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This would be a good incentive for paying $8 for Twitter Blue: you are allowed to use third party apps. It's the first mildly convincing reason to pay for Twitt

This would be a good incentive for paying $8 for Twitter Blue: you are allowed to use third party apps. It's the first mildly convincing reason to pay for Twitter that I've seen yet. Even better: access to use third party apps is a second tier that costs $10, and give $1 to the app maker. All the incentives are nicely lined up: the user won't choose to pay more if it's not worth it so the alternative app is guaranteed to offer some added value, the app maker gets paid for their efforts and is inclined to closely follow Twitter's increased rate of feature development so at least they don't fall behind and ideally innovate, Twitter gets value in not just a bit of extra money but also platform interaction experimentation which they can mine for good ideas to integrate back into the official client, they're inclined to make the API good, etc. I don't know how most people would take to this idea, but I like solutions where the incentives are all aligned. Am I missing something?

tptacek 4y ago
Isn't this one of the oldest discussions on Hacker News? Generally, I thought the reason you can't pay to use an arbitrary third party client on a locked-down service is that the most lucrative clients will disproportionately take advantage of that offer, which makes it hard to evolve the platform, and harder in the immediacy to monetize. I've only learned in the last few days how many ads Twitter has. I've never seen any of them, because I've never used the Twitter website, just Tweetbot. Also: after abruptly pulling the plug without explanation, I'm also pretty unlikely to shell out a dollar for it in the future. Certainly: Tapbots has no reason to invest in the platform anymore. The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  >The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter. I'm having a hard time seeing ActivityPub reach any kind of mass adaptation.
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    It doesn't have to. You don't need millions to be a good forum. You need the right 100s.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    My Twitter TL is a ghost town, my Mastodon TL is... what my Twitter TL was 6 months ago, except better because ActivityPub does long posts.
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      I think I have about 200 tweets on my Twitter timeline per one Mastodon toot. And the usability of Mastodon is so confusing that it's hard to see people moving. And brands have even less of a chance of moving, so I'm probably not going to get BBC Breaking News or the official Steam Deck account there anytime soon.
      - L3viathan 4y ago
        >brands have even less of a chance of moving Good >I'm probably not going to get BBC Breaking https://mastodon.cloud/@BBCBreaking_bot https://mastodon.cloud/@BBCBreaking_bot Not official, but why does it matter?
        Hamuko 4y ago
        >Not official, but why does it matter? Given that it hasn't posted since 2021, I'd say that it matters. There's obviously the issue of trust when it comes to unofficial sources masquerading as official.
        drcongo 4y ago
        Not much has happened since 2021 really.
      - hnbad 4y ago
        I think that 200 tweets per toot metric may be accurate tho in my case it's closer to 20 (tools like Movetodon can help get you started). The difference for me is that those 200 tweets are mostly about the same drama and the replies to every one of them are always full of trolls and genuinely shitty opinions havers (e.g. sports fan bunch of numbers insisting that the police should just shoot protestors) and somehow this stays the same even if I spend ten minutes every now and then just blocking those reply guys. You can shout "echo chamber" all you want but the lower overall population and stricter crackdowns on trolls and defederation of dodgy instances certainly leads to less noise and more respectful interactions. I'll take one 1000 character reply I disagree with over 200 low-effort trolls and parroted culture war slogans. Turns out the "public town square" is a much more pleasant space when it's not full of a billion people and their sock puppets shouting slurs at each other all day.
  - whateveracct 4y ago
    It doesn't have to. You don't need millions to be a good forum worth reading. You need the right 100s.
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      If the argument is that it's "the future", you kinda do.
      - hnbad 4y ago
        You can have millions across the fediverse. You don't need to see all those millions on any given instance. Fediblocks are good actually and while some complain about "discoverability", the filter bubble[0] actually disincentivizes the kind of attention-seeking disruption that "engagement driven" platforms like Twitter have ended up optimizing for. [0]: I'm using the term somewhat sarcastically as the filter is just about whom you follow, not about which views you agree with. If you follow a diverse enough crowd you'll still be exposed to views you may disagree with simply because you follow persons, not topics.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  > The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter. Tapbots are also building a Mastodon client called Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/ https://tapbots.com/ivory/
  - herrherrmann 4y ago
    Matteo Villa, maker of the Fenix Twitter client, is also working on a Mastodon client now (Woolly): https://twitter.com/mttvll/status/1614888366033539072 https://twitter.com/mttvll/status/1614888366033539072 It’s good to see that many (if not most) of these affected developers are already working on premium Mastodon clients.
Uehreka 4y ago
*could’ve been This option is not open to them anymore, they’ve burned too much credibility. I’m not paying Twitter a red cent.
0ct4via 4y ago
It really wouldn't -- the Twitter Blue thing is BS to begin with: the checkmark is meaningless, and you shouldn't need to pay to have your tweets appear more prominently / higher in timelines. Twitter already nerfed the API in 2018, and devs of third-party apps have to pay for the current API, so it's not like Twitter isn't making money from that... they're likely making more for charging much-more-popular third-party apps for API access, than they're getting for ads on their own (mediocre) app -- never mind the fact that Twitter for iOS and macOS were just rebranded versions of Tweetie post-acquisition (circa 2010)... The new "pay to be verified" scheme is absolute nonsense, and makes the new checkmarks absolutely meaningless... and paying to have your tweets be more prominent makes two classes of user and tweet, effectively fracturing your user base. In November, there were an estimated ~100,000 Twitter Blue subscribers[1] -- meanwhile, more than a million Twitter users[2] were driven to Mastodon, and a number have shuttered or mothballed their Twitter accounts -- especially in the tech scene. That's not good for business, and it certainly doesn't "incentivise" staying on Twitter, much less paying to do so. [1] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-blue-elon-musk-subscriber-numbers https://mashable.com/article/twitter-blue-elon-musk-subscrib... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/jan/08/elon-musk-drove-more-than-a-million-people-to-mastodon-but-many-arent-sticking-around https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/jan/08/elon-m...
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > and you shouldn't need to pay to have your tweets appear more prominently / higher in timelines. And more to the point, you shouldn’t be allowed to, because as a mechanic for social networks it just doesn’t work. No-one wants their timeline to be full of stuff from people who are paying for attention; these people are generally not good enough to get attention without paying for it.
Terretta 4y ago
$11 btw, not $8, if your sub is via Apple app store https://insiderpaper.com/twitter-to-increase-blue-subscription-price-from-9th-feb-users/ https://insiderpaper.com/twitter-to-increase-blue-subscripti...

tptacek 4y ago

Isn't this one of the oldest discussions on Hacker News? Generally, I thought the reason you can't pay to use an arbitrary third party client on a locked-down service is that the most lucrative clients will disproportionately take advantage of that offer, which makes it hard to evolve the platform, and harder in the immediacy to monetize. I've only learned in the last few days how many ads Twitter has. I've never seen any of them, because I've never used the Twitter website, just Tweetbot. Also: after abruptly pulling the plug without explanation, I'm also pretty unlikely to shell out a dollar for it in the future. Certainly: Tapbots has no reason to invest in the platform anymore. The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter.

Hamuko 4y ago
>The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter. I'm having a hard time seeing ActivityPub reach any kind of mass adaptation.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  It doesn't have to. You don't need millions to be a good forum. You need the right 100s.
- tptacek 4y ago
  My Twitter TL is a ghost town, my Mastodon TL is... what my Twitter TL was 6 months ago, except better because ActivityPub does long posts.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    I think I have about 200 tweets on my Twitter timeline per one Mastodon toot. And the usability of Mastodon is so confusing that it's hard to see people moving. And brands have even less of a chance of moving, so I'm probably not going to get BBC Breaking News or the official Steam Deck account there anytime soon.
    - L3viathan 4y ago
      >brands have even less of a chance of moving Good >I'm probably not going to get BBC Breaking https://mastodon.cloud/@BBCBreaking_bot https://mastodon.cloud/@BBCBreaking_bot Not official, but why does it matter?
      - Hamuko 4y ago
        >Not official, but why does it matter? Given that it hasn't posted since 2021, I'd say that it matters. There's obviously the issue of trust when it comes to unofficial sources masquerading as official.
        drcongo 4y ago
        Not much has happened since 2021 really.
    - hnbad 4y ago
      I think that 200 tweets per toot metric may be accurate tho in my case it's closer to 20 (tools like Movetodon can help get you started). The difference for me is that those 200 tweets are mostly about the same drama and the replies to every one of them are always full of trolls and genuinely shitty opinions havers (e.g. sports fan bunch of numbers insisting that the police should just shoot protestors) and somehow this stays the same even if I spend ten minutes every now and then just blocking those reply guys. You can shout "echo chamber" all you want but the lower overall population and stricter crackdowns on trolls and defederation of dodgy instances certainly leads to less noise and more respectful interactions. I'll take one 1000 character reply I disagree with over 200 low-effort trolls and parroted culture war slogans. Turns out the "public town square" is a much more pleasant space when it's not full of a billion people and their sock puppets shouting slurs at each other all day.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  It doesn't have to. You don't need millions to be a good forum worth reading. You need the right 100s.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    If the argument is that it's "the future", you kinda do.
    - hnbad 4y ago
      You can have millions across the fediverse. You don't need to see all those millions on any given instance. Fediblocks are good actually and while some complain about "discoverability", the filter bubble[0] actually disincentivizes the kind of attention-seeking disruption that "engagement driven" platforms like Twitter have ended up optimizing for. [0]: I'm using the term somewhat sarcastically as the filter is just about whom you follow, not about which views you agree with. If you follow a diverse enough crowd you'll still be exposed to views you may disagree with simply because you follow persons, not topics.
solarkraft 4y ago
> The future is ActivityPub, not Twitter. Tapbots are also building a Mastodon client called Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/ https://tapbots.com/ivory/
- herrherrmann 4y ago
  Matteo Villa, maker of the Fenix Twitter client, is also working on a Mastodon client now (Woolly): https://twitter.com/mttvll/status/1614888366033539072 https://twitter.com/mttvll/status/1614888366033539072 It’s good to see that many (if not most) of these affected developers are already working on premium Mastodon clients.

Uehreka 4y ago

*could’ve been This option is not open to them anymore, they’ve burned too much credibility. I’m not paying Twitter a red cent.

0ct4via 4y ago

It really wouldn't -- the Twitter Blue thing is BS to begin with: the checkmark is meaningless, and you shouldn't need to pay to have your tweets appear more prominently / higher in timelines. Twitter already nerfed the API in 2018, and devs of third-party apps have to pay for the current API, so it's not like Twitter isn't making money from that... they're likely making more for charging much-more-popular third-party apps for API access, than they're getting for ads on their own (mediocre) app -- never mind the fact that Twitter for iOS and macOS were just rebranded versions of Tweetie post-acquisition (circa 2010)... The new "pay to be verified" scheme is absolute nonsense, and makes the new checkmarks absolutely meaningless... and paying to have your tweets be more prominent makes two classes of user and tweet, effectively fracturing your user base. In November, there were an estimated ~100,000 Twitter Blue subscribers[1] -- meanwhile, more than a million Twitter users[2] were driven to Mastodon, and a number have shuttered or mothballed their Twitter accounts -- especially in the tech scene. That's not good for business, and it certainly doesn't "incentivise" staying on Twitter, much less paying to do so. [1] https://mashable.com/article/twitter-blue-elon-musk-subscriber-numbers https://mashable.com/article/twitter-blue-elon-musk-subscrib... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/jan/08/elon-musk-drove-more-than-a-million-people-to-mastodon-but-many-arent-sticking-around https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2023/jan/08/elon-m...

rsynnott 4y ago
> and you shouldn't need to pay to have your tweets appear more prominently / higher in timelines. And more to the point, you shouldn’t be allowed to, because as a mechanic for social networks it just doesn’t work. No-one wants their timeline to be full of stuff from people who are paying for attention; these people are generally not good enough to get attention without paying for it.

Terretta 4y ago

$11 btw, not $8, if your sub is via Apple app store https://insiderpaper.com/twitter-to-increase-blue-subscription-price-from-9th-feb-users/ https://insiderpaper.com/twitter-to-increase-blue-subscripti...