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Twitter discontinues ad-free articles for Blue subscribers
- james_pm 4y agoAnd there are still ads in the timeline. Whoever dreamt up Blue should be shown the door. $4.99/month for no ads in the timeline and a reverse chronological view that doesn't change back randomly is a no-brainer.
- angulardragon03 4y agoAgreed. No idea how it’s possible that this hasn’t even been floated for several years at this point. Every time Twitter announces a paid feature that isn’t this, I am disappointed.
- tanepiper 4y agoBuy 50 likes for $2.99 Buy 25 Retweets for $1.50, Quote Retweets are $6 for 10
- josefresco 4y agoThe last time I looked at Twitter Advertising, the "cost" for a follower was about $2.
- rchaud 4y agoBringing click farm jobs back to America!
- est 4y agoLast time twitter news was all over the place was during its blue whale interrupts.
- beckingz 4y agobring back the fail whale!
- powera 4y agoMy experience with Twitter Blue was that, quite frequently, the "ad-free articles" were still behind a paywall and inaccessible. So very little of value is being lost here.
- sremani 4y agoAccording to N.N.Taleb, Elon over-paid for twitter. $44 billion for a company that is according to Taleb ~15Billion. Now that cheap money era is over, Companies esp. in tech have to spend based on their cash-flow and profit instead of valuation. That means, Elon has to pull at almost all stops to make Twitter profitable and that means a lot of pain and change at Twitter. Every change need not make it front page of HN. The tactics may be new, but the strategy is as old as it gets.
- m3kw9 4y agoHe wouldn’t have have gotten it for 15. Unless there was a huge crash that sent it down to 10 first.
- BitwiseFool 4y agoAnd, the broader market crash would have also hit Elon Musk's own holdings as well. So I'm not sure how much better of a deal he would have gotten in terms of price and purchasing power.
- notyourwork 4y agoAnd frankly he should not have bought it at all.
- Hamuko 4y agoI think there's a lot of variance in how much analysts are valuing Twitter; Dan Ives is valuing Twitter at $25 billion. Kevin O'Leary (of Shark Tank fame) valued Twitter at only $10 billion. But I think all analysts are agreeing that Elon Musk paid way over market price.
- carlosdp 4y agoIn my experience, it never actually worked anyways
- cebert 4y agoI have been paying for Twitter Blue and it never worked for me either.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paxys 4y ago> But Twitter says eliminating ad-free news should allow it to focus its “resources on adding additional value for our members.” Adding value by removing value. Makes perfect sense.
- Spivak 4y agoI guess the good faith interpretation is they want out of the news game and don’t see their core competency as Netflix for news Which honestly makes some sense, it has almost nothing to do with Twitter as a platform and gets them into the world of bullshit content licensing.
- concinds 4y agoWith how unsuccessful Apple News+ has been, it's frankly unsurprising and would likely have happened whether or not Musk owns Twitter. It's obviously not why people subscribe to Twitter Blue, why increase costs for no reason?
- klyrs 4y agoRaise the price and drop the features, makes sense to me. Next step, the MMO route: sell different-color flair for your account so everybody can tell how much you spend per month on Twitter. Then, let people filter by tier: Twitter Blue can block Twitter Blue and no-check users; Twitter Red cannot be blocked except by Red and above... on up to Twitter Diamond who can't be blocked by anybody but other $100k/mo users. Sure, people will hate it, but will they pay?
- mikkergp 4y agoI support your cynicism here but it did make me curious, has “whale economics / micro transactions” been tried on a non gaming platform?
- klyrs 4y agoAirlines? Politicians? I think it was credit cards who started (or at least popularized) the Silver/Gold crap, but I'm unsure. And... I'm not sure that I'm being cynical here. I think I'm extrapolating on a pretty solid trend in economics. I'd like to think that the $100k value I tossed out is unrealistic, but I've been surprised before (looking at you, Diablo)
- mikkergp 4y agoFirst class twitter blue? For everyone else’s the first 140 characters are free, then .1 doge per character, unless you forget to add your characters at the beginning in which case you can add them in the edit for free, but have to collect them at baggage claim (the metaphor breaks down)
- fasthands9 4y agoI mean some would call it a game but Tinder/Match does this. They have subscriptions starting at $10 with some bonus features but there are also pre-set options for subscriptions/boosts that go up to $100 so I'm assuming those whales are using a lot. It's obviously not too dissimilar from Twitter. I bet some people get a very similar rush from a match as they do from a shared tweet. I imagine it's still mostly guys who buy the super futures but there's also a large class of OF models, aspiring influencers, etc. who use Tinder features because it is good value for their goals. I imagine people who use Twitter for clicks/attention would be in same spot.
- dralley 4y agoIt makes me so angry that Scroll died for this. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22417852/twitter-buying-scroll-subscription-service-news-revue-newsletter https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/4/22417852/twitter-buying-sc...
- AndrewDucker 4y agoMe too. I absolutely loved Scroll's idea - subscribe to a whole bunch of sites and have your money split between them, depending on how much you read them. It's a shame to have them be bought out just to be closed down.
- sk0g 4y agoBrave browser does something similar with its attention tokens, which by default get allocated* depending on your time split between sites. *provided the site supports it, unsure what the process for that is. Some really weird ones do, like specific Youtube channels, The Guardian, or some GitHub users.
- dralley 4y agoScroll wasn't locked into a particular browser, didn't use a pointless crypto scheme, and actively sought partners instead of opting sites in against their will.
- sk0g 4y agoI wasn't aware of the business model, merely that it's conceptually similar, if a bit "web 3.0" in implementation. Not sure it's any worse than browsing with an ad blocker, in which case the websites get 0 revenue, crypto or otherwise.
- OrderlyTiamat 4y agoThat's actually the reason I'm principally against using brave: they were accepting token payment on behalf of unsuspecting content creators without their consent. [1] I don't know if that rises to the level of fraud legally speaking, but morally it's very sketchy. I don't want to associate myself with that and I don't trust them. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1076160979388518407 https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/https://twitter.c... Tom Scott on his experience. He makes a good point on potential GDPR compliance issues as well.
- trident5000 4y agoTheres people out there that actually dont use Ublock?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y agoDitch the ads, all of them, and make the Twitter a pay-per-tweet service for all users. You can buy bundles for increased savings. This will reduce crap spam content because it will cost too much. Even regular users will tweet fewer bla posts. Win-win!
- gunapologist99 4y ago.. every tweet is an ad. brilliant!
- freeplay 4y agoI think you just figured out the single fastest way to kill the platform completely.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y agoImpossible. Bridges charge per use and people still use bridges! Twitter is like a bridge, but instead of connecting roads it connects people. Also, there are pay-per-use toilets, and twitter is like... well you get it.
- skrause 4y ago> Bridges charge per use and people still use bridges! Even if there is a free bridge right next to it?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y agoOf course! Because that other bridge is free only in a monetary sense but the twitter bridge will be free in a speech sense. Can't say racist/homophobic/anti-Semitic/misogynistic/hateful things on that on that other bridge? Do the moderators on that other bridge frown when you try and spread false stories about recently attacked politicians? Well on twitter bridge, you pay the fee and say all this and more! There is so much hate and craziness out there right now. People intensely wanting to say hateful and crazy things to other people. Why not monetize it? Billions to made! Billions!
- localhost 4y agoOne thing that I might have paid for is individual access to their API so that I can write my own client. It would proactively show me things that I care about and would filter out the things that I don't care about. I'd be happy with restrictions, e.g., for my use only etc. It might be an interesting open source project as well- build a model that can be trained to your tastes that runs on hardware that you control.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoI was planning to write a client like this with their relaunched API service recently but will not now
- throwaway27727 4y agoWhy?
- wahnfrieden 4y agoStrong aversion to longtermerist bs and concern for growing hostility toward many of my users (trans, lgtbq, etc). I don’t want to moderate UGC myself directly and have even less trust now in hate content being moderated by using their platform for extending my customer community
- TheRealDunkirk 4y agoJust bring back RSS feeds for accounts.
- LordDragonfang 4y agoNah, that would increase open access to information, which was never actually Musk's goal.
- i67vw3 4y agoTry this https://voonze.com/how-to-follow-twitter-accounts-by-rss-with-nitter/ https://voonze.com/how-to-follow-twitter-accounts-by-rss-wit... Musk twitter RSS feed https://nitter.pussthecat.org/elonmusk/ https://nitter.pussthecat.org/elonmusk/ I follow twitter posts in my RSS reader via this way
- nashashmi 4y agoReminds me of how AT&T bought Time Warner and how Verizon Bought Yahoo/AOL. They overpaid for those services and tried to recoup their money in some way and some how. It ended up lowering the value of the brands, and definitely turned away the customers. Leave twitter now. Let the dust settle 1 year later. and join then. Otherwise, you will be riding the same roller coaster.
- kurttt 4y ago
- tanepiper 4y agoBuy 50 likes for $2.99 Buy 25 Retweets for $1.50,
- tempodox 4y ago> Twitter says eliminating ad-free news should allow it to focus its “resources on adding additional value for our members.” This twisted perversion of meaning is prime newspeak. George Orwell would be proud.
- kschrader 4y agoMaybe it's just me, but other than ad-free articles what value does Blue bring to the table? (Just an edit button?) Anyone here paying for it and feel like they're getting their money worth?
- joenathanone 4y agoThis just in, you need an $8/mo sub to get the blue checkmark and: > - Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam > - Ability to post long video & audio > - Half as many ads > - And paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us >https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587500060853424129 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587500060853424129 So if you pay, your tweets will get more visibility, and if you are poor, well I guess what you have to say just doesn't matter as much...
- giantrobot 4y agoWhat a town square!
- 93po 4y agoMy problem with twitter is any big name person tweeting has absolutely garbage replies. It's half random memes and images and half vitriol that is completely missing the point or completely unrelated to the specific tweet
- whiplash451 4y agoSame. Twitter does a decent job at sorting the replies, though.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoThis is the biggest area of improvement I'm hoping for. After opting in to block unverified accounts, that kind of trolling and spamming should be reduced by a huge amount.
- kornhole 4y agoRSS + Ublock Origin is all you need for that.
- berry_sortoro 4y ago