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Revue will shut down and all data will be deleted
- danrl 4y ago[flagged]
- johnhenry 4y agoI wonder if they'd still be around if they weren't acquired?
- aliqot 4y agoVine
- deely3 4y agoSeriously, Musk fired all people?
- benatkin 4y ago[flagged]
- INeedMoreRam 4y ago[dead]
- kuboble 4y ago" it is your responsibility to adhere to any (...) regulations in connection with your subscriber list (...)and Twitter, Inc. has not obtained permission for you to use subscriber information for any purpose. " What does that mean exactly? > "Twitter hasn't obtained permission for you"?
- Centigonal 4y agoIt's poorly worded, but I think they're saying, "this link will let you download your list of subscribers. We're giving this to you with no warranties, don't use it to spam people or otherwise break the law." Honestly, I don't think that's a particularly strong legal defense, but IANAL. I do appreciate the revue team for letting users port their subscribers to other services. This is basic decency, but with Twitter banning links to other social media, I don't know what to expect from them anymore.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- maxfurman 4y agoWhat was Revue? I'd never heard of it before today.
- Centigonal 4y agoSubstack competitor acquired by twitter
- coldpie 4y agoWhat is Substack?
- jillesvangurp 4y agoIt's a blogging platform. A bit like medium.
- bombcar 4y agoWhat is Medium?
- dylan604 4y agoNot big and not small...medium.
- adventured 4y agoA blogging platform a bit like Geocities.
- xd1936 4y agoBut for some reason, Musk would be open to buying Substack[1] (even though it's not for sale[2]). 1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1607936197602562050 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1607936197602562050 2. https://twitter.com/hamishmckenzie/status/1323116718810693633 https://twitter.com/hamishmckenzie/status/132311671881069363... Just invest in the Substack competitor that your company _already has_...
- was_a_dev 4y agoMusk doesn't want to develop a competitor. He wants to aquire the existing userbase Shutting down Revue moves more users to Substack
- jameshart 4y agoSo you do it after you've purchased substack, not before.
- hennell 4y agoElon doing something stupid without thinking it through? What an unexpected unprecedented situation. /s
- marcusverus 4y agoThat's a stupid hypothetical, alright!
- rchaud 4y agoHis interest in Substack is more likely centred around controlling the public conversation in a more direct way than on Twitter. On Twitter, Musk gets dunked on daily, as do his $8/month boosters, all of whom are at the top of the replies (hence creating a larger dunk attack vector). Substack is more 'buttoned-down', everybody there is trying to be a "thought leader", so it already skews more "rich guys know better", even without considering all the conservative op-ed writers that have paid gigs there.
- 4y ago
- xrd 4y agoApparently this happened almost a month ago?
- j45 4y agoInteresting. Could the technical part of its user base crowdfund to acquire it?
- WJW 4y agoJust curious, why would it be the technical part of the userbase that raises money to acquire it? After all "raising money to buy a company" is typically more of an MBA activity than something done by the dev team.
- j45 4y agoWhy not? Do you mean intentionally mean to be that linear with that line of thinking? Keeping the platform running might be more of a tech endeavour than a business management skill. Who knows, maybe tech people can learn business easier than business people can learn tech. Still, some argue MBAs rarely have business experience. Others say they usually predict the next 5 years beard in the direction of the past 5.
- WJW 4y agoI meant it more as "why specifically a group of technical users" rather than just any group of users?
- comice 4y ago> "In the meantime, you will be able to download your subscriber list" ... > "Twitter, Inc. has not obtained permission for you to use subscriber information for any purpose." Twitter thinks it has permission to provide account owners with their subscriber lists but explicitly says that those same account owners have no permissions of their own for the data. I do not think this is how how most countries' data privacy laws work. This is a very murky situation and Twitter seem to be writing it all off with a wink and a nod.
- privacylawthrow 4y agoIt's very much how most privacy laws work. According to Revue's platform privacy policy[0], Revue processes subscriber emails as a data processor. Each newsletter publisher owns the email addresses of their respective audiences. Revue would have a legal obligation to make those email addresses available to the newsletter publishers until the shutdown date. [0]: https://www.getrevue.co/privacy/platform?locale=en https://www.getrevue.co/privacy/platform?locale=en
- comice 4y agoTheir privacy policy very strongly suggests that they are the data processor only when the account owner (Publisher) provides the email address, which they call indirect subscription. Direct subscribers are users who subscribed themselves via the Revue service. and the privacy policy says nothing about providing direct subscribers' private data to the Publisher. Their closure announcement does not distinguish between the types of subscriber. So either the Publisher is only getting the indirect subscribers' info (and isn't being told they are losing the direct subscribers) or the Publisher is getting direct subscriber info which the direct subscriber never agreed to allowing (unless that is a separate agreement from the privacy policy, in which case presumably some permission was indeed obtained).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 4y ago> explicitly says that those same account owners have no permissions of their own for the data "Twitter has not obtained permission for you" is not the same as "you have no permissions" You have whatever permissions you brought to the table, and nothing else.
- rchaud 4y agoThis has been known for weeks, I'm surprised that it only seems to be appearing on HN now.
- forgotpwd16 4y agoApparently someone submitted it few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33985798 Just never got any upvotes.
- trynewideas 4y agoDiscussion from Twitter's acquisition in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25914865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25914865
- netman21 4y ago"Excellent acquisition. Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack" did not age well.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoI tried launching an ad campaign on Twitter on their self-serve ads platform. On the very first screen, I'm asked to select my country and time zone. Except the time zone selector only has +1 hour increments. You can choose UTC+5 or UTC+6, but you can't choose UTC+5:30 (which is my time zone). So I had to choose UTC+5. This multibillion dollar corporation was running a multibillion ad platform where customers couldn't even choose their correct time zone. No wonder they couldn't make any money, even during the pandemic.
- jefftk 4y agoThis isn't even that weird an edge case: ~1.5B people are in UTC+5:30.
- Raed667 4y ago[flagged]
- nemothekid 4y agoTheir previous CEO was one of the 1.5B
- mattl 4y agoWho?
- philip1209 4y agoI'm finishing a Revue data importer for Postcard. If you want to move over your posts + subscribers, there's a form to submit them for import: https://postcard.page/alternative/revue https://postcard.page/alternative/revue
- stewx 4y agoBring back Nuzzel. https://twitter.com/nuzzel https://twitter.com/nuzzel
- dangoor 4y agoNuzzel kinda sorta exists as "Top Articles" which is a feature of the Blue subscription.
- jfmontesdeoca 4y agoWe have a homage to our beloved Nuzzel at Newslit Social (https://www.newslit.co/social https://www.newslit.co/social) that you might like. I was one of the Engineers at Nuzzel ;)
- hobo_mark 4y agoSounds like a good time to ask: alternatives to Substack that people actually use?
- burkaman 4y agoI subscribe to some writers that have switched from Substack to Ghost (https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/). It's open source, seems like a good company from what I know, and the experience as a subscriber is basically the same as Substack.
- cheriot 4y agoSurprising they couldn't make this work. It seems like every substack author promotes their work on twitter. Maybe it's just hard to avoid tossing a few babies out with the bath water when reducing headcount by 75%.
- uuddlrlrbaba 4y ago[flagged]
- BoorishBears 4y agoIt's an idiom that dates back to the 1500s that means accidentally getting rid of the good part of a subject while trying to get rid of the bad part. Not exactly corporate or jargon.
- adrian17 4y agoIt's also present (as in, a direct translation) as a casual phrase in other languages, like Polish.
- ianvisits 4y agoAs a saying it's been around for over 500 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_throw_the_baby_out_with_the_bathwater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_throw_the_baby_out_wit...
- Rebelgecko 4y agoI tried to double click into this but I think there's an impedance mismatch. When you have the bandwidth, can you ping me back with some extra color on how this phrase fits in with synergistic corporate jargon?
- uuddlrlrbaba 4y agoLet's put a pin in that, it's bigger than a breadbox and we'll have to circle back when there is more bandwidth. It's bizarre to me that my original comment was downvoted/flagged. Guess it triggered the tech managers on HN
- mattkevan 4y agoProbably fired everyone who worked there without realising. ‘Oh crap, there’s no-one left. Quick, write something and stick it on the homepage.’ It’s telling that the sign in with twitter functionality was broken for a few days after the initial announcement. Was seriously worried I wouldn’t be able to download my subscriber list and content.
- vincefutr23 4y agoA good product / VC strategy would be to double down on anything Twitter shuts down about 18 months after Open APIs > short form mobile video > creator owned long form text?
- gregdoesit 4y agoSome insider details as someone who knew some of the Revue team - based mostly in the Netherlands. The majority of the team was cut in the first wave of Twitter layoffs on 4 November (wrote about this [1]) - when 50% of people were let go. By this time, most of them were working on Twitter's long form tweets, which feature was being tested with customers. So this decision was indirectly made on the first week of the Twitter takeover. In the end, it was perhaps two people left from the old Revue team. Today, there's only the founder of Revue, who wrote this article, everyone else let go AFAIK. What was very, very surprising to me is how, a month and a half later, Elon Musk replied to a question on how he's open to the idea of acquiring Substack [2]. But he just shut down Revue, which was exactly "Twitter's Substack" version with all the same features: newsletters, support for paid, plus first-class integration into Twitter that Substack does not have. [1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/cruel-changes-at-twitter https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/cruel-changes-at-twitter [2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1607936197602562050 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1607936197602562050
- agentdrtran 4y ago[flagged]
- dvt 4y agoShort-sighted decision? Revue was basically DOA and Twitter did zero customer development since its acquisition. Shutting down Revue is probably the best decision he's made so far.
- ssharp 4y ago> But he just shut down Revue, which was exactly "Twitter's Substack" version Google Video was "Google's YouTube" but Google still decided YouTube was worth acquiring.
- throwaway14356 4y agostrangled by python
- holler 4y agoMaybe superficial but it seemed "tacked on" in terms of UI/UX. I don't think most people go to Twitter to read newsletters, and the way it was implemented just felt weird.
- paxys 4y agoIt's pretty clear that the service was a failure. The company was formed in 2015, two years before Substack. They were acquired by Twitter in Jan 2021. Two years later they pretty much have nothing to show for it, while Substack has become the dominant blogging/newsletter platform.
- rchaud 4y agoIs Substack a success? A piddling $9m revenue after a $650m valuation? > According to the Times, Substack separately told investors that it saw revenue of just $9 million last year. (It told the Times directly in a story last month that it has hundreds of thousands of paid newsletters now on the platform.) https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/26/report-substack-the-highly-hyped-newsletter-platform-has-ditched-plans-for-a-series-c https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/26/report-substack-the-highly...
- Giorgi 4y agoLooks like they discovered that nobody pays for subscriptions.
- edwnj 4y ago[dead]
- feklest 4y agoDoes anyone know if the Internet Archive is on the case? A lot of profile and newsletter links of the form "https://www.getrevue.co/profile/ https://www.getrevue.co/profile/..." are going to be dead very soon.
- mattl 4y agoCheck Jason Scott’s Twitter account. I’m sure it’s being worked on.
- swyx 4y agoalright I'm in need of a move. I tried Convertkit in the past and it was expensive + the editor was extremely slow/buggy and constantly ate my typing. what's the Revue alternative?
- xena 4y agoThis is a shame. I archived all my Revue posts to my blog: https://xeiaso.net/blog/site-update-revue-backups https://xeiaso.net/blog/site-update-revue-backups Next time I try to run a newsletter it will be something I self-host.
- ddri 4y agoPutting aside product strategy and Howard Hughes for a minute, it's worth paying respect to the Revue team. A little group of good humans in the Netherlands, creating a slick and well designed product in an otherwise competitive space. It's a testament to a lot of good work and the kind of energy that makes this industry such a joy at times. It's also one of endless examples of the downsides of acquisition for users (if not the founder/team with equity, who know the game they're playing). I often think of the analogy of rich kids from dysfunctional families who buy a lot of cool stuff and don't really do much with it after their social signal moment. Been on both side of this to some degree in the industry and it's never fun to see the users let down at the end of it. While this is part of what keeps the industry going, it would be nice to see more open source outcomes for such well designed products. But to end on a positive... well done team, hope you all go on to make awesome things again.
- clementmas 4y agoSeems like very short notice to delete all the data.
- onlyali 4y agoElon gone wild
- onlyali 4y agoElon gone wild. I'd think this has much more value continuing than not...