31 ms·

Twitter confirms Twitter Blue

481 points by 0xedb 5y ago

Zababa 5y ago
$3 for color themes and a reader mode? I don't like how it creates negative incentives to make regular twitter readable. I often see poeple here already complaining that threads are hard to read, and this could make it worse. Edit: also quick undo. So they are monetizing the lack of basic features and their restrictions on clients. I don't really like the idea.
- fernandotakai 5y ago
  honestly, if they take out the ads and stopped selling my data, i would pay 3 USD without any issues.
  - setBoolean 5y ago
    That and an option to permanently opt out of their curation of my timeline. I just want to see the content of people I actually follow in a chronological fashion. At the moment I‘am quiet happy using Tweetbot but most 3rd party clients are hampered due to API restrictions on Twitters side.
    - fernandotakai 5y ago
      one way to force chronological is to add everyone you follow to a private list. even on official clients, it's always chronological and no ads -- but it's not perfect.
    - scioto 5y ago
      I also use Tweetbot, and am experiencing very little of what everybody else is complaining about. I see only my timeline, and I use lists to make sure I don't miss anything from certain people I follow. Tweetbot has had mute longer than Twitter has, and some, um, acquaintances I follow I've had muted for years. And I mute keywords if something is getting way too much play, like the electric F-150. Will I pay Twitter $3/month? Sure, since I'd like to pay for what I use, just like I subscribe to the latest Tweetbot client. Will I use the Twitter client to get the benefits of Twitter Blue? Probably not.
    - jpindar 5y ago
      All you have to do for that is to use Tweetdeck.
      - setBoolean 5y ago
        I use Tweetdeck extensively on macOS but on mobile even as a web app it just isn‘t nearly as polished as a native app like Tweetbot.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    Same. I don't even use or like Twitter, but with an offer like that I totally would.
  - littledot5566 5y ago
    Your data is worth way more than $3
- toyg 5y ago
  > threads are hard to read Twitter threads must die, they are an oxymoron and a fugly hack. Just bloody give people a "gist.twitter.io" for long form, or something like that, for goodness' sake.
  - Nav_Panel 5y ago
    The "point" or benefit of a twitter thread as opposed to straightforward longform is that each tweet (sentence or paragraph) can stand alone (in terms of liked and retweet circulation) as well as being a part of a broader piece.
    - toyg 5y ago
      "Can" or rather "could", but never really does in practice. Take away the thread, and 99.99% of mid-thread tweets lose all meaning. It just makes things awkward for the sake of it.
      - Nav_Panel 5y ago
        It's funny, I mean, you're not wrong, but there was a period when I wrote a lot of twitter threads, and I enjoyed the challenge of making each tweet stand alone. I think it made me a better writer. But yes, many don't take advantage of this.
      - gaius_baltar 5y ago
        Well, these mid-thread tweets can still be taken out of context and used to create sh*tstorms.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I don't completely disagree but the point is mostly two-fold (which are related to your point). 1. Discoverability and engagement. 2. A tweet thread tends to be more conversational than a blog post and therefore can be more off the cuff (and therefore easier).
  - Zababa 5y ago
    Some people here will probably remember twitlonger, which wasn't that great. That or posting screenshots of text. I think threads, the idea, are fine; but the implementation is not good. I don't understand why, when you load a tweet in a thread that's not too long (< 50 tweets), Twitter refuses to just show the whole threads and makes you click "show more" every 5 tweets. That's a really bad UX.
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  This is just the beginning. They could add more features right? Similar to how Amazon Prime began as free 2-day shipping and then added Prime Video and what not.
  - manquer 5y ago
    Free 2 day shipping had still enormous value to many. Further additions to value also indirectly resulted in prices increasing over time. I can't think of a reason why any one is going to pay for this ? If they at least marked users as "Blue" like verified perhaps the social status would drive sales, right now there doesn't seem to be any incentive all.
- dschep 5y ago
  Doesn't twitter already have themes [0]? Or is it more than just the accent color? [0] https://twitter.com/i/display https://twitter.com/i/display
pedrogpimenta 5y ago
"Twitter Blue" is already a stupid name, after "YouTube Red" (which is stupid for the same reasons. At least YouTube tried it first, I guess) but it gets worse when the only feature I can see in that post is that you can select colours, other than the Twitter blue, making effectively not blue. At least YouTube Red keeps the colour (I guess, I have no idea)
- insonifi 5y ago
  BBC was on it way before any of them even existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Red_Button https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Red_Button
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- chomp 5y ago
  Sounds like the product team had difficulty coming up with a name. You probably don't want to name it Twitter Premium if there's nothing exactly premium there except for an undo button and color choices, and Premium or Enhanced imply that their base product isn't sufficient. If you remove Twitter <adjective> from the consideration, really all you can do is come up with a name that's somewhat disjointed but related to the product.
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    Whatever happened to good ol' "Plus"? Although, god forbid they come up with a "Twitter Pro"...
    - wcarss 5y ago
      I also immediately thought of 'plus' -- I wonder if there would be a trademark issue because of "Google Plus"?
      - adenozine 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dizzy3gg 5y ago
I feel the Blue makes it feel a bit blue movie.
dominotw 5y ago
I would pay for twitter if they gave me filter to mute out all the rage mob topic of the hour.
underseacables 5y ago
I try to avoid Twitter as much possible, is there an option where I can pay to never see Twitter again?
- ttt0 5y ago
  Yes, you can pay me to turn your screen off.
fxtentacle 5y ago
I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims. I know that there's also good posts and good people on Twitter, but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now. What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.
- celticninja 5y ago
  And it will likely prove that people will pay $2.99 to cause and get involved in shit storms and lynchmobs :-(
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    I believe in Rome, people where quite happy to pay handsomely to get a front row seat for watching gladiators get mutilated by lions. Maybe we have progressed less than we thought.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      I never thought of the old liveleaks site as a type of roman colosseum but I think you're right
    - bambax 5y ago
      Do we know that? I think most games were free? (I'm not sure).
      - munk-a 5y ago
        I think that's beside the point - more relevant is that people were both willing to pay a good deal to organize the games and that the games were a central and import part of roman society. You can argue - almost certainly correctly - that there was a significant portion of society that found the game distasteful, but you can't argue that there was still an even larger slice of the population that considered them so important that they built the coliseum to host them.
Mindwipe 5y ago
It's such a poor offering. I'm not completely unopposed to Twitter having a subscription offering, but this isn't what I'd want from it at all. (Number 1 would be unrestricted third party client before. The Twitter product team is awful and the UI basically unusable.)
- Raineer 5y ago
  Yeah I'm in this boat, too. In the end it might mean that I am paying Twitter $3/mo and the developer of the 3rd-party app, but to circumvent all API restrictions would be worth it. It seems a little unfair that Twitter gets so much of that money when it's really the app developer who is earning most of my value.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
I guess I need to update my angel investors pitch powerpoint to answer their "How do you intend to make money?" question. "We'll charge users $3 a month to change the app colors and icon.".
- toyg 5y ago
  Winamp should have monetized skins... /s
  - flatiron 5y ago
    And whipping llama asses.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  There's a lot of great apps on App Stores that have a pricing model like this. Granted, most of them don't have millions in VC funding, but it's a fine business model that can make a tidy sum.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  You make it sound as though this is an absurd way to monetize. This is the internet.
- njb311 5y ago
  The first news story I saw about this only mentioned the amount. I assumed it was one-off for a new app, or maybe annual. Per month is crazy. I don’t object to subscriptions, but in so many cases the pricing is way out of line with the value.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Don't forget the undo button, which is presumably just the existing delete button being rebranded.
  - Nav_Panel 5y ago
    You're not paying for the feature, you're paying for the UX, which is gated behind their unusable API (so it's impossible for a 3rd party app to achieve parity with the 1st party app).
max_ 5y ago
These people (social networks) are no longer solving any problems. When they see users they don't see people in need as a service or product. All they see is a Knob. -> "Twist the user like this" Are we making more or less money? -> If yes, turn further to that direction, else turn to the opposite direction. Modern social media companies are no longer about offering effective social networking & communication services. Its all about the money now.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- toyg 5y ago
  Don't know if you meant it, but "knob", short for "knobhead", is offensive slang in UK. It's eerily fitting here, though (the idea that Twitter leadership might see their users as a bunch of idiots might... not be entirely false).
  - brigandish 5y ago
    I thought people dropped the k for that. Nobhead has extra power!
  - max_ 5y ago
    Thanks for the warning. By "Knob" I meant the kind of that you turn on a radio when tuning toa frequency.
hs86 5y ago
With the old 3rd party clients I enjoyed using a linear timeline with a synced timeline position via Tweet Marker [0]. I would pay for their subscription if they enabled this for their official clients + web app. [0] https://tweetmarker.net/ https://tweetmarker.net/
senectus1 5y ago
gods this is pathetic. I predict this will be a failure at launch. followed by Twitter Pro which will be damned near exactly what everyone wants.
antiterra 5y ago
The public’s reaction to this should be highly interesting to those who argue that sites should just have subscriptions instead of targeted ads. $3 is half the price of a single print issue of the Sunday New York Times, but already the story seems to be about Twitter creating second class citizens out of free users who can’t be $36-a-year elites.
- derwiki 5y ago
  It seems Twitter Blue doesn't reduce ad volume
throwitaway1235 5y ago
How much does Twitter want to remove me from "view more replies"?
strict9 5y ago
Would happily pay this amount (or a little more) for a plan without tracking and ads.
AznHisoka 5y ago
Will there be some sort of marker in my Twitter profile to indicate I'm a Blue subscriber? Maybe a smaller lighter blue checkmark? If anything, I would want it as a social signal rather than the features.
- tomcooks 5y ago
  That's why you get icon colours, get ready for the screenshots
- pram 5y ago
  A social signal that you have $3?
  - mlvljr 5y ago
    Had. Last month.
  - zwily 5y ago
    Well, had $3.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    A signal that you're willing to pay something. The amount here isn't really relevant, and usage goes beyond social signaling. If it's exposed over the API and someone's logging into my product with that flag set, you could reasonably assume it's not a bot, or at the very least that whoever's botting has paid $3 of their own money.
  - mcjkrw 5y ago
    If there will be an indicator like that, people may assume that the account that doesn't have it is worse in some way.
- type0 5y ago
  > to indicate I'm a Blue subscriber? Maybe a smaller lighter blue checkmark? Or at least a medal emoji. Are blue checkmarks so popular that everyone is excited to have two, why is social signal so important for you?
Yaina 5y ago
I love Twitter and use it every day. Unlike many other sites, owned by tech-giants, I have a lot of goodwill for them and think if anyone can prove that social-media users can be paying customers, it's them. It's just a bummer that Twitter Blue is not removing ads. I assume they're not going ad-free because they don't want to cannibalise their ad-business. As in: You can't say your ads are so great and helpful and also offer a way to turn them off. That might decrease the value of their ads? But it's also the reason I'm a bit on the fence here. I want to be part of the message that says: "Yes, I'm willing to pay for you Twitter!" but without removing ads (and frankly with a pretty bad value prop here) it's not an easy sell.
- CamelCaseName 5y ago
  Does it ever make sense to sell the ability to turn off ads? I imagine the majority of people willing to pay for such an option are power users, the same group that likely generates the bulk of advertising revenues and lives in countries with high CPC.
  - MatekCopatek 5y ago
    Well, Youtube Premium does it, so does Hulu, and I'm sure there's other examples.
    - Aperocky 5y ago
      Youtube probably conceded that adblockers does it anyways for powerusers.
    - karolist 5y ago
      These services show ads in ways that delay you accessing the content you want, banner ads, while annoying do not have that property and are a harder sell
    - jedberg 5y ago
      reddit did it years before all of those.
    - 5y ago
o_p 5y ago
Ok but how much money do we need to raise in crowdfund to permanently delete Twitter.
cvwright 5y ago
This is awesome. Not because I like Twitter. It’s pretty awful. And I don’t hold out much hope that this will do anything to stop Twitter from boosting crazy garbage in order to maximize “engagement” and sell ads. I’m excited because I think this will make it easier for competitors to come along and offer a better, more user-focused experience. You can do a lot with $3/user. Full disclosure: I’m building a privacy focused social network that will be a paid subscription service. https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios
- willis936 5y ago
  >It’s pretty awful. Speaking of awful: Something Awful is an example of a paid social club that flourished. It can work. Twitter is a bit large and comes with certain connotations of low-brow behavior (ie the very essence of only using 160 characters to convey a thought), so I'm not confident it will succeed. It'll be interesting to watch what comes out of the paywall though.
  - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
    I don't think there's much to be learned from SA in this context. It existed during a different time of the internet, when cultural capital and honestly just raw power were allocated differently. It existed into the "modern" era of rage engagement, influencers, clickbait etc, but I would consider its "flourishing" to have ended well before that.
- truth_ 5y ago
  > It’s pretty awful. I will not talk about the ethics and privacy issues of Twitter but about user experience and quality of content on feed. The quality of content on your feed is as good as the people you choose to follow. Choose selectively, block and mute liberally. Keep doing this, and your feed will be fantastic. I use Twitter only for work. I set my Trending country to some country I have never heard the name of outside of trivia books containing nation capitals. And my Twitter experience is fantastic. Have meaningful discussions, learn new things, gain new perspectives. I keep away from politics and such.
elpakal 5y ago
Can't wait to hear what Scott Galloway has to say about this...
- sergiosgc 5y ago
  He already approached it on Pivot. Galloway's model is obviously better: Charge those that get value off a big following on Twitter.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  He's written his prescription here: Twitter needs to move from an ad model to a subscription model, with subscription fees for accounts of a certain size. The platform would still be free for the majority of users, but accounts over 200K followers (or even 50K followers) should pay for the audience that Twitter provides them with. This would lead to better financial results because recurring revenue is reliable, profitable, and earns a higher multiple than transaction revenue. 5 Feb 2021 https://www.profgalloway.com/overhauling-twitter/ https://www.profgalloway.com/overhauling-twitter/
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I'm all for big companies having to pay for their social media presence. And a lot. That might make them host it themselves and I wouldn't need to look at their offerings on these horrible social mediums...
spinningslate 5y ago
I hope Mozilla is watching closely. If (and it's a big 'if') this proves successful, it's an important datapoint on the viability of paid-for utility services on the web. No, Firefox isn't the same thing as Twitter. But if large numbers of people show willingness to pay $2.99/mo to change the app's theme, surely there's enough privacy-conscious people that would pay similarly for a browser that was commercially incentivised to protect privacy rather than monetise it.
- cvwright 5y ago
  Oh please please please make it so. I would happily pay a couple bucks per month for a Firefox Pro that’s exactly the same as normal Firefox. Provided, of course that it’s easy to start and end the subscription, and I don’t have to create a new account. Fortunately Apple provides all of this with the App Store.
  - mstipetic 5y ago
    Why don’t you just donate then?
    - cvwright 5y ago
      Good question. I suppose it's because: A) I don't want to create yet another account and give my CC number to yet another entity who can lose it B) I guess I don't fully trust them to use the $$ for anything that I care about. Tying the revenue more directly to Firefox IMO would send a stronger signal that this is what matters.
    - mdoms 5y ago
      Because he's lying. He would not pay for Firefox Premium. The set of people who would pay for this product is vastly smaller than the set of people who say they would.
      - brigandish 5y ago
        I paid for Omniweb and I still miss it. Features included per site settings, and workspaces that worked like a mix of profiles and Apple’s Spaces. It was killed off by free competitors, look where that brought us.
bosswipe 5y ago
Would it still have ads?
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
Don't forget that 90cents of that goes to Apple, and 40cents to Governments as sales tax (on average, depending on the region). Its a shame that the economics are so stacked against premium retail software instead of just slinging ads.
- alephnan 5y ago
  > to Governments as sales tax Does Twitter circumvent taxes from ad revenue ?
buzz27 5y ago
I would pay even more to never again see "recommended" tweets from people I don't follow. I use Twitter sort of like RSS, insofar as I want to be able to see everything the people I follow tweet. It amazes me that its not possible to coerce Twitter to do this in the settings. Instead I have to view users individually to see what they've tweeted since I last checked the app.
- droopyEyelids 5y ago
  might be a help to you: https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac56f9bd36ec https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac5...
  - lt 5y ago
    this is awesome, thanks
- ravenstine 5y ago
  I've noticed that other platforms like Facebook have been doing something similar. (not that I use Facebook much at all). It used to be a feed of things I've chosen... now half of it is stuff from meme pages, businesses, and animal rescue videos I've never shown any interest in. If I remove one of them, it just finds some other bullshit to push in front of me. It's like a subtle admission that these platforms are on their way out and they're throwing their own Barnum & Bailey circus just to keep anyone around.
- ffggvv 5y ago
  i recommend making “lists”. that’s what i do. just add everyone i care to see to the list (can seperate lists by category also)
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  you can switch to "latest tweets" mode
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  On some platforms, custom streams or lists can be used. On the late little-lamented Google+, a set of features converged to give this option: - It was possible to define what profiles could comment on one's own posts, or whose notifications would be visible. I simply piled all my contacts into two lists ("Circles") called "notifications" and "comments". If someone abused that privilege, they were removed. - The default Home stream could include "featured" or "recommended" content. Individual lists could not. Obvious hack: don't look at the Home stream, and instead have a primary list. On desktop, I further hacked the CSS to remove any references to streams I wasn't interested in following, e.g., the short-lived "Games" category, and "What's Hot" (an absolute cesspit of anodyne irrelevance). - On successor platforms, I typically set up about three lists in order of priority, often literally "A", "B", and "C". The highest-quality (and lowest-volume) posters go in A, spillover to B, and especially annoying / high-volume to C. If a profile's contributions are not useful, they're unfollowed. - Block early and often. Where merely unfollowing isn't enough. https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019 - Mastodon has the additional feature of being able to block an entire instance. For large instances (tens to hundreds of thousands of accounts) this may be overkill. For smaller ones with hostile cultures, it's quite handy. I'll note: HN has none of these features, but it has excellent moderation, and the option of collapsing annoying threads. If I find myself conversing with someone to whom my meagre skills in communication seem utterly inadequate, I collapse the thread and move on. HN preserves those collapsed states (at times this is an antifeature, here, it's useful). This isn't quite as powerful as the block-user feature, but in the context of HN's other controls, it's generally sufficient.
piinbinary 5y ago
Features I'd want: * No ads * No suggested topics * No suggested tweets, no people I might be interested in, no tweets someone I follow liked - just show me the people I follow and things they explicitly retweet * The timeline preserves order * Threads are grouped together and the entire thread is shown
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  Same here, with such an offering I'd find a subscription attractive. But then again I'd also be more willing to subscribe in general if Twitter didn't try to sabotage my experience and timeline at every step already in the first place.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  What you want is api access and a decent client (Tweetbot, Tweetdeck). My client does exactly this (no ads, feed in order) and I can’t believe I have this for free already while others can’t even pay for it.
  - mttjj 5y ago
    Exactly. Been using Tweetbot for years (a decade?). Never seen ads. Timeline is literally a “time line”. And nothing shows up that I don’t want to see like promoted tweets, tweets from people I don’t follow, or trends. Even has some awesome features on top of that like muting (people or hashtags). They’re only limited by Twitter’s throttled API at this point. However, literally the day that Twitter opened up viewing tweet likes via the API, Tweetbot had updated their app to support it. They switched to a subscription model with Tweetbot 6. And while I’m generally not a fan of subscriptions, I figured $6 per YEAR for an app that I use every day and have for nearly a decade is totally worth it to support the devs.
  - crispyalmond 5y ago
    Curious, what's your client? I'm interested in that.
    - alkonaut 5y ago
WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
I have watched a ton of interviews with Jack and find him extremely inspirational and what he does (and has done) being truly amazing. Easily one of my favorite entrepreneurs to follow. With Twitter, I get the sense he lost control of the company a long time ago because of a combo of monetization and culture. So basically he helped build the greatest communication platform in the world and instead we get what Twitter is today. This kind of weak Twitter Blue announcement, to me at least, just shows at what a lost the platform is for making money in a way that isn't engagement driven (aka, rewarding flaming-type behavior).
- airstrike 5y ago
  > greatest communication platform in the world Define greatest
  - TheJoYo 5y ago
    "communication"
weasel_words 5y ago
If all they are doing is allowing color changes and slight UI tweaks (and the undo button), why not take a page from online gaming's playbook and just sell cosmetics? There is pretty much no limit to what could be sold as a cosmetic...add "flair" to the twitter bird (googly eyes, hats, etc) ($5.99 - $25.99)...make circle logo on your profile an octagon ($1.99), a triangle ($1.25)...with a blue border for an extra $.99....etc I bet they'd make gobs more than a $2.99/mo.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  I guess more features will come out. Even they know 3 USD a month means they have to have good incentives.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jsnell 5y ago
The HN comments are pretty unanimous on wanting to pay this amount to remove ads, not for more features. The problem with that is that an active US user is already producing more as revenue than that from ads. (40M US DAU, 500M US advertising revenue per quarter -> $4/month). Add to that the problem that for subscriptions they end up paying app store fees, subscriptions to remove ads just can't work. They'd need to price it at like $10/month, but it seems obvious few people would pay that. This does feel somehow absurd, given how ineffective one would expect Twitter ads to be, but might be illustrative of the problems with paying to remove ads.
- kevindong 5y ago
  A decent chunk of HN is anti-SaaS in my experience.
  - throw_m239339 5y ago
    > A decent chunk of HN is anti-SaaS in my experience. No they are not, they are anti vendor lock-in.
slownews45 5y ago
Interesting - this came just after I'd read through the HN piece on life after an internet mob attack. https://twitter.com/pasql/status/1366795510355537924 https://twitter.com/pasql/status/1366795510355537924 https://pasquale.cool/internet-mob https://pasquale.cool/internet-mob I'm not on twitter, and poking my head into at least this corner seems pretty damn unhealthy. In sequence a women accused this guy (falsely) of harassing her from some other random account (it's not clear why). Then another person said they overheard a conversation ages ago and stopped being friends with the guy - which turned out to not be true either. And it continued from there. Is there no consequence on twitter for this type of stuff? Wonder if there is space for a twitter clone. Basically interesting ideas, sharing information. You'd be stuck with bad information, the response (instead of calling someone an idiot) would be to describe a different theory. No personal attacks of any kind. HN seems to avoid a lot of this type of mob behavior around personal stuff and it's easier for non-involved people to engage then.
- dkirill 5y ago
  It's impossible to have HN-like discussions if platform targets general population
  - slownews45 5y ago
    But what about just dialing down the personal attacks? I mean, it's hard to engage with twitter as part of general population when folks are immediately in destroyer mode. Couldn't twitter just have a flag for personnel attacks. Or is it considered good that these attacks happen there - plenty I'm sure are potentially supported by a bit more than the one linked from HN. But either way hard to engage with from the outside.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Twitter's business model relies on it being toxic. Controversy and drama generate "engagement", so they have no reason to change. This isn't specific to Twitter even, any ad-supported social platform has this problem and which is why advertising should be considered a cancer.
papito 5y ago
I would pay Twitter to NOT use Twitter. Give me the option to lock myself out for a few hours/days so I can focus on work and withdraw from social media addiction. They can shove their colored icons. What is this?!
intricatedetail 5y ago
If this stops any tracking then sounds good. All platforms should give an option to pay with money rather than personal data.
ilamont 5y ago
Me: I'll pay for Twitter without ads and a true reverse-chron view of the accounts that I follow. An edit feature would be nice, too. Twitter: Hey, check out Twitter Blue! Just $2.99 for reader view, colorful themes, and some other stuff you didn't ask for!
- gaius_baltar 5y ago
  > Twitter without ads and a true reverse-chron view of the accounts that I follow. I really expected Mastodon to get more adopted among the regular folks because these features that everybody wants are just the standard for Fediverse instances.
  - handrous 5y ago
    DDG "Mastodon". Second result is "joinmastodon.org" which I assume is the right thing. OK so far. No social content up-front on the page. Instead I have to watch a video if I want to know what I'm getting in to. (Yes I know Twitter just greets you with "sign up/log in" on their homepage these days, but everyone knows what they are so it's fine). "Get started", not "sign up". Looks like I'm in for a process. Four boxes telling me what it means to choose a community. Nothing immediately actionable. List of community categories on the left. Nothing against furries, but apparently this is the kind of place where they rate a top-level category, out of only ten categories... so. Hm. Ok. One of the infoboxes: "You can move your account to a different community later without losing your followers." Ok, but what if I get banninated for some reason? Do I lose my stuff then? Can I still move it? How much control can an op take over my data if I upset them? Or if they just stop paying their server bill without notice? Yes sure, it may be "the same thing that happens if Twitter suddenly stops paying their server bill" but in any given year that's way less likely than that one of these listed community servers will do the same. Guess answering all that requires outside research. I'll try the "general" category. It's not clear, even in "general", whether some of these are topic-specific spaces. I think not? But it's really hard to tell and I'm just guessing. Some are "request invite" and it's cool that's supported. Clicking on a few "join" buttons, all the pages I'm greeted with are practically identical aside from the color theme. That's good. Not sure I love the way "log in" and "sign up" are both given equal visual and page-position weight, considering I showed up via a "join" button, but whatever, that's a bit nitpicky. There's a "see what's happening" link on the sign-up/in pages. Back on the joinmastodon.org instance list, they have "browse directory"(??? Directory of what? ???) links on each instance's little card, which seems to take you to some kind of user list. Following the "see what's happening" link on a likely-looking instance. This instance, which noted on the sign-up page that it's "mostly English-language", presents me with about 50% posts in non-English languages (several different ones), and the English-language posts are context-free replies, it looks like, so they convey no useful meaning to me. It's like getting a random sampling of individual SMS messages belonging to 100 different people. The handful that aren't meaningless are kind of off-putting. I still don't know what's up with this whole thing, really, aside from I guess it's Twitterish? Kind of? Judging from the @ portions of the usernames, I think these posts are from a bunch of different servers, so I'm really not sure what the point is of treating the instances as separate and the choice as meaningful. Is it like email, so it doesn't matter where you're hosted as long as you have some host? They act like that's not the case and it really matters which host you choose, for reasons that mostly have nothing to do with longevity, stability, or likelihood of continued service, but I can't tell, from what I'm seeing, why. That's how I'd choose an email provider. I'm not getting how this is different, if this is what the "feed" looks like. > I really expected Mastodon to get more adopted among the regular folks Between the above and that if I didn't frequent nerd-spaces I'd never have heard of it in the first place, I think I can see why.
captainmuon 5y ago
Something I would really pay for is the ability to manage one twitter handle from multiple accounts. That functionality is kinda there in TweetDeck, but it is hidden and I'm not sure it is supported anymore. In the API it works I think but no client supports it. Ah and the ability to create an account anonymously without a phone, and maybe to pay with crypto. I understand why they don't want that, but if you post controversial stuff (IMO harmless progressive stuff, nothing agressive or hate-y, but enough to tick some people off who want to play culture wars) then you invite crazy people who try to dox or threaten you, and all kinds of legal threats. This is in West Europe, I can't imagine how it might be in acutally repressive states. Unless you just post for fun about cats or food, social media turns out to be ungrateful work...
simonsarris 5y ago
I feel like I must be living in an alternative reality from the Twitter deriders in this thread, I've had almost the exact opposite experience. I've made more friends and acquaintances on Twitter than any other social network. It's also easily the most intellectual social network. (If that sounds crazy, really compare it to the others. They're either not intellectual or [youtube] not really social.) If you care deeply about something, you will find other people on Twitter. If you work in public, people will find you. Someone right now I met from Maine is currently drawing up the plans to teach me to timber frame a structure I just got approved. About 20 people I met from twitter have been over my house (for dinner, etc) at different times. Far more people read my work because of Twitter. If you don't use it as a political mouthpiece it's incredible and there's nothing like it. And that's really up to the user.
- brandrick 5y ago
  This is largely my experience too.
- babelfish 5y ago
  Same. Social media is what you make it. If someone's experience with social media is that it's a highly toxic environment, the only person ultimately responsible for that is them.
- _r0fz 5y ago
  It's also very very funny to me the general tone of self-congratulatory nonparticipation all over this comment section about how superior we all are for not using social media or twitter or whatever. HN is social media too! I've heard the arguments why it's not but they aren't compelling to me; it is one. The main difference between here and twitter is the tone. On here there is a cultural expectation that you will perform dispassionate erudition but if you read beyond that at all very few comments are any more intellectually stimulating than an average tweet. Less, honestly, at least people on twitter still seem to value joy and humor and whimsy.
  - rantwasp 5y ago
    counterpoint: 1) the difference is on hn, shitposting, trolling and straight up being offensive is strongly discouraged. 2) I have experienced joy, whimsicality and humor in here. We are people not machines. 3) i have learned about more new things than in any other place. I have frequently changed my mind because of the quality of the arguments 4) no matter what the subject is people with deep expertise seem to show up and it’s a joy to actually hear from them
Taylor_OD 5y ago
Twitter is the only social media I use. If they have to do this to make a profit then I have no issue with it. I'm surprised more large social media companies have not done this since there are so many outside services that will do things like this on their platforms.
argvargc 5y ago
Big tech Co. deletes/censors half its users then scrambles to update to a freemium model to try and stay afloat. That'll be $2.99 well-refused.
not_jd_salinger 5y ago
I have a reasonable twitter following (between 5-10k followers) and have recently realized that I needed to remove the app from my phone and only occasionally check it from time to time on a laptop. I'm considering giving it up all together. I've struggled a bit with this decisions since I've made a fair number of real friends through twitter (people I keep up with in real life after) and come across a lot of interesting books, papers etc. But I've come to realize that despite its benefits, twitter is ultimately toxic to your mind. I've seen far too many people I care about slowly dissolve into a fever of dopamine fixes as they slowly contort their personality into a stream of memes and rants looking to gain followers. I always tried to fight the urge to post stupid shit just to grow followers, but anything genuinely nuanced or thoughtful you post will have virtually zero engagement. This is fine in isolation, but it leads all conversations to eventually degrade in to a miasma of garbage thinking that is just a mix of groupthink, rage and memes. The final straw for me was finding myself angry about the vague opinions of people I don't really care about at all. This same type of thinking is what got me to drop facebook entirely years ago.
- jan_Inkepa 5y ago
  As soon as I found myself one degree of separation from drama I packed up and left. It was a major factor in my livelihood and professionally very important, but it's not worth it. I've been adjacent to some people who the Twitter hivemind deathray has focussed its sights on, and it was deeply depraved/disturbing. For me Twitter has nothing to offer that'd make it worth risking that fate.
- josefresco 5y ago
  > The final straw for me was finding myself angry about the vague opinions of people I don't really care about at all. I laughed when I read this because I've replaced browsing Twitter while eating breakfast with reading my local newspaper. Today I was so upset by what I read in the paper, the feeling stuck with me all morning. In my head I composed several "letters to the editor" and only now am I finally moving on. I won't write those letters, but I probably would have engaged with that content on Twitter. I don't know what this means, but being outraged at the news is not exclusive to new media.
KoftaBob 5y ago
To those saying that this is "$3/m for different app icon colors": Based on their recent acquisitions of - Revue (email newsletter service similar to Substack) - Scroll (subscription that shares revenue with news sites, and removes ads on said sites) I highly doubt Twitter Blue will solely get you different app/icon colors, they're likely to roll those services into Blue. This is somewhat similar to the Amazon Prime approach, where you pay for a premium version of a site/service, and get access to a portfolio of services like Prime Video, Music, 2 day shipping, etc. Their aim seems to be "Twitter Blue is to consumption of online news as Amazon Prime is to shopping/media". The way I see it, a subscription model = moving away from a system that incentivizes a platform to maximize engagement/ad views, and instead incentivizes the platform to provide a positive experience, so users stay subscribed.
vecplane 5y ago
All I care about is being able to remove advertisements. I don't care about any of these new features. Can just I pay $X.99 a month to not see ads on Twitter?
alkonaut 5y ago
Does the premium version include unlimited API-access so you can use any client? I use a third party client with no ads and no content except tweets from people I follow because I can’t stand the official apps, but I have since learned that this possibility was limited to new users. If Twitter cut my ability to use Tweetbot and then charged $3 for it, I’d subscribe immediately. So I suspect this is a service more people would pay for.
dayvid 5y ago
I like Twitter a lot. It's the only social media platform that has a lot of features for power users. The trick is to regularly ban certain keywords associated with posts not relevant to you and to regularly block or mute users. You can also use Lists to get rid of recommended tweets and create specific feeds for whatever use case you want. If you pin them, you can swipe left or right on your timeline to have a feed just for content related to the list.
henvic 5y ago
It's about time blogs + RSS feeds come back :)
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  How do you answer discovery?
  - henvic 5y ago
    Feed aggregators, sometimes called planets. I remember back a little over a decade ago they were becoming quite common. One I liked a lot was KDE's. https://planet.kde.org/ https://planet.kde.org/
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      So, yeah, I remember those. The principle issue I had with them was that they scale poorly. A few dozen principle feeds: OK. Hundreds or thousands, not so much. You effectively see the same problem with Reddit forums, as a parallel. A smallish community of a few thousand subscribers, following the 90/10/1 rule meaning maybe 10 members submit 50% of the posts, another 100 contribute the other half is OK. A sub with 100k -- millions of members, both the submissions and comments are simply a firehose, and the temporal weighting (even with vote-based ranking) means arcane subjects slip off the page rapidly. Algorithmic ranking => algorithmic gaming. Temporal ranking => temporal gaming. That is, the feed is dominated by the most-frequently-posting users. Fixing this in a fair fashion for a large number of users with a high variability of interests is ... difficult. In any large-audience medium, the default "show/no-show" decision for a piece of content approaches "no-show". Attention is finite. (I'm not saying algorithmic social media is better. I'm saying the problem is hard.)
      - henvic 5y ago
        Good point. Now I want even more to build a better planet.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
> Reader mode : Keep up with threads by turning them into easy-to-read text. So, your current text design isn't easy to read?
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  3rd class service. Jules Dupuit rides again! https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-so-bad-this-19th-century-economist-explained-it-with-ju.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-...
StreamBright 5y ago
The only FAANG company products that I am willing to pay any money for are Amazon's AWS and Google's Search. There is no way that Twitter can produce anything that is mildly interesting and their behaviour in the last 5 years was just pure trash. Some people argue that social media in this form is just damaging to society and should not exist. I am not going that far but paying for it would be really over the edge.
alpb 5y ago
I absolutely hate ads on Twitter and there's no way to block them on mobile. So I developed this obsession to block every ad account I see (which is about 4,300 accounts so far https://github.com/ahmetb/twitter-audit-log/blob/master/blocked_accounts.txt https://github.com/ahmetb/twitter-audit-log/blob/master/bloc...). I am willing to pay $2 more and get ads blocked as well. Once you start blocking ads, the relevance goes down and it drives you crazier.
- remram 5y ago
  You can browse Twitter from a mobile browser with ad blocking (ex: Firefox). The UI is basically the same, it's a bit slower but on the other hand you get multiple tabs and more privacy.
mkl95 5y ago
I had a Twitter account since late 2010 until a few months ago. I'm not much of a social media guy, but I felt that I had some sort of addiction during those years, an addiction that made me go back every few weeks and "leave" after feeling Twitter's toxicity. Their system is smart at appealing to very specific personalities that just can't help being toxic. These people produce tons of controversial content and generate a lot of traffic. However, the system also operates at a collective level by forming closed groups of users, that fall somewhere between gossipy cliques and low key cults. This is by far the scariest side of Twitter.
45ure 5y ago
It was probably intended; I mistook the headline as a fast-track for 'Blue tick/checkmark' service. Regardless, it is not aimed at people like me, who are ambivalent about Twitter. I haven't tweeted a single thing from my vintage account, and have no (zero) followers. It is basically a read-only account. Not only that, but I try not to follow any more than 100 accounts, which is still a lot! If curated properly, you can stumble upon interesting and thought-provoking interactions, interspersed with churlish and toxic behaviour -- some of which is fairly easy to identify, albeit hard to ignore. In general, it is theatre mixed with rapid insult delivery mechanism, which I find amusing, and prefer not to read into too much, and/or have any desire to interact with.
digitalsin 5y ago
I thought this had something to do with Twitter supporting law enforcement..then I realized it's Twitter.
nickdothutton 5y ago
All will suffer from this eternal September unless you discriminate in terms of who you admit. People are totally unequal. Closed User Groups existed for a reason and that reason has been amplified many times over as internet adoption has grown.
brundolf 5y ago
Give me: - No ads - No pushy prompts for topics, follows, "tweets I might like" or anything else unsolicited - No tweets in my feed from people I don't follow and I'll happily pay monthly. Doesn't look like they do any of this yet, but I'll keep an eye out.
- jpindar 5y ago
  You can get that with Tweetdeck for free: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - brundolf 5y ago
    Alas, I mostly use iOS. I did just discover Tweetbot, which is pretty good, but apparently is limited by Twitter's API to (among other things) not be able to show notifications
- remram 5y ago
  And maybe no "you're back home" feature, undoing my preference about the order I want to see content every 7 days?
tored 5y ago
Twitter is such a garbage platform. If you browse the web page with your mobile it will eat up your battery pretty quick. Sometimes it rescrolls the page so you lose where you were. Or rerenders everything so you lose context completely. And because it renders quite slow it will misregister your thumb clicks on something else, like the back button. Or try to thumb click on a single line tweet, you will hit everything else. Pay for this? No, thanks.
moat 5y ago
I see all these comments about the trash and hate on Twitter, and I just wish that I could show them how I use it, and how wonderful a source of intellectual stimulation it can be. My feed is highly curated. 1) I mute all political words. Nothing good comes from these discussions. I also mute things that just don't contribute to my peace of mind (a recent addition being "basecamp") 2) I block users who put out garbage content or try to stir things up 3) I use lists that I view on TweetDeck, so I can have lists based on my different interests (i.e. investing, entrepreneurs, interesting people, philosophy, etc) Using this it becomes a dream feed. I get stimulating content, great discussions, and interesting ideas. On top of that I've actually made some solid friends from the network over the years, some in-person ones as well.
- moralestapia 5y ago
  Nice, just for the record, do you plan to spend $3/month on Twitter Blue?
- pram 5y ago
  Have you ever considered that all this labor isn't worth it to a casual user? It's quite obvious, the surface Twitter experience is hostile and trashy. You've sequestered yourself into a bubble you think is fine, ok, but what incentive is there for anyone else to do the same?
jp1016 5y ago
if you don't want to wait till twitter blue , you can try https://twimark.io https://twimark.io , I have made this tool to bookmark tweets by categories and convert threads into labels. unfortunately the completion of my project and Twitter's announcement came at same time
- onassar 5y ago
  Looks like a cool service :)
hahahasure 5y ago
If there's a filter for political news, you can take my money. Or better, if the news is curated for my benefit rather than engagement, I'm interested.
water8 5y ago
Hard Pass.
tweettweet 5y ago
Twitter should be shut down. Jack Dorsey should be arrested.
efdee 5y ago
What I need is a read-only Twitter. I can't keep myself from engaging with idiots and it always ends up a net negative. I wish I could take away the ability to react to things. But so far this hasn't materialized and I feel better just not going to Twitter at all, even if that means missing out on some interesting content.
- wmeredith 5y ago
  The free version of Tweetbot on the iOS App Store is read-only.
everydayDonut 5y ago
It seems to me that you can contribute a lot of the toxic behavior on twitter to the lack of nested comments. How can you ever have a healthier discussion when you can only ever reply directly to a tweet?
grey-area 5y ago
Twitter have picked the wrong customer IMO (readers). They should be selling features to writers, not readers. Writers/Broadcasters of content would pay a lot more than $2.99 a month for extra features to curate their feeds and followers, publish content automatically, weed out spam and trolls, schedule posts etc.
- debacle 5y ago
  Agreed. Those people want reach more than anything else. The utility for some tweeters is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The utility for tweetees isn't likely 10/yr.
______- 5y ago
I already have hand curated my Twitter and make full use of the `lists` feature. I have roughly 30 lists for different categories. One for techpress news, another for world news, another for quotes & inspirational messages, etc This attempt to serve curated feeds to people is too late. I've already put in the hard work of organizing my feeds to my liking, and this has the bonus of me not having to give Twitter money. (I will happily be their 'product' in return for me having insight into my interests and being abreast of world affairs, and local news too).
mproud 5y ago
I don’t think they have confirmed it, have they? They were asked about it and said no comment.
joshdance 5y ago
Interesting reading the replies. Twitter is the most valuable social network that I participate on. Friends, ideas, connections all come from finding people talking about things that are interesting to you.
Qahlel 5y ago
When did we agree that everything has to be a monthly subscription and we shouldn't own anything?
TeeMassive 5y ago
Well Twitter hasn't been profitable for a while. They'll have to try to make some serious money or go bust.
hk__2 5y ago
My main issue with Twitter is that you follow people, but those people have different interests. So I may follow @JohnSmith because he’s a known dev in the JS community and tweets about JS, but he also tweets about his country’s politics, what he ate at lunch, and engage in heated debats about pineapple on pizza I don’t care about. Twitter recently introduced topics, so that you can follow one topic that aggregates lots of tweets from various people. This is not what I want: I’d like to follow @JohnSmith, but only for the JS content. As someone who tweets, I’d like some sort of kafka-ish topic queues: I would post tweets about JS in the JS queue, and tweets about Italian food in that other queue, so that people could follow the queues they want. In the end I don’t tweet on either topic because I’m afraid I’ll deceive people who followed me for the other content.
- dpeck 5y ago
  God forbid anyone be multifaceted. It seems the the rise of influencer culture led to everyone else feeling like they had to only be in a specific niche, and only speak about it or they weren’t going to serve their “fanbase”. And you know they’re probably right that they wouldn’t serve that fanbase, but good grief has it made the net a generally much more boring place with space only for near-deified experts & influencers and perpetual newbs, leaving little room for anyone in the middle to have nuanced and varied conversations.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    It’s not that there is something wrong with you posting that stuff. It’s that it ruins the experience for followers. I follow a few hundred people who only post about specific topics they are experts in and it’s still almost too much. The last thing I want to read is all of their half-baked political opinions thrown in with hemorrhoid complaints. The truth is idgaf about the individual persona on Twitter. Being multifaceted is for friends and other real human relationships.
  - gffrd 5y ago
    I agree that it's extremely important that people be multifaceted. I also think people over-weight how important it is for them to express their individuality. That said, I think the biggest issue is neither of the above, but rather that it's really hard to design interfaces that allow people to sort the signal from the noise. To weight/filter information. I just haven't seen it. Back to OP and @JohnSmith: if OP worked in an office with @JohnSmith, OP could tune out @JohnSmith's pineapple-pizza rants … or walk away. This would be easy and natural. OP would that they were analyzing this and adjusting appropriately to maximize JS discussion while avoiding pineapple. We naturally weigh, throttle, and filter the input of others. This allows us to take the good with the bad. This is the nuance that Twitter—and most social media—lacks: how do I stay up on what matters most without being overwhelmed by what doesn't without separating content from context?
CobrastanJorji 5y ago
The chutzpah of adding an "undo" button as a monthly paid premium feature is just astounding to me. I assume the next step is to make sure that as soon as you stop paying them the $3/month, all of your undone tweets are republished.
greyhair 5y ago
Twitter Blew
m3kw9 5y ago
I wonder what went down at the meeting when the name “Twitter Pro” was put on the table.
xg15 5y ago
Twitter in 2006: Hey, we made this new infrastructure! You can consume it with any kind of client that you can imagine. We're really excited what kind of experiences you'll create! Twitter in 2021: For just $2.99/mo, you can view the tweets in your algorithmic timeline in this new exclusive colour theme!
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Sanely thinking this sort of monetization model was inevitable... Just how much money from adds can you get, specially when significant part of content is "free" adds in reality...
dools 5y ago
Queue Parler Red in 3...2...
cwkoss 5y ago
$3 as a one-time payment doesn't seem like it will meaningfully impact Twitter's earnings. I wonder if they are doing this to increase the value of their ads shown to people willing to pay: if someone is willing to pay $3 for minor aesthetic improvements they are much more valuable advertising targets than the general population.
- nsoonhui 5y ago
  It's $3 per month
no_wizard 5y ago
And yet still no way to get the little blue check mark of authenticity
karmasimida 5y ago
I have no problem with subscription, but this feels like a really lazy attempt to monetize TBH, albeit being cheap. Also note, HN folks are nothing like common users, and using their experience as indicator for public reception is a really bad model to say the least.
lobocinza 5y ago
I prefer smaller communities like those using Mastodon, eg Fosstodon.org.
soheil 5y ago
Undo Tweets? As in delete your tweet after you post it? Or it won't send the tweet for a minute or two in case you change your mind similar to Gmail Undo?
goguy 5y ago
People should learn to engage their brain, maybe mull it over for a while before posting on twitter. It doesn't seem to happen though so they may as well charge people for the ability to undo their mistakes!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

481 points by 0xedb 5y ago

$3 for color themes and a reader mode? I don't like how it creates negative incentives to make regular twitter readable. I often see poeple here already complaining that threads are hard to read, and this could make it worse. Edit: also quick undo. So they are monetizing the lack of basic features and their restrictions on clients. I don't really like the idea.

fernandotakai 5y ago
honestly, if they take out the ads and stopped selling my data, i would pay 3 USD without any issues.
- setBoolean 5y ago
  That and an option to permanently opt out of their curation of my timeline. I just want to see the content of people I actually follow in a chronological fashion. At the moment I‘am quiet happy using Tweetbot but most 3rd party clients are hampered due to API restrictions on Twitters side.
  - fernandotakai 5y ago
    one way to force chronological is to add everyone you follow to a private list. even on official clients, it's always chronological and no ads -- but it's not perfect.
  - scioto 5y ago
    I also use Tweetbot, and am experiencing very little of what everybody else is complaining about. I see only my timeline, and I use lists to make sure I don't miss anything from certain people I follow. Tweetbot has had mute longer than Twitter has, and some, um, acquaintances I follow I've had muted for years. And I mute keywords if something is getting way too much play, like the electric F-150. Will I pay Twitter $3/month? Sure, since I'd like to pay for what I use, just like I subscribe to the latest Tweetbot client. Will I use the Twitter client to get the benefits of Twitter Blue? Probably not.
  - jpindar 5y ago
    All you have to do for that is to use Tweetdeck.
    - setBoolean 5y ago
      I use Tweetdeck extensively on macOS but on mobile even as a web app it just isn‘t nearly as polished as a native app like Tweetbot.
- bogwog 5y ago
  Same. I don't even use or like Twitter, but with an offer like that I totally would.
- littledot5566 5y ago
  Your data is worth way more than $3
toyg 5y ago
> threads are hard to read Twitter threads must die, they are an oxymoron and a fugly hack. Just bloody give people a "gist.twitter.io" for long form, or something like that, for goodness' sake.
- Nav_Panel 5y ago
  The "point" or benefit of a twitter thread as opposed to straightforward longform is that each tweet (sentence or paragraph) can stand alone (in terms of liked and retweet circulation) as well as being a part of a broader piece.
  - toyg 5y ago
    "Can" or rather "could", but never really does in practice. Take away the thread, and 99.99% of mid-thread tweets lose all meaning. It just makes things awkward for the sake of it.
    - Nav_Panel 5y ago
      It's funny, I mean, you're not wrong, but there was a period when I wrote a lot of twitter threads, and I enjoyed the challenge of making each tweet stand alone. I think it made me a better writer. But yes, many don't take advantage of this.
    - gaius_baltar 5y ago
      Well, these mid-thread tweets can still be taken out of context and used to create sh*tstorms.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I don't completely disagree but the point is mostly two-fold (which are related to your point). 1. Discoverability and engagement. 2. A tweet thread tends to be more conversational than a blog post and therefore can be more off the cuff (and therefore easier).
- Zababa 5y ago
  Some people here will probably remember twitlonger, which wasn't that great. That or posting screenshots of text. I think threads, the idea, are fine; but the implementation is not good. I don't understand why, when you load a tweet in a thread that's not too long (< 50 tweets), Twitter refuses to just show the whole threads and makes you click "show more" every 5 tweets. That's a really bad UX.
vishnugupta 5y ago
This is just the beginning. They could add more features right? Similar to how Amazon Prime began as free 2-day shipping and then added Prime Video and what not.
- manquer 5y ago
  Free 2 day shipping had still enormous value to many. Further additions to value also indirectly resulted in prices increasing over time. I can't think of a reason why any one is going to pay for this ? If they at least marked users as "Blue" like verified perhaps the social status would drive sales, right now there doesn't seem to be any incentive all.
dschep 5y ago
Doesn't twitter already have themes [0]? Or is it more than just the accent color? [0] https://twitter.com/i/display https://twitter.com/i/display

pedrogpimenta 5y ago

"Twitter Blue" is already a stupid name, after "YouTube Red" (which is stupid for the same reasons. At least YouTube tried it first, I guess) but it gets worse when the only feature I can see in that post is that you can select colours, other than the Twitter blue, making effectively not blue. At least YouTube Red keeps the colour (I guess, I have no idea)

insonifi 5y ago
BBC was on it way before any of them even existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Red_Button https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Red_Button
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
chomp 5y ago
Sounds like the product team had difficulty coming up with a name. You probably don't want to name it Twitter Premium if there's nothing exactly premium there except for an undo button and color choices, and Premium or Enhanced imply that their base product isn't sufficient. If you remove Twitter <adjective> from the consideration, really all you can do is come up with a name that's somewhat disjointed but related to the product.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  Whatever happened to good ol' "Plus"? Although, god forbid they come up with a "Twitter Pro"...
  - wcarss 5y ago
    I also immediately thought of 'plus' -- I wonder if there would be a trademark issue because of "Google Plus"?
    - adenozine 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dizzy3gg 5y ago

I feel the Blue makes it feel a bit blue movie.

dominotw 5y ago

I would pay for twitter if they gave me filter to mute out all the rage mob topic of the hour.

underseacables 5y ago

I try to avoid Twitter as much possible, is there an option where I can pay to never see Twitter again?

ttt0 5y ago
Yes, you can pay me to turn your screen off.

fxtentacle 5y ago

I guess this is their admission that you cannot monetize engagement if your community is highly toxic and mostly just produces shitstorms, lynchmobs, perpetually enraged morally superior idiots and professional victims. I know that there's also good posts and good people on Twitter, but in my opinion it has been a net negative for society for quite a while now. What I would enjoy would be a button to hide all the accounts that post more often than once per day. Because chances are the people who talk too much have no time to think about what they're saying.

celticninja 5y ago
And it will likely prove that people will pay $2.99 to cause and get involved in shit storms and lynchmobs :-(
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  I believe in Rome, people where quite happy to pay handsomely to get a front row seat for watching gladiators get mutilated by lions. Maybe we have progressed less than we thought.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    I never thought of the old liveleaks site as a type of roman colosseum but I think you're right
  - bambax 5y ago
    Do we know that? I think most games were free? (I'm not sure).
    - munk-a 5y ago
      I think that's beside the point - more relevant is that people were both willing to pay a good deal to organize the games and that the games were a central and import part of roman society. You can argue - almost certainly correctly - that there was a significant portion of society that found the game distasteful, but you can't argue that there was still an even larger slice of the population that considered them so important that they built the coliseum to host them.

Mindwipe 5y ago

It's such a poor offering. I'm not completely unopposed to Twitter having a subscription offering, but this isn't what I'd want from it at all. (Number 1 would be unrestricted third party client before. The Twitter product team is awful and the UI basically unusable.)

Raineer 5y ago
Yeah I'm in this boat, too. In the end it might mean that I am paying Twitter $3/mo and the developer of the 3rd-party app, but to circumvent all API restrictions would be worth it. It seems a little unfair that Twitter gets so much of that money when it's really the app developer who is earning most of my value.

bellyfullofbac 5y ago

I guess I need to update my angel investors pitch powerpoint to answer their "How do you intend to make money?" question. "We'll charge users $3 a month to change the app colors and icon.".

toyg 5y ago
Winamp should have monetized skins... /s
- flatiron 5y ago
  And whipping llama asses.
d3nj4l 5y ago
There's a lot of great apps on App Stores that have a pricing model like this. Granted, most of them don't have millions in VC funding, but it's a fine business model that can make a tidy sum.
enos_feedler 5y ago
You make it sound as though this is an absurd way to monetize. This is the internet.
njb311 5y ago
The first news story I saw about this only mentioned the amount. I assumed it was one-off for a new app, or maybe annual. Per month is crazy. I don’t object to subscriptions, but in so many cases the pricing is way out of line with the value.
ceejayoz 5y ago
Don't forget the undo button, which is presumably just the existing delete button being rebranded.
- Nav_Panel 5y ago
  You're not paying for the feature, you're paying for the UX, which is gated behind their unusable API (so it's impossible for a 3rd party app to achieve parity with the 1st party app).

max_ 5y ago

These people (social networks) are no longer solving any problems. When they see users they don't see people in need as a service or product. All they see is a Knob. -> "Twist the user like this" Are we making more or less money? -> If yes, turn further to that direction, else turn to the opposite direction. Modern social media companies are no longer about offering effective social networking & communication services. Its all about the money now.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
toyg 5y ago
Don't know if you meant it, but "knob", short for "knobhead", is offensive slang in UK. It's eerily fitting here, though (the idea that Twitter leadership might see their users as a bunch of idiots might... not be entirely false).
- brigandish 5y ago
  I thought people dropped the k for that. Nobhead has extra power!
- max_ 5y ago
  Thanks for the warning. By "Knob" I meant the kind of that you turn on a radio when tuning toa frequency.

hs86 5y ago

With the old 3rd party clients I enjoyed using a linear timeline with a synced timeline position via Tweet Marker [0]. I would pay for their subscription if they enabled this for their official clients + web app. [0] https://tweetmarker.net/ https://tweetmarker.net/

senectus1 5y ago

gods this is pathetic. I predict this will be a failure at launch. followed by Twitter Pro which will be damned near exactly what everyone wants.

antiterra 5y ago

The public’s reaction to this should be highly interesting to those who argue that sites should just have subscriptions instead of targeted ads. $3 is half the price of a single print issue of the Sunday New York Times, but already the story seems to be about Twitter creating second class citizens out of free users who can’t be $36-a-year elites.

derwiki 5y ago
It seems Twitter Blue doesn't reduce ad volume

throwitaway1235 5y ago

How much does Twitter want to remove me from "view more replies"?

strict9 5y ago

Would happily pay this amount (or a little more) for a plan without tracking and ads.

AznHisoka 5y ago

Will there be some sort of marker in my Twitter profile to indicate I'm a Blue subscriber? Maybe a smaller lighter blue checkmark? If anything, I would want it as a social signal rather than the features.

tomcooks 5y ago
That's why you get icon colours, get ready for the screenshots
pram 5y ago
A social signal that you have $3?
- mlvljr 5y ago
  Had. Last month.
- zwily 5y ago
  Well, had $3.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  A signal that you're willing to pay something. The amount here isn't really relevant, and usage goes beyond social signaling. If it's exposed over the API and someone's logging into my product with that flag set, you could reasonably assume it's not a bot, or at the very least that whoever's botting has paid $3 of their own money.
- mcjkrw 5y ago
  If there will be an indicator like that, people may assume that the account that doesn't have it is worse in some way.
type0 5y ago
> to indicate I'm a Blue subscriber? Maybe a smaller lighter blue checkmark? Or at least a medal emoji. Are blue checkmarks so popular that everyone is excited to have two, why is social signal so important for you?

Yaina 5y ago

I love Twitter and use it every day. Unlike many other sites, owned by tech-giants, I have a lot of goodwill for them and think if anyone can prove that social-media users can be paying customers, it's them. It's just a bummer that Twitter Blue is not removing ads. I assume they're not going ad-free because they don't want to cannibalise their ad-business. As in: You can't say your ads are so great and helpful and also offer a way to turn them off. That might decrease the value of their ads? But it's also the reason I'm a bit on the fence here. I want to be part of the message that says: "Yes, I'm willing to pay for you Twitter!" but without removing ads (and frankly with a pretty bad value prop here) it's not an easy sell.

CamelCaseName 5y ago
Does it ever make sense to sell the ability to turn off ads? I imagine the majority of people willing to pay for such an option are power users, the same group that likely generates the bulk of advertising revenues and lives in countries with high CPC.
- MatekCopatek 5y ago
  Well, Youtube Premium does it, so does Hulu, and I'm sure there's other examples.
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    Youtube probably conceded that adblockers does it anyways for powerusers.
  - karolist 5y ago
    These services show ads in ways that delay you accessing the content you want, banner ads, while annoying do not have that property and are a harder sell
  - jedberg 5y ago
    reddit did it years before all of those.
  - 5y ago

o_p 5y ago

Ok but how much money do we need to raise in crowdfund to permanently delete Twitter.

cvwright 5y ago

This is awesome. Not because I like Twitter. It’s pretty awful. And I don’t hold out much hope that this will do anything to stop Twitter from boosting crazy garbage in order to maximize “engagement” and sell ads. I’m excited because I think this will make it easier for competitors to come along and offer a better, more user-focused experience. You can do a lot with $3/user. Full disclosure: I’m building a privacy focused social network that will be a paid subscription service. https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

willis936 5y ago
>It’s pretty awful. Speaking of awful: Something Awful is an example of a paid social club that flourished. It can work. Twitter is a bit large and comes with certain connotations of low-brow behavior (ie the very essence of only using 160 characters to convey a thought), so I'm not confident it will succeed. It'll be interesting to watch what comes out of the paywall though.
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 5y ago
  I don't think there's much to be learned from SA in this context. It existed during a different time of the internet, when cultural capital and honestly just raw power were allocated differently. It existed into the "modern" era of rage engagement, influencers, clickbait etc, but I would consider its "flourishing" to have ended well before that.
truth_ 5y ago
> It’s pretty awful. I will not talk about the ethics and privacy issues of Twitter but about user experience and quality of content on feed. The quality of content on your feed is as good as the people you choose to follow. Choose selectively, block and mute liberally. Keep doing this, and your feed will be fantastic. I use Twitter only for work. I set my Trending country to some country I have never heard the name of outside of trivia books containing nation capitals. And my Twitter experience is fantastic. Have meaningful discussions, learn new things, gain new perspectives. I keep away from politics and such.

elpakal 5y ago

Can't wait to hear what Scott Galloway has to say about this...

sergiosgc 5y ago
He already approached it on Pivot. Galloway's model is obviously better: Charge those that get value off a big following on Twitter.
dredmorbius 5y ago
He's written his prescription here: Twitter needs to move from an ad model to a subscription model, with subscription fees for accounts of a certain size. The platform would still be free for the majority of users, but accounts over 200K followers (or even 50K followers) should pay for the audience that Twitter provides them with. This would lead to better financial results because recurring revenue is reliable, profitable, and earns a higher multiple than transaction revenue. 5 Feb 2021 https://www.profgalloway.com/overhauling-twitter/ https://www.profgalloway.com/overhauling-twitter/
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I'm all for big companies having to pay for their social media presence. And a lot. That might make them host it themselves and I wouldn't need to look at their offerings on these horrible social mediums...

spinningslate 5y ago

I hope Mozilla is watching closely. If (and it's a big 'if') this proves successful, it's an important datapoint on the viability of paid-for utility services on the web. No, Firefox isn't the same thing as Twitter. But if large numbers of people show willingness to pay $2.99/mo to change the app's theme, surely there's enough privacy-conscious people that would pay similarly for a browser that was commercially incentivised to protect privacy rather than monetise it.

cvwright 5y ago
Oh please please please make it so. I would happily pay a couple bucks per month for a Firefox Pro that’s exactly the same as normal Firefox. Provided, of course that it’s easy to start and end the subscription, and I don’t have to create a new account. Fortunately Apple provides all of this with the App Store.
- mstipetic 5y ago
  Why don’t you just donate then?
  - cvwright 5y ago
    Good question. I suppose it's because: A) I don't want to create yet another account and give my CC number to yet another entity who can lose it B) I guess I don't fully trust them to use the $$ for anything that I care about. Tying the revenue more directly to Firefox IMO would send a stronger signal that this is what matters.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    Because he's lying. He would not pay for Firefox Premium. The set of people who would pay for this product is vastly smaller than the set of people who say they would.
    - brigandish 5y ago
      I paid for Omniweb and I still miss it. Features included per site settings, and workspaces that worked like a mix of profiles and Apple’s Spaces. It was killed off by free competitors, look where that brought us.

bosswipe 5y ago

Would it still have ads?

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

Don't forget that 90cents of that goes to Apple, and 40cents to Governments as sales tax (on average, depending on the region). Its a shame that the economics are so stacked against premium retail software instead of just slinging ads.

alephnan 5y ago
> to Governments as sales tax Does Twitter circumvent taxes from ad revenue ?

buzz27 5y ago

I would pay even more to never again see "recommended" tweets from people I don't follow. I use Twitter sort of like RSS, insofar as I want to be able to see everything the people I follow tweet. It amazes me that its not possible to coerce Twitter to do this in the settings. Instead I have to view users individually to see what they've tweeted since I last checked the app.

droopyEyelids 5y ago
might be a help to you: https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac56f9bd36ec https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac5...
- lt 5y ago
  this is awesome, thanks
ravenstine 5y ago
I've noticed that other platforms like Facebook have been doing something similar. (not that I use Facebook much at all). It used to be a feed of things I've chosen... now half of it is stuff from meme pages, businesses, and animal rescue videos I've never shown any interest in. If I remove one of them, it just finds some other bullshit to push in front of me. It's like a subtle admission that these platforms are on their way out and they're throwing their own Barnum & Bailey circus just to keep anyone around.
ffggvv 5y ago
i recommend making “lists”. that’s what i do. just add everyone i care to see to the list (can seperate lists by category also)
cblconfederate 5y ago
you can switch to "latest tweets" mode
dredmorbius 5y ago
On some platforms, custom streams or lists can be used. On the late little-lamented Google+, a set of features converged to give this option: - It was possible to define what profiles could comment on one's own posts, or whose notifications would be visible. I simply piled all my contacts into two lists ("Circles") called "notifications" and "comments". If someone abused that privilege, they were removed. - The default Home stream could include "featured" or "recommended" content. Individual lists could not. Obvious hack: don't look at the Home stream, and instead have a primary list. On desktop, I further hacked the CSS to remove any references to streams I wasn't interested in following, e.g., the short-lived "Games" category, and "What's Hot" (an absolute cesspit of anodyne irrelevance). - On successor platforms, I typically set up about three lists in order of priority, often literally "A", "B", and "C". The highest-quality (and lowest-volume) posters go in A, spillover to B, and especially annoying / high-volume to C. If a profile's contributions are not useful, they're unfollowed. - Block early and often. Where merely unfollowing isn't enough. https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019 - Mastodon has the additional feature of being able to block an entire instance. For large instances (tens to hundreds of thousands of accounts) this may be overkill. For smaller ones with hostile cultures, it's quite handy. I'll note: HN has none of these features, but it has excellent moderation, and the option of collapsing annoying threads. If I find myself conversing with someone to whom my meagre skills in communication seem utterly inadequate, I collapse the thread and move on. HN preserves those collapsed states (at times this is an antifeature, here, it's useful). This isn't quite as powerful as the block-user feature, but in the context of HN's other controls, it's generally sufficient.

piinbinary 5y ago

Features I'd want: * No ads * No suggested topics * No suggested tweets, no people I might be interested in, no tweets someone I follow liked - just show me the people I follow and things they explicitly retweet * The timeline preserves order * Threads are grouped together and the entire thread is shown

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
Same here, with such an offering I'd find a subscription attractive. But then again I'd also be more willing to subscribe in general if Twitter didn't try to sabotage my experience and timeline at every step already in the first place.
alkonaut 5y ago
What you want is api access and a decent client (Tweetbot, Tweetdeck). My client does exactly this (no ads, feed in order) and I can’t believe I have this for free already while others can’t even pay for it.
- mttjj 5y ago
  Exactly. Been using Tweetbot for years (a decade?). Never seen ads. Timeline is literally a “time line”. And nothing shows up that I don’t want to see like promoted tweets, tweets from people I don’t follow, or trends. Even has some awesome features on top of that like muting (people or hashtags). They’re only limited by Twitter’s throttled API at this point. However, literally the day that Twitter opened up viewing tweet likes via the API, Tweetbot had updated their app to support it. They switched to a subscription model with Tweetbot 6. And while I’m generally not a fan of subscriptions, I figured $6 per YEAR for an app that I use every day and have for nearly a decade is totally worth it to support the devs.
- crispyalmond 5y ago
  Curious, what's your client? I'm interested in that.
  - alkonaut 5y ago

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago

I have watched a ton of interviews with Jack and find him extremely inspirational and what he does (and has done) being truly amazing. Easily one of my favorite entrepreneurs to follow. With Twitter, I get the sense he lost control of the company a long time ago because of a combo of monetization and culture. So basically he helped build the greatest communication platform in the world and instead we get what Twitter is today. This kind of weak Twitter Blue announcement, to me at least, just shows at what a lost the platform is for making money in a way that isn't engagement driven (aka, rewarding flaming-type behavior).

airstrike 5y ago
> greatest communication platform in the world Define greatest
- TheJoYo 5y ago
  "communication"

weasel_words 5y ago

If all they are doing is allowing color changes and slight UI tweaks (and the undo button), why not take a page from online gaming's playbook and just sell cosmetics? There is pretty much no limit to what could be sold as a cosmetic...add "flair" to the twitter bird (googly eyes, hats, etc) ($5.99 - $25.99)...make circle logo on your profile an octagon ($1.99), a triangle ($1.25)...with a blue border for an extra $.99....etc I bet they'd make gobs more than a $2.99/mo.

kumarvvr 5y ago
I guess more features will come out. Even they know 3 USD a month means they have to have good incentives.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jsnell 5y ago

The HN comments are pretty unanimous on wanting to pay this amount to remove ads, not for more features. The problem with that is that an active US user is already producing more as revenue than that from ads. (40M US DAU, 500M US advertising revenue per quarter -> $4/month). Add to that the problem that for subscriptions they end up paying app store fees, subscriptions to remove ads just can't work. They'd need to price it at like $10/month, but it seems obvious few people would pay that. This does feel somehow absurd, given how ineffective one would expect Twitter ads to be, but might be illustrative of the problems with paying to remove ads.

kevindong 5y ago
A decent chunk of HN is anti-SaaS in my experience.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  > A decent chunk of HN is anti-SaaS in my experience. No they are not, they are anti vendor lock-in.

slownews45 5y ago

Interesting - this came just after I'd read through the HN piece on life after an internet mob attack. https://twitter.com/pasql/status/1366795510355537924 https://twitter.com/pasql/status/1366795510355537924 https://pasquale.cool/internet-mob https://pasquale.cool/internet-mob I'm not on twitter, and poking my head into at least this corner seems pretty damn unhealthy. In sequence a women accused this guy (falsely) of harassing her from some other random account (it's not clear why). Then another person said they overheard a conversation ages ago and stopped being friends with the guy - which turned out to not be true either. And it continued from there. Is there no consequence on twitter for this type of stuff? Wonder if there is space for a twitter clone. Basically interesting ideas, sharing information. You'd be stuck with bad information, the response (instead of calling someone an idiot) would be to describe a different theory. No personal attacks of any kind. HN seems to avoid a lot of this type of mob behavior around personal stuff and it's easier for non-involved people to engage then.

dkirill 5y ago
It's impossible to have HN-like discussions if platform targets general population
- slownews45 5y ago
  But what about just dialing down the personal attacks? I mean, it's hard to engage with twitter as part of general population when folks are immediately in destroyer mode. Couldn't twitter just have a flag for personnel attacks. Or is it considered good that these attacks happen there - plenty I'm sure are potentially supported by a bit more than the one linked from HN. But either way hard to engage with from the outside.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Twitter's business model relies on it being toxic. Controversy and drama generate "engagement", so they have no reason to change. This isn't specific to Twitter even, any ad-supported social platform has this problem and which is why advertising should be considered a cancer.

papito 5y ago

I would pay Twitter to NOT use Twitter. Give me the option to lock myself out for a few hours/days so I can focus on work and withdraw from social media addiction. They can shove their colored icons. What is this?!

intricatedetail 5y ago

If this stops any tracking then sounds good. All platforms should give an option to pay with money rather than personal data.

ilamont 5y ago

Me: I'll pay for Twitter without ads and a true reverse-chron view of the accounts that I follow. An edit feature would be nice, too. Twitter: Hey, check out Twitter Blue! Just $2.99 for reader view, colorful themes, and some other stuff you didn't ask for!

gaius_baltar 5y ago
> Twitter without ads and a true reverse-chron view of the accounts that I follow. I really expected Mastodon to get more adopted among the regular folks because these features that everybody wants are just the standard for Fediverse instances.
- handrous 5y ago
  DDG "Mastodon". Second result is "joinmastodon.org" which I assume is the right thing. OK so far. No social content up-front on the page. Instead I have to watch a video if I want to know what I'm getting in to. (Yes I know Twitter just greets you with "sign up/log in" on their homepage these days, but everyone knows what they are so it's fine). "Get started", not "sign up". Looks like I'm in for a process. Four boxes telling me what it means to choose a community. Nothing immediately actionable. List of community categories on the left. Nothing against furries, but apparently this is the kind of place where they rate a top-level category, out of only ten categories... so. Hm. Ok. One of the infoboxes: "You can move your account to a different community later without losing your followers." Ok, but what if I get banninated for some reason? Do I lose my stuff then? Can I still move it? How much control can an op take over my data if I upset them? Or if they just stop paying their server bill without notice? Yes sure, it may be "the same thing that happens if Twitter suddenly stops paying their server bill" but in any given year that's way less likely than that one of these listed community servers will do the same. Guess answering all that requires outside research. I'll try the "general" category. It's not clear, even in "general", whether some of these are topic-specific spaces. I think not? But it's really hard to tell and I'm just guessing. Some are "request invite" and it's cool that's supported. Clicking on a few "join" buttons, all the pages I'm greeted with are practically identical aside from the color theme. That's good. Not sure I love the way "log in" and "sign up" are both given equal visual and page-position weight, considering I showed up via a "join" button, but whatever, that's a bit nitpicky. There's a "see what's happening" link on the sign-up/in pages. Back on the joinmastodon.org instance list, they have "browse directory"(??? Directory of what? ???) links on each instance's little card, which seems to take you to some kind of user list. Following the "see what's happening" link on a likely-looking instance. This instance, which noted on the sign-up page that it's "mostly English-language", presents me with about 50% posts in non-English languages (several different ones), and the English-language posts are context-free replies, it looks like, so they convey no useful meaning to me. It's like getting a random sampling of individual SMS messages belonging to 100 different people. The handful that aren't meaningless are kind of off-putting. I still don't know what's up with this whole thing, really, aside from I guess it's Twitterish? Kind of? Judging from the @ portions of the usernames, I think these posts are from a bunch of different servers, so I'm really not sure what the point is of treating the instances as separate and the choice as meaningful. Is it like email, so it doesn't matter where you're hosted as long as you have some host? They act like that's not the case and it really matters which host you choose, for reasons that mostly have nothing to do with longevity, stability, or likelihood of continued service, but I can't tell, from what I'm seeing, why. That's how I'd choose an email provider. I'm not getting how this is different, if this is what the "feed" looks like. > I really expected Mastodon to get more adopted among the regular folks Between the above and that if I didn't frequent nerd-spaces I'd never have heard of it in the first place, I think I can see why.

captainmuon 5y ago

Something I would really pay for is the ability to manage one twitter handle from multiple accounts. That functionality is kinda there in TweetDeck, but it is hidden and I'm not sure it is supported anymore. In the API it works I think but no client supports it. Ah and the ability to create an account anonymously without a phone, and maybe to pay with crypto. I understand why they don't want that, but if you post controversial stuff (IMO harmless progressive stuff, nothing agressive or hate-y, but enough to tick some people off who want to play culture wars) then you invite crazy people who try to dox or threaten you, and all kinds of legal threats. This is in West Europe, I can't imagine how it might be in acutally repressive states. Unless you just post for fun about cats or food, social media turns out to be ungrateful work...

simonsarris 5y ago

I feel like I must be living in an alternative reality from the Twitter deriders in this thread, I've had almost the exact opposite experience. I've made more friends and acquaintances on Twitter than any other social network. It's also easily the most intellectual social network. (If that sounds crazy, really compare it to the others. They're either not intellectual or [youtube] not really social.) If you care deeply about something, you will find other people on Twitter. If you work in public, people will find you. Someone right now I met from Maine is currently drawing up the plans to teach me to timber frame a structure I just got approved. About 20 people I met from twitter have been over my house (for dinner, etc) at different times. Far more people read my work because of Twitter. If you don't use it as a political mouthpiece it's incredible and there's nothing like it. And that's really up to the user.

brandrick 5y ago
This is largely my experience too.
babelfish 5y ago
Same. Social media is what you make it. If someone's experience with social media is that it's a highly toxic environment, the only person ultimately responsible for that is them.
_r0fz 5y ago
It's also very very funny to me the general tone of self-congratulatory nonparticipation all over this comment section about how superior we all are for not using social media or twitter or whatever. HN is social media too! I've heard the arguments why it's not but they aren't compelling to me; it is one. The main difference between here and twitter is the tone. On here there is a cultural expectation that you will perform dispassionate erudition but if you read beyond that at all very few comments are any more intellectually stimulating than an average tweet. Less, honestly, at least people on twitter still seem to value joy and humor and whimsy.
- rantwasp 5y ago
  counterpoint: 1) the difference is on hn, shitposting, trolling and straight up being offensive is strongly discouraged. 2) I have experienced joy, whimsicality and humor in here. We are people not machines. 3) i have learned about more new things than in any other place. I have frequently changed my mind because of the quality of the arguments 4) no matter what the subject is people with deep expertise seem to show up and it’s a joy to actually hear from them

Taylor_OD 5y ago

Twitter is the only social media I use. If they have to do this to make a profit then I have no issue with it. I'm surprised more large social media companies have not done this since there are so many outside services that will do things like this on their platforms.

argvargc 5y ago

Big tech Co. deletes/censors half its users then scrambles to update to a freemium model to try and stay afloat. That'll be $2.99 well-refused.

not_jd_salinger 5y ago

I have a reasonable twitter following (between 5-10k followers) and have recently realized that I needed to remove the app from my phone and only occasionally check it from time to time on a laptop. I'm considering giving it up all together. I've struggled a bit with this decisions since I've made a fair number of real friends through twitter (people I keep up with in real life after) and come across a lot of interesting books, papers etc. But I've come to realize that despite its benefits, twitter is ultimately toxic to your mind. I've seen far too many people I care about slowly dissolve into a fever of dopamine fixes as they slowly contort their personality into a stream of memes and rants looking to gain followers. I always tried to fight the urge to post stupid shit just to grow followers, but anything genuinely nuanced or thoughtful you post will have virtually zero engagement. This is fine in isolation, but it leads all conversations to eventually degrade in to a miasma of garbage thinking that is just a mix of groupthink, rage and memes. The final straw for me was finding myself angry about the vague opinions of people I don't really care about at all. This same type of thinking is what got me to drop facebook entirely years ago.

jan_Inkepa 5y ago
As soon as I found myself one degree of separation from drama I packed up and left. It was a major factor in my livelihood and professionally very important, but it's not worth it. I've been adjacent to some people who the Twitter hivemind deathray has focussed its sights on, and it was deeply depraved/disturbing. For me Twitter has nothing to offer that'd make it worth risking that fate.
josefresco 5y ago
> The final straw for me was finding myself angry about the vague opinions of people I don't really care about at all. I laughed when I read this because I've replaced browsing Twitter while eating breakfast with reading my local newspaper. Today I was so upset by what I read in the paper, the feeling stuck with me all morning. In my head I composed several "letters to the editor" and only now am I finally moving on. I won't write those letters, but I probably would have engaged with that content on Twitter. I don't know what this means, but being outraged at the news is not exclusive to new media.

KoftaBob 5y ago

To those saying that this is "$3/m for different app icon colors": Based on their recent acquisitions of - Revue (email newsletter service similar to Substack) - Scroll (subscription that shares revenue with news sites, and removes ads on said sites) I highly doubt Twitter Blue will solely get you different app/icon colors, they're likely to roll those services into Blue. This is somewhat similar to the Amazon Prime approach, where you pay for a premium version of a site/service, and get access to a portfolio of services like Prime Video, Music, 2 day shipping, etc. Their aim seems to be "Twitter Blue is to consumption of online news as Amazon Prime is to shopping/media". The way I see it, a subscription model = moving away from a system that incentivizes a platform to maximize engagement/ad views, and instead incentivizes the platform to provide a positive experience, so users stay subscribed.

vecplane 5y ago

All I care about is being able to remove advertisements. I don't care about any of these new features. Can just I pay $X.99 a month to not see ads on Twitter?

alkonaut 5y ago

Does the premium version include unlimited API-access so you can use any client? I use a third party client with no ads and no content except tweets from people I follow because I can’t stand the official apps, but I have since learned that this possibility was limited to new users. If Twitter cut my ability to use Tweetbot and then charged $3 for it, I’d subscribe immediately. So I suspect this is a service more people would pay for.

dayvid 5y ago

I like Twitter a lot. It's the only social media platform that has a lot of features for power users. The trick is to regularly ban certain keywords associated with posts not relevant to you and to regularly block or mute users. You can also use Lists to get rid of recommended tweets and create specific feeds for whatever use case you want. If you pin them, you can swipe left or right on your timeline to have a feed just for content related to the list.

henvic 5y ago

It's about time blogs + RSS feeds come back :)

dredmorbius 5y ago
How do you answer discovery?
- henvic 5y ago
  Feed aggregators, sometimes called planets. I remember back a little over a decade ago they were becoming quite common. One I liked a lot was KDE's. https://planet.kde.org/ https://planet.kde.org/
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    So, yeah, I remember those. The principle issue I had with them was that they scale poorly. A few dozen principle feeds: OK. Hundreds or thousands, not so much. You effectively see the same problem with Reddit forums, as a parallel. A smallish community of a few thousand subscribers, following the 90/10/1 rule meaning maybe 10 members submit 50% of the posts, another 100 contribute the other half is OK. A sub with 100k -- millions of members, both the submissions and comments are simply a firehose, and the temporal weighting (even with vote-based ranking) means arcane subjects slip off the page rapidly. Algorithmic ranking => algorithmic gaming. Temporal ranking => temporal gaming. That is, the feed is dominated by the most-frequently-posting users. Fixing this in a fair fashion for a large number of users with a high variability of interests is ... difficult. In any large-audience medium, the default "show/no-show" decision for a piece of content approaches "no-show". Attention is finite. (I'm not saying algorithmic social media is better. I'm saying the problem is hard.)
    - henvic 5y ago
      Good point. Now I want even more to build a better planet.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

> Reader mode : Keep up with threads by turning them into easy-to-read text. So, your current text design isn't easy to read?

dredmorbius 5y ago
3rd class service. Jules Dupuit rides again! https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-so-bad-this-19th-century-economist-explained-it-with-ju.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-...

StreamBright 5y ago

The only FAANG company products that I am willing to pay any money for are Amazon's AWS and Google's Search. There is no way that Twitter can produce anything that is mildly interesting and their behaviour in the last 5 years was just pure trash. Some people argue that social media in this form is just damaging to society and should not exist. I am not going that far but paying for it would be really over the edge.

alpb 5y ago

I absolutely hate ads on Twitter and there's no way to block them on mobile. So I developed this obsession to block every ad account I see (which is about 4,300 accounts so far https://github.com/ahmetb/twitter-audit-log/blob/master/blocked_accounts.txt https://github.com/ahmetb/twitter-audit-log/blob/master/bloc...). I am willing to pay $2 more and get ads blocked as well. Once you start blocking ads, the relevance goes down and it drives you crazier.

remram 5y ago
You can browse Twitter from a mobile browser with ad blocking (ex: Firefox). The UI is basically the same, it's a bit slower but on the other hand you get multiple tabs and more privacy.

mkl95 5y ago

I had a Twitter account since late 2010 until a few months ago. I'm not much of a social media guy, but I felt that I had some sort of addiction during those years, an addiction that made me go back every few weeks and "leave" after feeling Twitter's toxicity. Their system is smart at appealing to very specific personalities that just can't help being toxic. These people produce tons of controversial content and generate a lot of traffic. However, the system also operates at a collective level by forming closed groups of users, that fall somewhere between gossipy cliques and low key cults. This is by far the scariest side of Twitter.

45ure 5y ago

It was probably intended; I mistook the headline as a fast-track for 'Blue tick/checkmark' service. Regardless, it is not aimed at people like me, who are ambivalent about Twitter. I haven't tweeted a single thing from my vintage account, and have no (zero) followers. It is basically a read-only account. Not only that, but I try not to follow any more than 100 accounts, which is still a lot! If curated properly, you can stumble upon interesting and thought-provoking interactions, interspersed with churlish and toxic behaviour -- some of which is fairly easy to identify, albeit hard to ignore. In general, it is theatre mixed with rapid insult delivery mechanism, which I find amusing, and prefer not to read into too much, and/or have any desire to interact with.

digitalsin 5y ago

I thought this had something to do with Twitter supporting law enforcement..then I realized it's Twitter.

nickdothutton 5y ago

All will suffer from this eternal September unless you discriminate in terms of who you admit. People are totally unequal. Closed User Groups existed for a reason and that reason has been amplified many times over as internet adoption has grown.

brundolf 5y ago

Give me: - No ads - No pushy prompts for topics, follows, "tweets I might like" or anything else unsolicited - No tweets in my feed from people I don't follow and I'll happily pay monthly. Doesn't look like they do any of this yet, but I'll keep an eye out.

jpindar 5y ago
You can get that with Tweetdeck for free: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- brundolf 5y ago
  Alas, I mostly use iOS. I did just discover Tweetbot, which is pretty good, but apparently is limited by Twitter's API to (among other things) not be able to show notifications
remram 5y ago
And maybe no "you're back home" feature, undoing my preference about the order I want to see content every 7 days?

tored 5y ago

Twitter is such a garbage platform. If you browse the web page with your mobile it will eat up your battery pretty quick. Sometimes it rescrolls the page so you lose where you were. Or rerenders everything so you lose context completely. And because it renders quite slow it will misregister your thumb clicks on something else, like the back button. Or try to thumb click on a single line tweet, you will hit everything else. Pay for this? No, thanks.

moat 5y ago

I see all these comments about the trash and hate on Twitter, and I just wish that I could show them how I use it, and how wonderful a source of intellectual stimulation it can be. My feed is highly curated. 1) I mute all political words. Nothing good comes from these discussions. I also mute things that just don't contribute to my peace of mind (a recent addition being "basecamp") 2) I block users who put out garbage content or try to stir things up 3) I use lists that I view on TweetDeck, so I can have lists based on my different interests (i.e. investing, entrepreneurs, interesting people, philosophy, etc) Using this it becomes a dream feed. I get stimulating content, great discussions, and interesting ideas. On top of that I've actually made some solid friends from the network over the years, some in-person ones as well.

moralestapia 5y ago
Nice, just for the record, do you plan to spend $3/month on Twitter Blue?
pram 5y ago
Have you ever considered that all this labor isn't worth it to a casual user? It's quite obvious, the surface Twitter experience is hostile and trashy. You've sequestered yourself into a bubble you think is fine, ok, but what incentive is there for anyone else to do the same?

jp1016 5y ago

if you don't want to wait till twitter blue , you can try https://twimark.io https://twimark.io , I have made this tool to bookmark tweets by categories and convert threads into labels. unfortunately the completion of my project and Twitter's announcement came at same time

onassar 5y ago
Looks like a cool service :)

hahahasure 5y ago

If there's a filter for political news, you can take my money. Or better, if the news is curated for my benefit rather than engagement, I'm interested.

water8 5y ago

Hard Pass.

tweettweet 5y ago

Twitter should be shut down. Jack Dorsey should be arrested.

efdee 5y ago

What I need is a read-only Twitter. I can't keep myself from engaging with idiots and it always ends up a net negative. I wish I could take away the ability to react to things. But so far this hasn't materialized and I feel better just not going to Twitter at all, even if that means missing out on some interesting content.

wmeredith 5y ago
The free version of Tweetbot on the iOS App Store is read-only.

everydayDonut 5y ago

It seems to me that you can contribute a lot of the toxic behavior on twitter to the lack of nested comments. How can you ever have a healthier discussion when you can only ever reply directly to a tweet?

grey-area 5y ago

Twitter have picked the wrong customer IMO (readers). They should be selling features to writers, not readers. Writers/Broadcasters of content would pay a lot more than $2.99 a month for extra features to curate their feeds and followers, publish content automatically, weed out spam and trolls, schedule posts etc.

debacle 5y ago
Agreed. Those people want reach more than anything else. The utility for some tweeters is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The utility for tweetees isn't likely 10/yr.

______- 5y ago

I already have hand curated my Twitter and make full use of the `lists` feature. I have roughly 30 lists for different categories. One for techpress news, another for world news, another for quotes & inspirational messages, etc This attempt to serve curated feeds to people is too late. I've already put in the hard work of organizing my feeds to my liking, and this has the bonus of me not having to give Twitter money. (I will happily be their 'product' in return for me having insight into my interests and being abreast of world affairs, and local news too).

mproud 5y ago

I don’t think they have confirmed it, have they? They were asked about it and said no comment.

joshdance 5y ago

Interesting reading the replies. Twitter is the most valuable social network that I participate on. Friends, ideas, connections all come from finding people talking about things that are interesting to you.

Qahlel 5y ago

When did we agree that everything has to be a monthly subscription and we shouldn't own anything?

TeeMassive 5y ago

Well Twitter hasn't been profitable for a while. They'll have to try to make some serious money or go bust.

hk__2 5y ago

My main issue with Twitter is that you follow people, but those people have different interests. So I may follow @JohnSmith because he’s a known dev in the JS community and tweets about JS, but he also tweets about his country’s politics, what he ate at lunch, and engage in heated debats about pineapple on pizza I don’t care about. Twitter recently introduced topics, so that you can follow one topic that aggregates lots of tweets from various people. This is not what I want: I’d like to follow @JohnSmith, but only for the JS content. As someone who tweets, I’d like some sort of kafka-ish topic queues: I would post tweets about JS in the JS queue, and tweets about Italian food in that other queue, so that people could follow the queues they want. In the end I don’t tweet on either topic because I’m afraid I’ll deceive people who followed me for the other content.

dpeck 5y ago
God forbid anyone be multifaceted. It seems the the rise of influencer culture led to everyone else feeling like they had to only be in a specific niche, and only speak about it or they weren’t going to serve their “fanbase”. And you know they’re probably right that they wouldn’t serve that fanbase, but good grief has it made the net a generally much more boring place with space only for near-deified experts & influencers and perpetual newbs, leaving little room for anyone in the middle to have nuanced and varied conversations.
- kortilla 5y ago
  It’s not that there is something wrong with you posting that stuff. It’s that it ruins the experience for followers. I follow a few hundred people who only post about specific topics they are experts in and it’s still almost too much. The last thing I want to read is all of their half-baked political opinions thrown in with hemorrhoid complaints. The truth is idgaf about the individual persona on Twitter. Being multifaceted is for friends and other real human relationships.
- gffrd 5y ago
  I agree that it's extremely important that people be multifaceted. I also think people over-weight how important it is for them to express their individuality. That said, I think the biggest issue is neither of the above, but rather that it's really hard to design interfaces that allow people to sort the signal from the noise. To weight/filter information. I just haven't seen it. Back to OP and @JohnSmith: if OP worked in an office with @JohnSmith, OP could tune out @JohnSmith's pineapple-pizza rants … or walk away. This would be easy and natural. OP would that they were analyzing this and adjusting appropriately to maximize JS discussion while avoiding pineapple. We naturally weigh, throttle, and filter the input of others. This allows us to take the good with the bad. This is the nuance that Twitter—and most social media—lacks: how do I stay up on what matters most without being overwhelmed by what doesn't without separating content from context?

CobrastanJorji 5y ago

The chutzpah of adding an "undo" button as a monthly paid premium feature is just astounding to me. I assume the next step is to make sure that as soon as you stop paying them the $3/month, all of your undone tweets are republished.

greyhair 5y ago

Twitter Blew

m3kw9 5y ago

I wonder what went down at the meeting when the name “Twitter Pro” was put on the table.

xg15 5y ago

Twitter in 2006: Hey, we made this new infrastructure! You can consume it with any kind of client that you can imagine. We're really excited what kind of experiences you'll create! Twitter in 2021: For just $2.99/mo, you can view the tweets in your algorithmic timeline in this new exclusive colour theme!

Ekaros 5y ago
Sanely thinking this sort of monetization model was inevitable... Just how much money from adds can you get, specially when significant part of content is "free" adds in reality...

dools 5y ago

Queue Parler Red in 3...2...

cwkoss 5y ago

$3 as a one-time payment doesn't seem like it will meaningfully impact Twitter's earnings. I wonder if they are doing this to increase the value of their ads shown to people willing to pay: if someone is willing to pay $3 for minor aesthetic improvements they are much more valuable advertising targets than the general population.

nsoonhui 5y ago
It's $3 per month

no_wizard 5y ago

And yet still no way to get the little blue check mark of authenticity

karmasimida 5y ago

I have no problem with subscription, but this feels like a really lazy attempt to monetize TBH, albeit being cheap. Also note, HN folks are nothing like common users, and using their experience as indicator for public reception is a really bad model to say the least.

lobocinza 5y ago

I prefer smaller communities like those using Mastodon, eg Fosstodon.org.

soheil 5y ago

Undo Tweets? As in delete your tweet after you post it? Or it won't send the tweet for a minute or two in case you change your mind similar to Gmail Undo?

goguy 5y ago

People should learn to engage their brain, maybe mull it over for a while before posting on twitter. It doesn't seem to happen though so they may as well charge people for the ability to undo their mistakes!

deleted 5y ago

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