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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

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?
    - nomdep 6y ago
      At least in my country, in the week just after christmas, in several children cable channels, the ads dissapear. Instead the run "ads" for other shows in the channel. I guess that how TV without ads would look like.
      - larrik 6y ago
        In the USA, the Disney Channel is mostly like this year round.
        devlopr 6y ago
        tcm is like this.
      - smileybarry 6y ago
        In Israel, cable/satellite company-owned channels only ads shown for other shows or channels. That's not because they're nice, but because they're legally barred from showing "real" ads (only commercial, free OTA channels can do that; gov-owned public access only shows ads for their own shows, same reason). Plus those ads are just between programs and never in the middle of one. They still get very repetitive, though.
    - ISL 6y ago
      With satellite TV in the 90s, some channels simply blacked out or showed a placeholder in the ad slots -- sometimes the satellite channels were the very feeds that the TV stations were using. Premium channels would fill the gaps between shows with advertisements for upcoming shows on the same channel or affiliated channels. Coming from broadcast TV, networks like HBO were kind of incredible; no ads, just the thing you went there to watch. By then, however, the non-premium channels definitely carried ads.
    - sharperguy 6y ago
      In the UK, the BBC channels are still ad-free. Shows like The IT Crowd or Star Trek just play through continuously without ads. Between shows, they have a short ad break advertising other BBC shows and live broadcasts that will be playing at a later time, but nothing paid.
  - TimPC 6y ago
    cable tv always had ads because the cable subscription goes to an infrastructure provider not the content provider. If the infrastructure provider was the content provider there is a substantial incentive to reduce or eliminate ads a la Netflix and Amazon Prime which largely restrict ads to brief promotions of other content on the network.
    - julianlam 6y ago
      I don't believe this is correct. Certain cable television channels were originally ad free (e.g. USA, Nickelodeon) because they competed against free OTA broadcasts which were ad supported. Similarly to pay per view. That those channels now show commercials (and has for a long enough time that people think "it was always like this") just cements our expectations that commercials are a fact of life.
    - organsnyder 6y ago
      Those infrastructure providers pay a ton of money to the content providers. I've heard that ESPN is the single largest cost of most cable plans.
  - deckard1 6y ago
    In addition to cable going to ads, it deserves mention that many shows today feature brand advertising right in the program. I pay for Netflix, but go watch a Korean drama and they are clearly advertising Subway, KFC, Samsung, etc. right there in the show through the show itself. Movies do this too, and you paid for that expensive ticket. Wayne's World even did a parody of this in 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjB6r-HDDI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjB6r-HDDI0 Advertising is incredibly pervasive in our modern society and only going to increase.
- rozab 6y ago
  Correct. I don't understand why people suggest direct revenue streams would help in this regard. Have you seen Facebook's profit margins? They don't need to spy on people.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >I am a bit cynical about that Spyware-aaS companies like FB would stop spying just becouse you paid them. So am I. The problem is that the paying members are also the same members that are most valuable to advertisers (because they have disposable cash and are probably 'power users' of the platform), so there is an incentive to 'sell them' to advertisers as well.
  - TimPC 6y ago
    If we get enough global privacy laws with sufficient teeth, it may be possible for paid models to offer a low risk alternative to spying where you would be constantly at risk of fines for poor decisions on how you implement your data collection. It would be quite a change in the way the internet works financially, but it seems like companies would be likely to adapt to it were it to happen.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      The trouble with paid social media is that the value is in the network, and becomes much less attractive if lots (maybe 90% of users) don't pay, and hence are removed from the service. You could do freemium, but you'd make a lot less money (FB would anyway, maybe this would work for Twitter) without reducing your support costs. So yeah, I'm not sure this would work in the current setup (even global privacy laws with teeth will move from individual level ads to cohort level ads). The trouble is not that subscription services are worse, it's that ads are super profitable if you're a really big service.
- boogies 6y ago
  > companies [don’t] stop spying just becouse you paid them I think Windows (10 especially) is Exhibit A here (its “users” are definitely the product, but MS is happy to take their free money — or not, you can download it for $0 from their site, and cheap activation keys are easy to find), and the world’s first trillion dollar company is Exhibit B — its end-users are customers in many senses of the word, and they’re not the product, but a product that they offer to their walled garden’s developers with strings attached.
- simias 6y ago
  Indeed, and especially if they already have the tracking tech anyway. Why bother turning it off? I wish that paying for Spotify meant that my privacy would be respected, but I have zero illusions that they basically gather at least as much data as free customers.
- leppr 6y ago
  A derivative take on this is that getting people used to paying for internet services, would enable more respectful platforms that need the subscription revenue, to exist. I also would never pay for participation in a monolithic user-generated content platform with questionable "curation" (e.g. Youtube Premium), but directly paying for hosting/moderation/admin work is still the way forward IMO.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  I think you're right, but if people had to pay even a few dollars a month for Facebook and Twitter I think it would make a big dent in amount of nonstop drivel and shitposting that goes on. And that's another reason it won't happen, it would reduce eyeballs for the ads.
user-the-name 6y ago
An edit button does not make sense for a service like Twitter. There are way to many ways to abuse it, and any solution that tries to deal with those just ends up being equivalent to what already exists: Delete and repost.
- siruva07 6y ago
  Why does an edit button not make sense for a service like Twitter? How would it be abused? Deleting and reposting hurts and would eliminate engagement statistics. From a product experience, edited tweets, similar to Slack, could show an "(edited)" that when clicked on let's a user see the version history. That way, it can't be abused, but does allow for minor typos (e.g. https://twitter.com/sir/status/1353737949729468416 https://twitter.com/sir/status/1353737949729468416)
  - thomasahle 6y ago
    > Deleting and reposting hurts and would eliminate engagement statistics. Maybe there should be a maximum number of characters edited. If I have liked/retweeted a tweet, and its author then completely rewrites it,I would want my "engagement" eliminated.
    - RL_Quine 6y ago
      Am considering taking Tesla private at $9420. Funding secured. Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured. Am considering taking Tesla private at $42. Funding secured.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - mnx 6y ago
      no way to prevent just adding a 'not' while still allowing sensible editing.
    - conradfr 6y ago
boogies 6y ago
> Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product You’re not the product in the Fediverse, where Pleroma says you can run a small server for ~$4/month (https://pleroma.social/blog/2021/01/13/the-big-pleroma-and-fediverse-faq/ https://pleroma.social/blog/2021/01/13/the-big-pleroma-and-f...). Or you can join someone else’s instance and donate eg. to GNU Social’s lead developer on Liberapay (https://liberapay.com/diogo/donate https://liberapay.com/diogo/donate) or Mastodon on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/mastodon https://www.patreon.com/mastodon, $1/month gives you access ironically to a Discord channel).
motoboi 6y ago
If they charge 5 to 15 reais per month 80% of Brazil’s users will exit Twitter and Facebook for the free competitor the same day. I suppose the same would happen anywhere the exchange rate is unfavorable. A price for FB in Brazil? R$ 1 ($0,2). And the free option would still get a huge market share.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  For what is worth, those users also earn them much lees revenue, so the cost can be lower, too.
  - mrisoli 6y ago
    It's a matter of perception, especially in poorer countries like Brazil, why would anyone pay money for something that was previously free? Good example of this is WhatsApp, IIRC it was free for a year then charged $1 for lifetime access, people still scrambled to get around the app(download illegal APKs, or recreate accounts).
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      Exactly. There are 2 problems with requiring payments in Brazil: 1 - Most people will not want to pay. They will spend a whole day/weekend trying to find a free alternative, even if it costs just a couple bucks. 2 - Many, many people don't have credit cards. You would need to support boleto or debit. Generating and managing boletos adds cost, so you would need to increase your fees not to lose money
      - strogonoff 6y ago
        I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that there’s a slight problem with saying “social networks shouldn’t become paid because some users will leave”. This line of reasoning implicitly treats those products as some sort of public good. I imagine it’s beneficial to their owners—but is it to the users? There’s a conflict of interest here. Networks want to be free. Huge account numbers and de-facto public good status positively influence network valuations and allow them to charge more for ads; armies of troll and no-value accounts greatly inflate the numbers; the loser turns out to be legitimate users. If we are sure they remain afloat if we pay them, why should we worry about product’s popularity more than our own treatment? They are not central parks or public squares. They don’t have the obligation of being free. They are free to discriminate subscription prices between countries, which many companies do today (Apple Music is 5 times cheaper in India than in the US[0]). And if geographical price discrimination is not enough, if I’m poor I have the freedom to use another social network that charges less or nothing; when I (hopefully) grow my income and get fed up with myself being a product of X I can choose to invest into a more expensive tier of social networking and move my social presence[1] to Y—what’s wrong with that? I suspect that normalizing paid options could make social networking more heterogenous, encourage competition, and likely benefit the society in the long run. [0] https://www.cashnetusa.com/blog/which-countries-pay-most-and-least-apple-music/ https://www.cashnetusa.com/blog/which-countries-pay-most-and... [1] If https://datatransferproject.dev https://datatransferproject.dev pans out, I could perhaps even take my posts with me.
notahacker 6y ago
> 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). So my inbox is the product? I think the number of people willing to pay $36 per annum to not see sponsored content in amongst all the organic marketing spam in newsfeeds is a negligible proportion of the user base, especially since ad blockers can be configured to hide it anyway.
hderms 6y ago
Presumably none of these big players want to charge money for a pro service because it would be difficult to walk back on w.r.t ad revenue. The ad purchasers would probably take issue with it, especially given that they're explicitly valuing their user base at presumably less than they're charging for advertising access to them. Not to say it couldn't work, but I'm guessing the reason it hasn't been tried is at least partially do to there being no going back
sneak 6y ago
> I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service. I don't. Centralization of censorship ability in a small number of platforms is a bad thing for everyone. Twitter and Instagram or any other centralized censor becoming a "better service" makes our whole society worse. It's time to leave Twitter and never look back. Only assholes tell other adults what they're allowed to see or read. I tolerated Twitter deciding what I was allowed to write for a dozen years. When they started censoring search and dictating what I was allowed to read, I deleted my account. Sharecropping on someone else's platform is a dead end.
Applejinx 6y ago
Funnily enough, just last week I deleted both Facebook and Twitter, even though they 'cost me nothing'.
nathias 6y ago
I won't believe that until I see it, you can most definitely both pay and be the product.
Nacdor 6y ago
> Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%. Twitter's willingness to silence users for political reasons will ensure this service never competes with Substack in any meaningful way. I don't doubt that it will be popular, but you won't see top-tier independent journalists building their houses on a Twitter's land after what we learned in the past year.
- reidjs 6y ago
  I assume you're mainly referring to Trump. Inciting a coup is technically a political reason, but I think most people agree that's a valid reason to silence someone.
  - TimPC 6y ago
    Twitter has done far more than silence Trump. The NY Post article they shut down before the election turned out to be more true than false. It wasn't an attempt to incite a coup, it was an attempt to report some inconvenient facts about the son of a man who is now president and corruption. I'm glad Biden is president as I think it was a needed change that will be good for the US and the world but I still found this shut down of information deeply troubling.
  - Nacdor 6y ago
    No, I'm mainly referring to the NY Post which was pre-emptively banned before Twitter had fact-checked their story. Even after it was proven that the story was true, Twitter refused to unlock their account. It took weeks of immense public pressure and even then the NY Post might've still been forced to delete the "offending" tweets just to satisfy Twitter and get their account back. https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1354077568555692034 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1354077568555692034 No sane journalist would rely on Twitter for income after that.
    - NicoJuicy 6y ago
      > Even after it was proven that the story was true Where did you get that that story was true? It was mostly fake but with some elements of truth in it. The story itselve didn't even seem credible was my POV. Source?
patrickaljord 6y ago
There is no way in hell Twitter is going to give up on ads any time soon. Maintaining a service like Twitter costs hundreds of millions of dollars in infra and workers and it's highly unlikely that Revue could cover those costs. Even if by some miracle, Revue manages to pays the bill, it would be impossible to justify to shareholders giving up on such a huge source of revenue that is ads. tl;dr twitter giving up on ads ain't happening
throwawaysea 6y ago
I am very fearful of where that goes. Twitter and Facebook delete lots of conversations that offend their progressive political sensibilities. Even if people paid for these services, they would still be operating within those biased chambers as a result. I would rather have someone independent like Substack win this space instead of seeing these companies take it all just because of their financial warchests and the power of network effects making them immune to competition.
dumbfounder 6y ago
The second you charge you cut out a large chunk of your audience. The second you cut out a large chunk of your audience you give up what makes Twitter useful. Facebook has the same issue, if only 10% of your friends are on there, why would you want to be there?
enos_feedler 6y ago
100% agree with the business model switch. I think products have a natural business model and for Twitter it's not advertising. I think it took time for the market to have appetite to pay for more subs, but it's here now. I really think this takes Twitter to the next level.
0x1F8B 6y ago
> Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter.
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  I'm sure they would figure out a way to roll it into your phone bill. I think it would be a good thing. This sounds harsh but honestly most of the the types of people that are unwilling to pay $1-3 per month for the service are probably the types that don't make the service a better social network. It would also hopefully disincentivize government agencies and maybe even politicians from using it as a channel of communications since it's more along the lines of a traditional business arrangement and not a "free, TV-like" service.
jtsiskin 6y ago
Facebook makes $30-40 ARPU in the US+Canada. https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/FB-Q3-2020-Earnings-Presentation.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3...
- krrrh 6y ago
  It’s important to factor in how much cost savings Facebook could realize by eliminating most of its advertising department and associated engineering when looking at how moving off an advertising model might affect profitability. I have no idea what the magnitude of this is, but a good portion of that $30-40 has to get chewed up by spending on stuff that makes the platform less useful to the end users.
- siruva07 6y ago
  Got it. Looks like I pulled my figure on a quarterly basis which syncs with this annualized math. FB is on the high end of ARPU. Most other services are cents to low dollars. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/facebook-towers-over-rivals-in-the-critical-metric-of-revenue-per-user.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/facebook-towers-over-rivals-...
csomar 6y ago
> 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. The problem is that they are making the bulk of their money from the top tier of their users (which is a really tiny percentage); and the rest is not monetize-able. If your are making $80-100 from your top guys (who will probably, gladly, pay $5/month subscription), you still come short. And the mass that makes you $0/year is not going to pay at any price, anyway. They are just there to keep the higher value audience.
- stonecraftwolf 6y ago
  Obligatory, but this really seems to confuse the point: their revenue doesn’t come from their users at all. It comes from selling their users to advertisers.
nunez 6y ago
I am absolutely not convinced that Facebook and their like would make more money as a paid service. People are okay with giving up (or not knowing that they are giving up) privacy to use products like social media. Unlike television (where there aren’t any free alternatives), Facebook would lose market share overnight if a somewhat-competent but free competitor sprang up. I am also not convinced that people would pay to just get rid of ads, especially when there are free and easy alternatives available. I _am_ convinced that a company like Facebook will try to launch a paid content service with their own exclusives since that seems to be the thing that big content providers are doing.

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?
  - nomdep 6y ago
    At least in my country, in the week just after christmas, in several children cable channels, the ads dissapear. Instead the run "ads" for other shows in the channel. I guess that how TV without ads would look like.
    - larrik 6y ago
      In the USA, the Disney Channel is mostly like this year round.
      - devlopr 6y ago
        tcm is like this.
    - smileybarry 6y ago
      In Israel, cable/satellite company-owned channels only ads shown for other shows or channels. That's not because they're nice, but because they're legally barred from showing "real" ads (only commercial, free OTA channels can do that; gov-owned public access only shows ads for their own shows, same reason). Plus those ads are just between programs and never in the middle of one. They still get very repetitive, though.
  - ISL 6y ago
    With satellite TV in the 90s, some channels simply blacked out or showed a placeholder in the ad slots -- sometimes the satellite channels were the very feeds that the TV stations were using. Premium channels would fill the gaps between shows with advertisements for upcoming shows on the same channel or affiliated channels. Coming from broadcast TV, networks like HBO were kind of incredible; no ads, just the thing you went there to watch. By then, however, the non-premium channels definitely carried ads.
  - sharperguy 6y ago
    In the UK, the BBC channels are still ad-free. Shows like The IT Crowd or Star Trek just play through continuously without ads. Between shows, they have a short ad break advertising other BBC shows and live broadcasts that will be playing at a later time, but nothing paid.
- TimPC 6y ago
  cable tv always had ads because the cable subscription goes to an infrastructure provider not the content provider. If the infrastructure provider was the content provider there is a substantial incentive to reduce or eliminate ads a la Netflix and Amazon Prime which largely restrict ads to brief promotions of other content on the network.
  - julianlam 6y ago
    I don't believe this is correct. Certain cable television channels were originally ad free (e.g. USA, Nickelodeon) because they competed against free OTA broadcasts which were ad supported. Similarly to pay per view. That those channels now show commercials (and has for a long enough time that people think "it was always like this") just cements our expectations that commercials are a fact of life.
  - organsnyder 6y ago
    Those infrastructure providers pay a ton of money to the content providers. I've heard that ESPN is the single largest cost of most cable plans.
- deckard1 6y ago
  In addition to cable going to ads, it deserves mention that many shows today feature brand advertising right in the program. I pay for Netflix, but go watch a Korean drama and they are clearly advertising Subway, KFC, Samsung, etc. right there in the show through the show itself. Movies do this too, and you paid for that expensive ticket. Wayne's World even did a parody of this in 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjB6r-HDDI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjB6r-HDDI0 Advertising is incredibly pervasive in our modern society and only going to increase.
rozab 6y ago
Correct. I don't understand why people suggest direct revenue streams would help in this regard. Have you seen Facebook's profit margins? They don't need to spy on people.
macspoofing 6y ago
>I am a bit cynical about that Spyware-aaS companies like FB would stop spying just becouse you paid them. So am I. The problem is that the paying members are also the same members that are most valuable to advertisers (because they have disposable cash and are probably 'power users' of the platform), so there is an incentive to 'sell them' to advertisers as well.
- TimPC 6y ago
  If we get enough global privacy laws with sufficient teeth, it may be possible for paid models to offer a low risk alternative to spying where you would be constantly at risk of fines for poor decisions on how you implement your data collection. It would be quite a change in the way the internet works financially, but it seems like companies would be likely to adapt to it were it to happen.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    The trouble with paid social media is that the value is in the network, and becomes much less attractive if lots (maybe 90% of users) don't pay, and hence are removed from the service. You could do freemium, but you'd make a lot less money (FB would anyway, maybe this would work for Twitter) without reducing your support costs. So yeah, I'm not sure this would work in the current setup (even global privacy laws with teeth will move from individual level ads to cohort level ads). The trouble is not that subscription services are worse, it's that ads are super profitable if you're a really big service.
boogies 6y ago
> companies [don’t] stop spying just becouse you paid them I think Windows (10 especially) is Exhibit A here (its “users” are definitely the product, but MS is happy to take their free money — or not, you can download it for $0 from their site, and cheap activation keys are easy to find), and the world’s first trillion dollar company is Exhibit B — its end-users are customers in many senses of the word, and they’re not the product, but a product that they offer to their walled garden’s developers with strings attached.
simias 6y ago
Indeed, and especially if they already have the tracking tech anyway. Why bother turning it off? I wish that paying for Spotify meant that my privacy would be respected, but I have zero illusions that they basically gather at least as much data as free customers.
leppr 6y ago
A derivative take on this is that getting people used to paying for internet services, would enable more respectful platforms that need the subscription revenue, to exist. I also would never pay for participation in a monolithic user-generated content platform with questionable "curation" (e.g. Youtube Premium), but directly paying for hosting/moderation/admin work is still the way forward IMO.
throwawayboise 6y ago
I think you're right, but if people had to pay even a few dollars a month for Facebook and Twitter I think it would make a big dent in amount of nonstop drivel and shitposting that goes on. And that's another reason it won't happen, it would reduce eyeballs for the ads.

user-the-name 6y ago

An edit button does not make sense for a service like Twitter. There are way to many ways to abuse it, and any solution that tries to deal with those just ends up being equivalent to what already exists: Delete and repost.

siruva07 6y ago
Why does an edit button not make sense for a service like Twitter? How would it be abused? Deleting and reposting hurts and would eliminate engagement statistics. From a product experience, edited tweets, similar to Slack, could show an "(edited)" that when clicked on let's a user see the version history. That way, it can't be abused, but does allow for minor typos (e.g. https://twitter.com/sir/status/1353737949729468416 https://twitter.com/sir/status/1353737949729468416)
- thomasahle 6y ago
  > Deleting and reposting hurts and would eliminate engagement statistics. Maybe there should be a maximum number of characters edited. If I have liked/retweeted a tweet, and its author then completely rewrites it,I would want my "engagement" eliminated.
  - RL_Quine 6y ago
    Am considering taking Tesla private at $9420. Funding secured. Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured. Am considering taking Tesla private at $42. Funding secured.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - mnx 6y ago
    no way to prevent just adding a 'not' while still allowing sensible editing.
  - conradfr 6y ago

boogies 6y ago

> Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product You’re not the product in the Fediverse, where Pleroma says you can run a small server for ~$4/month (https://pleroma.social/blog/2021/01/13/the-big-pleroma-and-fediverse-faq/ https://pleroma.social/blog/2021/01/13/the-big-pleroma-and-f...). Or you can join someone else’s instance and donate eg. to GNU Social’s lead developer on Liberapay (https://liberapay.com/diogo/donate https://liberapay.com/diogo/donate) or Mastodon on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/mastodon https://www.patreon.com/mastodon, $1/month gives you access ironically to a Discord channel).

motoboi 6y ago

If they charge 5 to 15 reais per month 80% of Brazil’s users will exit Twitter and Facebook for the free competitor the same day. I suppose the same would happen anywhere the exchange rate is unfavorable. A price for FB in Brazil? R$ 1 ($0,2). And the free option would still get a huge market share.

Tenoke 6y ago
For what is worth, those users also earn them much lees revenue, so the cost can be lower, too.
- mrisoli 6y ago
  It's a matter of perception, especially in poorer countries like Brazil, why would anyone pay money for something that was previously free? Good example of this is WhatsApp, IIRC it was free for a year then charged $1 for lifetime access, people still scrambled to get around the app(download illegal APKs, or recreate accounts).
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    Exactly. There are 2 problems with requiring payments in Brazil: 1 - Most people will not want to pay. They will spend a whole day/weekend trying to find a free alternative, even if it costs just a couple bucks. 2 - Many, many people don't have credit cards. You would need to support boleto or debit. Generating and managing boletos adds cost, so you would need to increase your fees not to lose money
    - strogonoff 6y ago
      I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that there’s a slight problem with saying “social networks shouldn’t become paid because some users will leave”. This line of reasoning implicitly treats those products as some sort of public good. I imagine it’s beneficial to their owners—but is it to the users? There’s a conflict of interest here. Networks want to be free. Huge account numbers and de-facto public good status positively influence network valuations and allow them to charge more for ads; armies of troll and no-value accounts greatly inflate the numbers; the loser turns out to be legitimate users. If we are sure they remain afloat if we pay them, why should we worry about product’s popularity more than our own treatment? They are not central parks or public squares. They don’t have the obligation of being free. They are free to discriminate subscription prices between countries, which many companies do today (Apple Music is 5 times cheaper in India than in the US[0]). And if geographical price discrimination is not enough, if I’m poor I have the freedom to use another social network that charges less or nothing; when I (hopefully) grow my income and get fed up with myself being a product of X I can choose to invest into a more expensive tier of social networking and move my social presence[1] to Y—what’s wrong with that? I suspect that normalizing paid options could make social networking more heterogenous, encourage competition, and likely benefit the society in the long run. [0] https://www.cashnetusa.com/blog/which-countries-pay-most-and-least-apple-music/ https://www.cashnetusa.com/blog/which-countries-pay-most-and... [1] If https://datatransferproject.dev https://datatransferproject.dev pans out, I could perhaps even take my posts with me.

notahacker 6y ago

> 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). So my inbox is the product? I think the number of people willing to pay $36 per annum to not see sponsored content in amongst all the organic marketing spam in newsfeeds is a negligible proportion of the user base, especially since ad blockers can be configured to hide it anyway.

hderms 6y ago

Presumably none of these big players want to charge money for a pro service because it would be difficult to walk back on w.r.t ad revenue. The ad purchasers would probably take issue with it, especially given that they're explicitly valuing their user base at presumably less than they're charging for advertising access to them. Not to say it couldn't work, but I'm guessing the reason it hasn't been tried is at least partially do to there being no going back

sneak 6y ago

> I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service. I don't. Centralization of censorship ability in a small number of platforms is a bad thing for everyone. Twitter and Instagram or any other centralized censor becoming a "better service" makes our whole society worse. It's time to leave Twitter and never look back. Only assholes tell other adults what they're allowed to see or read. I tolerated Twitter deciding what I was allowed to write for a dozen years. When they started censoring search and dictating what I was allowed to read, I deleted my account. Sharecropping on someone else's platform is a dead end.

Applejinx 6y ago

Funnily enough, just last week I deleted both Facebook and Twitter, even though they 'cost me nothing'.

nathias 6y ago

I won't believe that until I see it, you can most definitely both pay and be the product.

Nacdor 6y ago

> Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%. Twitter's willingness to silence users for political reasons will ensure this service never competes with Substack in any meaningful way. I don't doubt that it will be popular, but you won't see top-tier independent journalists building their houses on a Twitter's land after what we learned in the past year.

reidjs 6y ago
I assume you're mainly referring to Trump. Inciting a coup is technically a political reason, but I think most people agree that's a valid reason to silence someone.
- TimPC 6y ago
  Twitter has done far more than silence Trump. The NY Post article they shut down before the election turned out to be more true than false. It wasn't an attempt to incite a coup, it was an attempt to report some inconvenient facts about the son of a man who is now president and corruption. I'm glad Biden is president as I think it was a needed change that will be good for the US and the world but I still found this shut down of information deeply troubling.
- Nacdor 6y ago
  No, I'm mainly referring to the NY Post which was pre-emptively banned before Twitter had fact-checked their story. Even after it was proven that the story was true, Twitter refused to unlock their account. It took weeks of immense public pressure and even then the NY Post might've still been forced to delete the "offending" tweets just to satisfy Twitter and get their account back. https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1354077568555692034 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1354077568555692034 No sane journalist would rely on Twitter for income after that.
  - NicoJuicy 6y ago
    > Even after it was proven that the story was true Where did you get that that story was true? It was mostly fake but with some elements of truth in it. The story itselve didn't even seem credible was my POV. Source?

patrickaljord 6y ago

There is no way in hell Twitter is going to give up on ads any time soon. Maintaining a service like Twitter costs hundreds of millions of dollars in infra and workers and it's highly unlikely that Revue could cover those costs. Even if by some miracle, Revue manages to pays the bill, it would be impossible to justify to shareholders giving up on such a huge source of revenue that is ads. tl;dr twitter giving up on ads ain't happening

throwawaysea 6y ago

I am very fearful of where that goes. Twitter and Facebook delete lots of conversations that offend their progressive political sensibilities. Even if people paid for these services, they would still be operating within those biased chambers as a result. I would rather have someone independent like Substack win this space instead of seeing these companies take it all just because of their financial warchests and the power of network effects making them immune to competition.

dumbfounder 6y ago

The second you charge you cut out a large chunk of your audience. The second you cut out a large chunk of your audience you give up what makes Twitter useful. Facebook has the same issue, if only 10% of your friends are on there, why would you want to be there?

enos_feedler 6y ago

100% agree with the business model switch. I think products have a natural business model and for Twitter it's not advertising. I think it took time for the market to have appetite to pay for more subs, but it's here now. I really think this takes Twitter to the next level.

0x1F8B 6y ago

> Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter.

tenebrisalietum 6y ago
I'm sure they would figure out a way to roll it into your phone bill. I think it would be a good thing. This sounds harsh but honestly most of the the types of people that are unwilling to pay $1-3 per month for the service are probably the types that don't make the service a better social network. It would also hopefully disincentivize government agencies and maybe even politicians from using it as a channel of communications since it's more along the lines of a traditional business arrangement and not a "free, TV-like" service.

jtsiskin 6y ago

Facebook makes $30-40 ARPU in the US+Canada. https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/FB-Q3-2020-Earnings-Presentation.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3...

krrrh 6y ago
It’s important to factor in how much cost savings Facebook could realize by eliminating most of its advertising department and associated engineering when looking at how moving off an advertising model might affect profitability. I have no idea what the magnitude of this is, but a good portion of that $30-40 has to get chewed up by spending on stuff that makes the platform less useful to the end users.
siruva07 6y ago
Got it. Looks like I pulled my figure on a quarterly basis which syncs with this annualized math. FB is on the high end of ARPU. Most other services are cents to low dollars. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/facebook-towers-over-rivals-in-the-critical-metric-of-revenue-per-user.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/facebook-towers-over-rivals-...

csomar 6y ago

> 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. The problem is that they are making the bulk of their money from the top tier of their users (which is a really tiny percentage); and the rest is not monetize-able. If your are making $80-100 from your top guys (who will probably, gladly, pay $5/month subscription), you still come short. And the mass that makes you $0/year is not going to pay at any price, anyway. They are just there to keep the higher value audience.

stonecraftwolf 6y ago
Obligatory, but this really seems to confuse the point: their revenue doesn’t come from their users at all. It comes from selling their users to advertisers.

nunez 6y ago

I am absolutely not convinced that Facebook and their like would make more money as a paid service. People are okay with giving up (or not knowing that they are giving up) privacy to use products like social media. Unlike television (where there aren’t any free alternatives), Facebook would lose market share overnight if a somewhat-competent but free competitor sprang up. I am also not convinced that people would pay to just get rid of ads, especially when there are free and easy alternatives available. I _am_ convinced that a company like Facebook will try to launch a paid content service with their own exclusives since that seems to be the thing that big content providers are doing.