use. I know Fleets is a Twitter thing... I remember seeing it someplace, maybe a story on Hacker News or something? Was it something like a replacement for Vine maybe? Or was it something with threaded conversations? Am I seeing Fleets in my feed? What do they look like? Are they being used at all? I really have no idea what Fleets is and I use Twitter all the time. Whatever Fleets is I agree with pboutros, don't put that same team in charge of anything else, this rollout didn't work. (I may be missing something totally obvious and awesome here! Maybe Fleets is the greatest thing since Google+ and I'm to set in my ways to notice or care? This could very well be another "It's not you, it's me" thing and I'm too dense to see it.)
  - shp0ngle 6y ago
    Fleets are Instagram Stories - Now On Twitter. I think they appear just in mobile app, but also not sure, I use the web Twitter on phone.
    - kilbuz 6y ago
      They do appear on the mobile app. One person out of the hundreds I follow uses them, so therefore I am reminded that they exist, even though I never watch them. If that person happened to stop creating them, I would not know what they are or that they exist.

siruva07 6y ago

Excellent acquisition. Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%. I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service. Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. No political ads to worry about. No interference with the product experience. And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year. Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product — our data not for sale — and the companies would make more money! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail). It's almost a running joke, up there with Daft Punk playing at the trash fence, that Twitter just won't release an edit button. With a move towards paying subscribers, maybe Twitter will listen to its real customers -- content writers -- rather than advertisers.

rightbyte 6y ago
I am a bit cynical about that Spyware-aaS companies like FB would stop spying just becouse you paid them. I mean I bought a Samsung TV for 1000USD and still it tries to show adds and spy. The temptation to increase margins is high no matter what. I am not that up to date with Twitter. Are they in the same class as FB and Google?
- RankingMember 6y ago
  > The temptation to increase margins is high no matter what. yep, I remember when cable tv was ad-free (because who would've dreamt people would be ok with paying a subscription fee while still getting ads shoved down their throat?)
  - DavidPeiffer 6y ago
    I knew someone who was an early adopter of satellite TV. She said during the news, rather than ads, you saw the hosts smoking and chatting. That sounds so much more pleasant than what we have today. When cable had no ads, did all programs just run continously? If a channel did a special where they played standard TV programs designed for over the air broadcast (18-23 minutes/episode), did they just play them consecutively or have some other filler to keep on a 30 or 60 minute schedule?

jawns 6y ago

TWEET 1/7: It's ironic that the way Twitter proposes to improve its platform for writers is to move them off Twitter proper. TWEET 2/7: Writers use Twitter begrudgingly because that's where the eyeballs are, but it is a terrible communications platform for any writing longer than a single tweet. TWEET 3/7: Microblogging is core to its brand, but I shudder whenever I see a thread marked 1 of 22. Because of the character limitation, the writing on Twitter has a wooden cadence. TWEET 4/7: The best thing Twitter could do for writers is give them some way to go beyond the standard character limit within the core platform. TWEET 5/7: The limit doesn't need to be lifted entirely; maybe anything beyond the limit can be hidden by default, but with an option to reveal it. TWEET 6/7: Restricting how writers write can sometimes encourage better writing. But Twitter is one of the largest communications platforms in the world, and it's got to reckon with that. TWEET 7/7: Imagine if, instead of a char limit, you could only write rhyming couplets! It would be fun as a niche site, but not as a site used to communicate breaking news and longer, more thoughtful writing. COUPLET 1/1: Twitter's a major communications hub, like it or not. Its restrictions on writing are a big blind spot.

herodoturtle 6y ago
Or alternatively (in my humble opinion), they should stop trying to be what they're not (a long form blogging platform) and instead stick to what they excel at (short broadcasts that are hashtag groupable and searchable).
- thesuitonym 6y ago
  The problem isn't Twitter trying to be something it's not, it's that the short broadcasts that are hashtag groupable just is not a useful platform. People want long form writing platforms, but don't want to choose between Twitter, where people are, and blogging, where people aren't.
  - herodoturtle 6y ago
    I totally agree with this: > People want long form writing platforms, but don't want to choose between Twitter, where people are, and blogging, where people aren't. But this: > short broadcasts that are hashtag groupable just is not a useful platform I completely disagree with. It's been proven to be a very useful platform indeed. Again, not for long form blogging, but for short to-the-point announcements that can instantly reach a wide audience (and that can be grouped with related announcements and quickly searched for) - I think it's incredibly useful.

2Gkashmiri 6y ago

shout out to writefreely, https://github.com/writeas/writefreely https://github.com/writeas/writefreely this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool.

Tomte 6y ago
I take a look at write.as (the hosted version), and find one of the first posts in the community section: https://write.as/tmo/5-30-am-coffee-to-kick-things-off https://write.as/tmo/5-30-am-coffee-to-kick-things-off This post has just over 1800 characters (copy/pasted everything visible into Notepad++), no images whatsoever, and it takes 776ms to load and transfers 238 kilobytes. Why are minimalist seeming web sited often so obese (https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)?
- 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
  dunno. is it due to scripts on html page that does highlighting? or
chrisweekly 6y ago
Thanks for the link! Starred / bookmarked, will look closer before jumping onto substack or revue (twitter's new thing).
andrew_ 6y ago
Writefreely is awesome, and their devs were highly available in my experience with them. Discovered when Medium went the way of paywalls, I've donated several times to help keep the project alive.

mberning 6y ago

If you write anything important or at all at risk of becoming controversial twitter should be nothing more than a promotion engine.

rriepe 6y ago

Are you allowed to disagree?

cjlm 6y ago

This space is quite interesting. You have the gorilla at the picnic (Substack), the stagnating old timers (TinyLetter), the member management platforms (Memberful, probably Mailchimp), the link dump creators (curated.co) and the spunky indie upstarts (Buttondown).

asicsp 6y ago
There's membership feature on gumroad as well: https://gumroad.com/gumroad/p/introducing-gumroad-memberships https://gumroad.com/gumroad/p/introducing-gumroad-membership...
FalconSensei 6y ago
Yeah, but I guess by going free, Revue is going to grab a good chunk of the space. For example, curated.co seems nice, but $25 bucks a month for sending a newsletter that doesn't even have a single subscriber?
Kye 6y ago
MailChimp owns TinyLetter.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

andrew_ 6y ago

As someone who moved away from Twitter, the last thing I need in my life is another Twitter-owned property. The politics of the last month aside, Twitter is a foul, trite, snide place where the worst of us are trumpeted to the loudest voice and widest audience. The negativity and incentive to waste hours and focus are pervasive in every community I've participated in. Of course, YMMV. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to curate and filter away those things that I abhor about Twitter. A few weeks removed and my mental state feels all the better for it. Color me cynical, but I'll pass on another attempt for Twitter to monetize my attention.

tentacleuno 6y ago
I find it somewhat ironic that Twitter has only now banned Trump. They allowed him to stay on his platform so more people would sign-up, follow him and get radicalised. Now he's no longer the President, they've suddenly acquired morality. Fool me once, eh.
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  Didn't they ban him as a protective measure to curb additional violence after he incited the storming of the capitol? I don't think twitter's tactics are as nefarious as you make them out to be.
  - tentacleuno 6y ago
    They banned him after his Presidency. He did greivous harm and acts of hate before that, but only now are Twitter giving it the attention it deserves. Anyone else would have been banned long before now. He has incited a great deal of violence with racist dogwhistles, and only now he's facing any sort of punishment. The argument of 'free speech' falls apart when you factor this in.
siruva07 6y ago
<sigh> I hear you. But Twitter is an incredible service. From the Arab spring to people like @balajis who broke COVID (for me at least) before major news networks. The only interactive we have as users is positive (a heart or retweet) vs negative (thumbs down on Youtube, downvote on reddit). I think a broken heart, </3, essentially as a downvote, could do a lot to make Twitter more of a community that rewards and punishes, rather than just allows people to exist in their own eco-chamber. The politicians of the last month would have likely seen way more downvotes / broken hearts than favs and retweets, and that might have done something for them personally...it's at least worth a test if anyone at Twitter reads this :).

pembrook 6y ago

> Starting today, we’re making Revue’s Pro features free for all accounts and lowering the paid newsletter fee to 5% ...and there goes Substack's entire business. Overall, this is great for writers however. The missing component to Substack was the discovery/social mechanism. From a strategic perspective, it's easier to bolt on newsletter sending than it is to build a new social network. So this was always a huge risk for Substack as a platform. But hey, there's also an alternate universe where Twitter stays dumb and lazy and never crushes Substack. So I see why investors took the risk. But I see no path forward for Substack if Twitter manages to not completely botch this.

offtop5 6y ago
Not exactly. The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now. I think it's the same thing with Slack, Slack only exists because Microsoft teams is made by Microsoft. I swear to God it's mostly a placebo effect, but you're like oh yeah we're using slack we're the cool kids now. Many companies will have a single breakaway team that uses slack just to feel cool. But if $10 a month makes a developer happier she might produce another $500 in value.
- pembrook 6y ago
  > The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now. I see "current press sentiment" as an irrelevant factor. Just wait until some prominent right winger heads to Substack and the journalists start aiming their sights. The point is, if I'm going to start a paid newsletter, am I willing to give up an extra 5% of my income for the same feature set? The answer is hell no. Substack will have to lower their prices, and then the feature war will begin. Twitter will always have the upper hand given they can directly integrate newsletter sign up forms into twitter. But hey, bureaucratic incompetence is endemic at Twitter, so they might screw up this obvious path to victory they have in front of them.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    To each their own, but given the major questions around how much power Twitter has, I don't see a lot of free and open journalism happening there. Ideally the entire reason you pay for this type of content is because you don't want to just read CNN. If Twitter is perceived as controlling your content anyway, why pay for it

doublerabbit 6y ago

And so, we now enter the tumblr phase of Twitter.

herodoturtle 6y ago
twittr

sturza 6y ago

Seems like substack discovered a market and now they’re competing

eimrine 6y ago

I tried to use Twitter for advertising my business. Reason why I have chosen Twitter is because somebody has told me that I can tweet via SMS, which fits perfect to my livestyle w/o smartphone. But after I have followed several dozens of similar businesses in short period of time (1 hour to find them all) my account was banned. Also I could not set up tweeting from SMS. That was my first and last experience with Twitter.

bachmeier 6y ago

As a user of Twitter who mainly reads tweets rather than writing them, I hope this isn't just a way to make larger volumes of misinformation go viral. Obviously, that's not Twitter's intention, but they want to make money, and viral misinformation seems to be an effective strategy for making money. The reason I raise this issue is because the important characteristic of Twitter is that others can call out the misinformation quickly. It's not perfect, of course, but it's better than a newsletter, where it's just a blob of misinformation with nobody able to call out the BS.

Bakary 6y ago
That's the first time I hear of Twitter as a platform inherently efficient against misinformation. If anything, it seems uniquely primed to spread it and reward users for doing so.
- bachmeier 6y ago
  Oh, Twitter's definitely not a tool "against misinformation". My concern is actually that it's so efficient at spreading misinformation and now they want to take away the ability to call out the misinformation.

kareemm 6y ago

Curious: was this an acqui-hire? Anybody have intel about deal terms?

devdiary 6y ago

Revue looks amazing. But why so many twitter permissions required to login?

julienreszka 6y ago

At what point are those kind of acquisitions anticompetitive?

ryanwiggins 6y ago

The Creators arms race is in full swing, and the winner will be who can deliver the way to most monetize your existing audience AND expand your audience. Twitter already has a strong interest graph and is well positioned here

jhunter1016 6y ago

This is a smart move by Twitter. Substack has taken off considerably. Rather than watch all their prized users go publish long form content on a platform outside their orbit, Twitter just pulled a platform into their orbit. The thing I’m curious about is how creative Twitter will get with integrating the platforms. There have been a lot of missed opportunities with previous Twitter acquisitions IMO.

AzzieElbab 6y ago
I don’t thin substack crowd would trust Twitter with their content.
- the_reformation 6y ago
  The Substack crowd is already on Twitter, and is where they got their audience from.
  - AzzieElbab 6y ago
    That is an overstatement. I might be a dinosaur, but in my case it is the other way around. I mostly follow people I have learned about elsewhere. Also, if Twitter decides to ban one of them, I will still have access to substack where the articles are.
- mcintyre1994 6y ago
  I think Twitter would be okay if the history professor with the $1m Substack comes over to them and people like Glenn Greenwald stay at Substack though.
  - AzzieElbab 6y ago
    You are right. I am biased by my substack subscriptions list
  - whiddershins 6y ago
    History professor with 1m substack? Is this a specific reference?

AndrewLiptak 6y ago

It'll be interesting to see what Substack does in response to this. I can imagine that they'll lose some folks because Twitter's taking a lower rate.

woodpanel 6y ago
Or they could win some folks because of ... Twitter.
paulgb 6y ago
My prediction: bundling. Most of the good content (excluding self-hosted) is now arguably on Substack, but the subscription model is still one-to-one and doesn’t allow them to take advantage of the network effects. There’s a limited number of subscriptions I’m willing to pay for. Bundling economics, if done right, could extract a higher monthly fee from me into the platform. After all, the marginal cost of providing content to me is negligible, so anything I’d be willing to pay for but not enough for to justify another subscription is money left on the table.
- omarhaneef 6y ago
  You know the joke that tech just rediscovers the pre-tech economy? Like a rideshare company will pick up groups of passengers from a location and drop them to the same location in the direction you're going - oh, you just discovered buses. That kind of thing? This is heading towards a you just discovered online magazines/newspapers jokes. Consider: - bundle the best writers together - pay them a salary so they feel some comfort - have an editor who decides - brand it so people trust the name etc
  - paulgb 6y ago
    Ha, that’s fair, but a magazine-style model is only one way to go. Something like diminishing cost for adding additional subscriptions (with the discount split between the newsletters I subscribe to) would be effective in making me spend more there. (And probably abandon an off-substack paid subscription)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

coreyrab 6y ago

It will be interesting to see what the terms of the deal are. I've used Revue to publish a paid newsletter and it works great. Not quite as polished as Substack, but the lower take rate will certainly be enough for some customers to switch imo.

the_drunkard 6y ago

Curious if Twitter will carry-over their draconian (and selectively enforced) censorship rules to Revue. I assume this was discussed as part of the acquisition? Will publishers have free reign to discuss topics that they want to publish on or do Twitter "rules" govern what's allowed to be discussed?

coldtea 6y ago

While censorship people for their writings (based on whatever the US elites that happen to be mainstream in 2020 consider acceptable)? To the degree that even the sitting President, right or wrong, can be shut down? Yeah, pass...

malwarebytess 6y ago

Interesting they're framing it as Revue joining twitter rather than Twitter acquiring Revue.

mrweasel 6y ago
It’s standard “we got bought up” jargon, but it is weird way of saying it. Joining indicates some come goal or success, but it has become Silicon Vally slang for: Our product is dead but at least we made some money.

complianceowl 6y ago

Use Revue, build a sizeable distribution list, so I can get banned for expressing my thoughts? So I can be treated like a pedophile for saying something unpopular that doesn't align with their radical leftist ideology? No thank you. There's a lot of other subscription services for me to take a risk that big with anyone associated with Twitter.

woodpanel 6y ago
Probably a win for Substack, as a take-over by less-diverse-on-purpose Twitter will drive away those who seek diversity of opinions. Although, I can already feel the cancel-pressure building up in and around Substack, just by writing this.
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  I dont think this is a win for substack. Before this acquisition Substack was probably the leading product in this category. Im sure if Substack polled it’s publishers on what they want most, people would say “more paid subscribers”. Twitter is a platform that can offer this from day 1. A chance to have your newsletter promoted to new eyeballs with a strong interest in what you write about. Substack needs to grow the reader side organically and so the race is on. Substack needs to turn into twitter faster than twitter can build substacks tools. Twitter just acquired a company to accelerate this process. How can substack accelerate?
rchaud 6y ago
You seem to be more concerned with 'cancel culture' than the actual viability of your hypothetical 'unpopular opinion' newsletter.
- complianceowl 6y ago
  The "viability of your hypothetical 'unpopular opinion'"?? Are you serious? You're already taking shots and focusing on my beliefs without first addressing the risk that Big Tech and its affiliates pose to merely not being censored or banned? You're the kind of person that should work at Twitter. You'll fit right in, bud.

orliesaurus 6y ago

Will twitter penalize substack users like it had penalized sharing of instagram pictures by removing the preview embedded in tweets?

pr0zac 6y ago
Instagram pictures don't show up on Twitter because Facebook blocked it. They did that in response to Twitter blocking Instagram from finding contacts via Twitter. Its FAANG in-fighting from like 8 years ago that I'm still kind of surprised hasn't been sorted out by now.
- TechBro8615 6y ago
  More like NATFAG in-fighting in this case
  - jsjsbdkj 6y ago
    wow that's a terrible acronym.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      How about FATNAG…oh wait, that's still not not great.
      - GreenWatermelon 6y ago
        FANTAG rolls of the tongue.
mcintyre1994 6y ago
I listened to a podcast that included this story, it was a Facebook decision. Mark phoned and gave them a few hours heads up that 'Instagram' had decided not to allow the embeds any more. They actually got it delayed 24 hours or something like that to avoid breaking Twitter.
6y ago

CivBase 6y ago

"Revue by Twitter" It's interesting that the tech giants keep tagging their names onto the brands they acquire. Does that really help? I know that the tech crowd exists in a bubble and that the hatred for the tech giants on HN doesn't really reflect the feelings of the general public... but even outside the tech sphere, are there really many people who like Twitter as a company? Most people just seem to tolerate the companies behind their preferred platform. It doesn't seem to me like there would be many who would be more likely to engage with a new brand as a result of its association with Twitter. If anything, I'd expect the opposite effect.

whomst 6y ago
I’ve heard that it might be for anti trust reasons (but with putting Facebook on all of its properties). Properly establishing who owns what up front makes the average user more aware of the consolidation of platforms
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  If Revue were a big company perhaps. In this case I think its just to give Revue more value through the brand association.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  I’ve seen that argument a few times recently as well but I don’t find it at all persuasive. Public perception of market competition isn’t relevant to antitrust law. That the public is more aware of a company’s anti-competitive behavior doesn’t somehow absolve or even lessen the potential liability for the anti-competitive behavior. Or perhaps I just don’t understand the point they’re trying to make? I’ve yet to come across this antitrust/branding argument where the rationale has been explained but I’d definitely be curious to hear the legal theory.
  - TimPC 6y ago
    The only thing I can come up with is that being aware of the damages in advance of a purchasing decision might in some cases serve to limit said damages relative to being unaware of them. Not sure it applies in a monopoly setting where awareness of damages doesn't give you an alternative though. It gets more complicated when damage is speech instead of a financial exploit on a product.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

walleeee 6y ago

Why is the Revue model preferable to a blog with a tip jar and RSS? I understand why Twitter wants in on a lucrative game, but I don't understand the value proposition for writers or readers. I struggle to see how, as a regular person on the internet, I benefit from a "public square" that will hijack my brainstem to maximize engagement, sell my attention and browsing habits to 3rd parties, and suspend my account with no warning if I run afoul of a black-box censor.

input_sh 6y ago
Well, for one, it's not a tip jar, but more of a blog + exclusive content. Other than that, not much but an easy setup... if you're from a country that supports receiving money from Stripe. If not, sucks to be you!
rchaud 6y ago
It's preferable because people don't want to have to click through multiple screens to do PayPal/Visa Checkout authentication to give somebody $3. Nobody knows what RSS is either. Even back in mid-00s, I would sometimes struggle to add a blog to my Firefox feed (this was pre-Chrome). On some sites you'd click the RSS button and it would work. On other sites clicking it would display incomprehensible XML markup, causing me to abandon the site.
- walleeee 6y ago
  That's fair, although to me that suggests we need to create easier self-hostable blog/newsletter tools, not all migrate to Twitter's next big fishtank
- nerfhammer 6y ago
  also some would only put a snippet in their RSS feed rather than the whole article
  - rchaud 6y ago
    I forgot about that! That's another reason why I eventually stopped bothering with it.

cercatrova 6y ago

Somewhat related, I use https://typefully.app https://typefully.app to write tweet threads and schedule their posting. Why tweet threads instead of blogging, as many HN users ask? Tweets get traction and build an audience (yes, owning your platform is better than a corporation owning your platform, but you have to go where the eyeballs are) with which I can drive traffic, users and customers to other sites I want them to see. Twitter is also an amazing community, I've had many good interactions there that are simply not possible in other social media platforms. Where else can you get Paul Graham or Balaji Srinivasan to reply to you?

dt3ft 6y ago

What is the product here?

2Gkashmiri 6y ago

second mention of writefreely on HN today... writefreely, https://github.com/writeas/writefreely https://github.com/writeas/writefreely this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool. AGPLv-3.0 goodness

prestigious 6y ago

You would have to be a complete idiot to try and build your revenue on something owned by Twitter. They will shut you down at any time, for any reason, with no recourse.

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
In the new era of monopolistic common carrier platforms, you have to BUILD INTO YOUR BUSINESS PLAN what happens when you get screwed by, say, the Apple App Store, YouTube, or Twitter, et. al. It's a business risk, just like fire or flood. You have to have a contingency ready to go at a moment's notice. By example, Parler didn't.
- rwcarlsen 6y ago
  I read somewhere that parler actually did have a contingency plan, but their backup host pulled out on them too.
  - rubyist5eva 6y ago
    just build your own internet
gnicholas 6y ago
With Revue and Substack, do the authors have access to subscriber email addresses? If so, that would somewhat blunt concerns like this, both directly (if you are booted off the platform) and indirectly (presumably the platforms would be less aggressive in their rules/enforcement if it is easy for authors to leave).
- mshroyer 6y ago
  https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/logistics https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/logistics > I'm saving the Substack mailing list regularly to my hard drive, and if I go somewhere else I'll let you all know. So this is possible on Substack at least. Some Substacks also use a custom domain name, which would make migration off the platform even easier.

vincentmarle 6y ago

Cool, this is a Dutch company right? Congrats!

another_sock 6y ago

This is a good idea with the caveat that twitter gets more sane banning/suspension policies. For any interesting or non-traditional writers/thinkers, the process of building up a platform and having it taken away from you by some tech overlord is a very common experience. Most people with any audience who say anything of value are very wary of anything associated with twitter, so there needs to be some administrative and policy changes before anybody of value uses this.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cblconfederate 6y ago

I ve seen people talking about owning their twitter audience but the suggestion was to move away from twitter and towards self-hosting. Substack is promoted as a temporary in-between. Interesting that twitter thinks authors want to lock long-form content in there. What happens after the inevitable next Purge?

whimsicalism 6y ago
> What happens after the inevitable next Purge? Most authors are not going to be "purged" full stop.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  The good ones won't go to a platform that purges speech. It may be OK for content marketers, but i don't see journalists that don't like to mince their words (e.g. greenwald) choosing to host their content on twitter.
  - wbsss4412 6y ago
    Greenwald is an avid Twitter user, and is hardly in any danger of being de platformed for any of his views.
- adolph 6y ago
  "Most" definitely messes with the business model. The requirement is for only enough to get everyone else to fall in line. It also helps to make selections idiosyncraticly arbitrary to maintain strategic ambiguity instead of drawing a clear line.

mschuster91 6y ago

Fascinating. I wonder what happened to Medium?

herodoturtle 6y ago
No idea what happened because I stopped using it after they started adding all the accessibility friction. The UI was decent, original. And giving the reader an idea of the "Reading time" of each article was a nice touch. But yeah, that friction got to be a little too much.
kbelder 6y ago
They're blocked for me where ever I can block them, just because I got sick of innocently following a link and being ambushed by Medium and their hassle. Or 'friction', to euphemize.

lesstenseflow 6y ago

Why are comments about twitter's censorious nature being downvoted? The two main topics here (in my view) are 1. Twitter's response to Substack and how this move will impact the two companies and 2. the fact that some of Substack's most prominent users are writers who are refugees from other platforms (Andrew Sullivan from New York magazine, Bari Weiss from the New York Times etc.) who left because of the suppression-of-unpopular-speech trends that Twitter is now famous for. So Revue is what, Substack minus fees plus twitter viewpoint-enforcement? In any event I think this topic (censorship) at least bears discussion and I encourage users here not to downvote the discussion in the name of "suppressing right wingers" or similar. Twitter does not just ban right wingers. Take a look at the list of prominent people banned from twitter[0], it includes people such as Talib Kweli, Zuby (both rappers), "The IT Crowd" creator Graham Linehan, numerous political satire accounts, numerous feminists, and numerous artists and others for death threats towards such potential victims as "the Planters mascot Mr. Peanut," "a dead mosquito" and "the country Austria" (issued by an Austrian artist). If you have strong contrary views, you are probably in the danger zone for getting a twitter suspension or ban if someone wants to make a point of reporting you. Censorship should definitely be part of this discussion of Revue. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#List_of_notable_suspensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#List_of_no...

stakkur 6y ago

Oy. Another company wanting a piece of the 'newsletter' pie, and access to your mailing list.

herodoturtle 6y ago
Yeah. But I'll still keep subscribing to the best mailing list, so...

figgyc 6y ago

Am I the only one who sees Revue, Substack etc. as a niche market? I can see why it appeals to Silicon Valley types/HN readers; after all this website is a content aggregator so it makes sense we all have a shared interest in written work. That said I think that the blog "industry" is dying more than it is growing. To me, media seems to be trending towards quick, consumable, visually stimulating content, ie YouTube, TikTok and the like. The reason such content is more engaging and profitable is because it's a lot easier to turn it into a feed: one does not scroll through a newsletter for hours on end, and long form content tends to be the type that you put more thought into reading instead of simply moving on to the next piece. Advertising runs on eyeballs but subscriptions do not, and it feels to me like Twitter seem to think that creating a well integrated platform to drive more Twitter discussion is a good idea, but really to me it feels like blogs and Tweets run perpendicular to each other: anyone who's read a decent amount of Twitter conversation knows that deeply thought out and sensible it is not. Maybe they see being able to be "in" conversations about paywalled content will incentivize people to pay up, and will subsequently start pushing Revue content on people's feeds to try and create such a mentality? Or maybe Twitter don't care about making Revue "part of" Twitter and just think it's a growing market worth capitalising on. Only time will tell. In a way it sort of reminds me of podcasts. They work well only for a group of people who have the time to consume long content, and while it works as a large niche, I can't see it growing into a Twitter-scale mass market, so I wouldn't trust it to be around for a particularly long time.

kodah 6y ago

I'm conflicted about this move. I was listening to Reply All the other day and they mentioned platform diversity and I've seen a number of discussions on here around platform diversity. Twitters ability to buy a feature like this makes it harder to compete with. It benefits writers in a way that it adds in-demand functionality to an existing popular platform but also harms writers and consumers because of the rising demand of platform diversity.

cccc4all 6y ago

Will this be Twitter's Instagram? Or Will this be Twitter's Tumbler? My money is on the latter.

jp1016 6y ago

I was making a tool to bookmark tweets and convert threads into articles , https://twimark.io https://twimark.io , this acquisition could move some users who write long threads to revue. I wonder what the effects will be

nojs 6y ago

I’m curious as to why Twitter chose to do this as an acquisition rather than build their own. It doesn’t seem particularly hard to build from an engineering perspective, and I doubt Twitter needs to acquire the Revue user base given their existing profile and reach.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
machiaweliczny 6y ago
They buy creators this way. In social networks and winner-take-all market it's logical.

ghaff 6y ago

I used Revue for a while and basically decided I didn't want to do a regular newsletter. (Never had any interest in directly monetizing.) I do still have a blog but I mostly publish on various platforms that have fairly heavy-duty promotion machinery. But depending upon how Revue is integrated into Twitter, I'd take a look again.

alberth 6y ago

Does anyone else find it ironic Revue official blog is hosted on Medium? https://blog.getrevue.co https://blog.getrevue.co

pier25 6y ago
Well, a newsletter is not a blog after all. It's intended to be consumed in an email client, not a browser.