6 ms·

Social media is changing, and paid accounts are the response

47 points by lxm 4y ago

freitzkriesler2 4y ago
You'd have to be a really...curious person to waste money on something like this. Then again, I don't play freemium games either so I'm clearly not the type of person who would pay for this.
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  The people who pay for this are the people who use these platforms for their jobs. And even then, only the big ones. I think the last stats I saw on twitter blue was like 0.2% of account holders. Nearly a rounding error.
  - undersuit 4y ago
    How many accounts are active? I'm going to go on Twitter right now while writing this comment and find you a Blue user with less than 100 followers too. https://twitter.com/RaX369 https://twitter.com/RaX369
    - spywaregorilla 4y ago
      That looks like a bot account if you ask me. It does not post, and replies only to news articles and elon musk. Plus a comment about Israel Palestine.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        Not to mention it has 60K likes and a fake link.
      - undersuit 4y ago
        I guess I tried. Unsubstantiated claims will win again because there's no number of profiles I could link to prove nickthegreek wrong.
        spywaregorilla 4y ago
        To prove nickthegreek wrong you would need to show a number meaningfully higher than 0.2% of accounts.
        undersuit 4y ago
        No to prove nickthegreek wrong I'd have to have a list of Twitter Blue users that are not using their subscription to benefit their jobs that is longer than the list of Twitter Blue users that are. But how would I know that? How would I know which people are benefiting? How do we know they are breaking even? It's not worth it; I'm giving up.
        nickthegreek 4y ago
        https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+blue+0.2 https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+blue+0.2
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        undersuit 4y ago
        I cannot read the source material without a subscription: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-has-just-180-000-u-s-subscribers-two-months-after-launch https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-has-ju... Can anyone verify the claim?
stehtisch123 4y ago
Interesting how everyone was calling musk a madman for paid twitter accounts and suddenly its a trend. I think it makes sense too, but sure as hell I am not going to be part of it this time around
- barbazoo 4y ago
  Obviously not everyone called him a madman. Personally I found it weird to tie SMS 2FA to paid accounts.
- themitigating 4y ago
  But this hasn't happened, it's the opinion of this person who wrote the article. That doesn't vindicate Musk
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  When 20% of account holders pay for access, wake me up. It's not a trend until people actually spend money.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    I doubt 20% of twitter account holders actively use twitter.
    - geraldcombs 4y ago
      Are 20% of Twitter account holders flesh and blood?
- nemothekid 4y ago
  >Interesting how everyone was calling musk a madman for paid twitter accounts and suddenly its a trend. I think you are taking a very interesting spin on the situation and leaving out many factors; notable blowing up advertising revenue to the tune of several hundred million dollars per year in exchange for a program that is now pulling ~30M/year.
wolpoli 4y ago
The article talks about charging the content creators. I wonder if there is also a market for charging the content consumers where they get Chronological feed or the ability to use custom clients.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > where they get Chronological feed Are you suggesting they paywall the chronological feed that's been free for 16 years? > or the ability to use custom clients It's too late. Twitter killed the custom clients, and the client developers have (angrily) abandoned them. That bridge has been burned entirely. The devs would never be dumb enough to trust Twitter again.
  - kornhole 4y ago
    I think we are talking about a chronological unadulterated feed of only those people we follow. An API key could be sold for this to be used in desired client. Or you could just the fediverse where this is standard.
  - wolpoli 4y ago
    > Are you suggesting they paywall the chronological feed that's been free for 16 years? Yes. It's not very nice, but there is nothing that'll prevent them from doing this. > It's too late. Twitter killed the custom clients, and the client developers have (angrily) abandoned them. That bridge has been burned entirely. The devs would never be dumb enough to trust Twitter again. That's true. But some might come back, for example, if Twitter takes some of the Twitter Blue revenue and, say, give 20 cents per month for each Twitter Blue users that sign in through a list of sanctioned app. Yes, Twitter would have been in a better position if they didn't burn the bridge.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      > there is nothing that'll prevent them from doing this Except user exodus > if Twitter takes some of the Twitter Blue revenue and, say, give 20 cents per month for each Twitter Blue users that sign in through a list of sanctioned app "Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads" "To be eligible, the account must be a subscriber to Twitter Blue Verified" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1621544497388875777 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1621544497388875777 This was announced a month ago but never actually happened. In effect, a lie. Twitter can't be trusted. https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23623927/twitter-blue-ad-revenue-one-month-missing https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23623927/twitter-blue-ad-r...
foreverobama 4y ago
[dead]
tehlike 4y ago
Creators are often businesses, and drive direct revenue from the platform. That's why it makes more sense to charge them first than to charge consumer.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  I prefer content from creators putting their stuff out their because it is their passion vs the creators trying to run their accounts like businesses. Platforms are welcome to select for the latter (and some do), but I'll take my eyeballs elsewhere. People who create for the joy of creating are the golden goose content that makes platforms fascinating. Malls full of ads just aren't fun. For vast majority of users, sponsored content is something they'd prefer to not consume. For-profit speech is an ugly vacuum of actual culture. Twitter sorting replies on threads to show people who paid first has already started training me to avoid looking at replies anymore. Capturing value on-platform can be the right move, but its constantly risking UX.
kornhole 4y ago
"end of free social media" Corporate and government controlled social media has been quite expensive for a long time. Stuff you do not want is forced into your feed. Your every action is tracked and recorded to be distilled into other products. Your views are censored if they do not align with those controlling it. You are locked in without any interoperable exit. The most free social media is in the fediverse. You can run your own instance for $5-$10 a month and share it with others.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rchaud 4y ago
  These apps today have as much to do with "social media" as Uber and Lyft have to do with "ride-sharing". It was social when you saw what your friends were posting. Nowadays the only people posting are those that see Facebook/Twitter as an income stream.
djha-skin 4y ago
> The reactions all missed the underlying shift behind the move: Social media feeds, once filled with content from ordinary users, are now programmed primarily by professional creators. These creators need identity verification, customer service, and visibility boosting. And they’re willing to pay. Meta is simply filling the need. Ugh, this is the worst thing about social media in my opinion these days. It's why I really, really like RSS feeds of blog posts: 1. Everything is still chronological 2. If someone went to the trouble to post to their blog, they'll put more thought into it than if they were just cussing out their most hated politician on twitter 3. The blogging space is still relatively independent of the content mill. I do miss my feedly account though, simply because it makes it easier to find these feeds so they don't go stale.
vmoore 4y ago
Why should I pay for the privilege of having my data being sold, even as a paid user? Twitter is known to be in cahoots with Acxiom[0] a very shady data broker. And as for Facebook, they have a goldmine from turning people's data into ADs. Why should I give them one cent? Verification can be done without asking for money. [0] https://www.acxiom.com/news/acxiom-expands-its-global-data-partnership-with-twitter/ https://www.acxiom.com/news/acxiom-expands-its-global-data-p...
- passwordoops 4y ago
  Bingo. We pay for all kinds of products that collect and sell our data, namely TVs, cars, Anything-as-a-Service... This would just be seen as an additional revenue stream
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
> Social media feeds, once filled with content from ordinary users, are now programmed primarily by professional creators. Honestly, I'm pretty grateful, because it means I finally won't miss anything when I delete my Facebook account. For a long time I wanted to get rid of Facebook because I found it toxic, but I worried about keeping up with old friends and missing out on some of their important life announcements. These days, though, I so rarely see content from my friends anyway that I'd barely miss it. My FB feed these days is the equivalent of a soda or glazed donut - tons of sugar but no real nutrients. Which I think is kind of sad, because I do think there is still a useful "just your friends" social media app, but basically they've all gotten on the TikTok-ification of just generating more addictive crap that it's unbearable. My favorite is that tons of Reels creators have realized "dwell time" is an important metric, so I'm inundated with tons of "Just wait for it!" or "You won't believe it when you see it!" videos that are like 20 minutes long where nothing happens, but creators set things up with a "where's waldo" tagline to keep you waiting until the end. Of course, you see one or two of those videos and now I basically never open Reels again.
- Swizec 4y ago
  That's what I like about HN – it may not be friends posting, but at least it's people. No such thing as a professional HN commenter ... at least not that I've noticed.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > No such thing as a professional HN commenter https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
- danudey 4y ago
  I haven't used Facebook the way it was meant to be used for maybe a decade; I actually had to create a new Facebook account when my wife and I moved in together because whenever we arranged a large gathering at our house we did it as a Facebook event and I couldn't invite people otherwise. That said, I scrolled through Facebook a while ago, and it reminded me of flipping aimlessly through channels in the days of cable TV; there wasn't any content there that I would have gone out of my way to look for, but there was a lot that was just interesting enough to stop on for a second. It felt so gross that I haven't opened Facebook since, except to look through Marketplace. Twitter-wise, moving to Mastodon was a great filter for people. 99% of the people I follow or who follow me didn't make the jump (as far as I can tell), and so the result is a small feed of people who are sufficiently aware of what's going on as to figure out how mastodon works, which seems to be a good signal for 'people worth hearing from'. Likewise the posts that they boost into my feed are also much more relevant than tweets on Twitter tended to be.
armchairhacker 4y ago
Professionals? I thought this was going to be about paid accounts in order to prevent bots and spam. Especially with the rise of LLMs and it seems like every day the botnets are getting larger and smarter. I would like to pay a few bucks a month for the opposite of this: a social media where being a professional content creator gets you banned or at least restricted from visibility, in order to encourage new people and original content. There would also be identity verification, and the few dollars (besides supporting the side and allowing it to not run ads) would prevent people from finding ways to DoS or circumvent this unless they spend huge amounts of money. The site could also distribute some of this money back to "viral" content in an effort to further reward originality and reduce sponsorships. And while the pay would be proportionally better than YouTube and other platforms, nobody is getting rich or making their full income (and you still get flagged for promoting stuff), so it wouldn't defeat the purpose. Just something to encourage people to make content and help kickstart the new platform.
- dublinben 4y ago
  Many people share this desire, which is why real "social networks" have moved to invite-only groups on chat services like Discord, Whatsapp, Slack etc. It turns out they're actually a better way to keep up with the real people you know, without any annoying ads or influencers crowding out the organic content.
nitwit005 4y ago
No, they absolutely want normal users to pay. They're just struggling to find features people will pay for. Long before Musk did his blue checkmark nonsense, YouTube was trying to get people to sign up for YouTube Premium.
brutusurp 4y ago
One hilarious/dystopian component is that we are paying a company to gather, verify, and sell our data. Shouldn't this be the other way around? IMO, yes...

47 points by lxm 4y ago

You'd have to be a really...curious person to waste money on something like this. Then again, I don't play freemium games either so I'm clearly not the type of person who would pay for this.

nickthegreek 4y ago
The people who pay for this are the people who use these platforms for their jobs. And even then, only the big ones. I think the last stats I saw on twitter blue was like 0.2% of account holders. Nearly a rounding error.
- undersuit 4y ago
  How many accounts are active? I'm going to go on Twitter right now while writing this comment and find you a Blue user with less than 100 followers too. https://twitter.com/RaX369 https://twitter.com/RaX369
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    That looks like a bot account if you ask me. It does not post, and replies only to news articles and elon musk. Plus a comment about Israel Palestine.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      Not to mention it has 60K likes and a fake link.
    - undersuit 4y ago
      I guess I tried. Unsubstantiated claims will win again because there's no number of profiles I could link to prove nickthegreek wrong.
      - spywaregorilla 4y ago
        To prove nickthegreek wrong you would need to show a number meaningfully higher than 0.2% of accounts.
        undersuit 4y ago
        No to prove nickthegreek wrong I'd have to have a list of Twitter Blue users that are not using their subscription to benefit their jobs that is longer than the list of Twitter Blue users that are. But how would I know that? How would I know which people are benefiting? How do we know they are breaking even? It's not worth it; I'm giving up.
      - nickthegreek 4y ago
        https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+blue+0.2 https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+blue+0.2
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        undersuit 4y ago
        I cannot read the source material without a subscription: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-has-just-180-000-u-s-subscribers-two-months-after-launch https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musks-twitter-has-ju... Can anyone verify the claim?

stehtisch123 4y ago

Interesting how everyone was calling musk a madman for paid twitter accounts and suddenly its a trend. I think it makes sense too, but sure as hell I am not going to be part of it this time around

barbazoo 4y ago
Obviously not everyone called him a madman. Personally I found it weird to tie SMS 2FA to paid accounts.
themitigating 4y ago
But this hasn't happened, it's the opinion of this person who wrote the article. That doesn't vindicate Musk
nickthegreek 4y ago
When 20% of account holders pay for access, wake me up. It's not a trend until people actually spend money.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I doubt 20% of twitter account holders actively use twitter.
  - geraldcombs 4y ago
    Are 20% of Twitter account holders flesh and blood?
nemothekid 4y ago
>Interesting how everyone was calling musk a madman for paid twitter accounts and suddenly its a trend. I think you are taking a very interesting spin on the situation and leaving out many factors; notable blowing up advertising revenue to the tune of several hundred million dollars per year in exchange for a program that is now pulling ~30M/year.

wolpoli 4y ago

The article talks about charging the content creators. I wonder if there is also a market for charging the content consumers where they get Chronological feed or the ability to use custom clients.

lapcat 4y ago
> where they get Chronological feed Are you suggesting they paywall the chronological feed that's been free for 16 years? > or the ability to use custom clients It's too late. Twitter killed the custom clients, and the client developers have (angrily) abandoned them. That bridge has been burned entirely. The devs would never be dumb enough to trust Twitter again.
- kornhole 4y ago
  I think we are talking about a chronological unadulterated feed of only those people we follow. An API key could be sold for this to be used in desired client. Or you could just the fediverse where this is standard.
- wolpoli 4y ago
  > Are you suggesting they paywall the chronological feed that's been free for 16 years? Yes. It's not very nice, but there is nothing that'll prevent them from doing this. > It's too late. Twitter killed the custom clients, and the client developers have (angrily) abandoned them. That bridge has been burned entirely. The devs would never be dumb enough to trust Twitter again. That's true. But some might come back, for example, if Twitter takes some of the Twitter Blue revenue and, say, give 20 cents per month for each Twitter Blue users that sign in through a list of sanctioned app. Yes, Twitter would have been in a better position if they didn't burn the bridge.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > there is nothing that'll prevent them from doing this Except user exodus > if Twitter takes some of the Twitter Blue revenue and, say, give 20 cents per month for each Twitter Blue users that sign in through a list of sanctioned app "Starting today, Twitter will share ad revenue with creators for ads that appear in their reply threads" "To be eligible, the account must be a subscriber to Twitter Blue Verified" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1621544497388875777 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1621544497388875777 This was announced a month ago but never actually happened. In effect, a lie. Twitter can't be trusted. https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23623927/twitter-blue-ad-revenue-one-month-missing https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23623927/twitter-blue-ad-r...

foreverobama 4y ago

[dead]

tehlike 4y ago

Creators are often businesses, and drive direct revenue from the platform. That's why it makes more sense to charge them first than to charge consumer.

cwkoss 4y ago
I prefer content from creators putting their stuff out their because it is their passion vs the creators trying to run their accounts like businesses. Platforms are welcome to select for the latter (and some do), but I'll take my eyeballs elsewhere. People who create for the joy of creating are the golden goose content that makes platforms fascinating. Malls full of ads just aren't fun. For vast majority of users, sponsored content is something they'd prefer to not consume. For-profit speech is an ugly vacuum of actual culture. Twitter sorting replies on threads to show people who paid first has already started training me to avoid looking at replies anymore. Capturing value on-platform can be the right move, but its constantly risking UX.

kornhole 4y ago

"end of free social media" Corporate and government controlled social media has been quite expensive for a long time. Stuff you do not want is forced into your feed. Your every action is tracked and recorded to be distilled into other products. Your views are censored if they do not align with those controlling it. You are locked in without any interoperable exit. The most free social media is in the fediverse. You can run your own instance for $5-$10 a month and share it with others.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rchaud 4y ago
These apps today have as much to do with "social media" as Uber and Lyft have to do with "ride-sharing". It was social when you saw what your friends were posting. Nowadays the only people posting are those that see Facebook/Twitter as an income stream.

djha-skin 4y ago

> The reactions all missed the underlying shift behind the move: Social media feeds, once filled with content from ordinary users, are now programmed primarily by professional creators. These creators need identity verification, customer service, and visibility boosting. And they’re willing to pay. Meta is simply filling the need. Ugh, this is the worst thing about social media in my opinion these days. It's why I really, really like RSS feeds of blog posts: 1. Everything is still chronological 2. If someone went to the trouble to post to their blog, they'll put more thought into it than if they were just cussing out their most hated politician on twitter 3. The blogging space is still relatively independent of the content mill. I do miss my feedly account though, simply because it makes it easier to find these feeds so they don't go stale.

vmoore 4y ago

Why should I pay for the privilege of having my data being sold, even as a paid user? Twitter is known to be in cahoots with Acxiom[0] a very shady data broker. And as for Facebook, they have a goldmine from turning people's data into ADs. Why should I give them one cent? Verification can be done without asking for money. [0] https://www.acxiom.com/news/acxiom-expands-its-global-data-partnership-with-twitter/ https://www.acxiom.com/news/acxiom-expands-its-global-data-p...

passwordoops 4y ago
Bingo. We pay for all kinds of products that collect and sell our data, namely TVs, cars, Anything-as-a-Service... This would just be seen as an additional revenue stream

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

> Social media feeds, once filled with content from ordinary users, are now programmed primarily by professional creators. Honestly, I'm pretty grateful, because it means I finally won't miss anything when I delete my Facebook account. For a long time I wanted to get rid of Facebook because I found it toxic, but I worried about keeping up with old friends and missing out on some of their important life announcements. These days, though, I so rarely see content from my friends anyway that I'd barely miss it. My FB feed these days is the equivalent of a soda or glazed donut - tons of sugar but no real nutrients. Which I think is kind of sad, because I do think there is still a useful "just your friends" social media app, but basically they've all gotten on the TikTok-ification of just generating more addictive crap that it's unbearable. My favorite is that tons of Reels creators have realized "dwell time" is an important metric, so I'm inundated with tons of "Just wait for it!" or "You won't believe it when you see it!" videos that are like 20 minutes long where nothing happens, but creators set things up with a "where's waldo" tagline to keep you waiting until the end. Of course, you see one or two of those videos and now I basically never open Reels again.

Swizec 4y ago
That's what I like about HN – it may not be friends posting, but at least it's people. No such thing as a professional HN commenter ... at least not that I've noticed.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > No such thing as a professional HN commenter https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
danudey 4y ago
I haven't used Facebook the way it was meant to be used for maybe a decade; I actually had to create a new Facebook account when my wife and I moved in together because whenever we arranged a large gathering at our house we did it as a Facebook event and I couldn't invite people otherwise. That said, I scrolled through Facebook a while ago, and it reminded me of flipping aimlessly through channels in the days of cable TV; there wasn't any content there that I would have gone out of my way to look for, but there was a lot that was just interesting enough to stop on for a second. It felt so gross that I haven't opened Facebook since, except to look through Marketplace. Twitter-wise, moving to Mastodon was a great filter for people. 99% of the people I follow or who follow me didn't make the jump (as far as I can tell), and so the result is a small feed of people who are sufficiently aware of what's going on as to figure out how mastodon works, which seems to be a good signal for 'people worth hearing from'. Likewise the posts that they boost into my feed are also much more relevant than tweets on Twitter tended to be.

armchairhacker 4y ago

Professionals? I thought this was going to be about paid accounts in order to prevent bots and spam. Especially with the rise of LLMs and it seems like every day the botnets are getting larger and smarter. I would like to pay a few bucks a month for the opposite of this: a social media where being a professional content creator gets you banned or at least restricted from visibility, in order to encourage new people and original content. There would also be identity verification, and the few dollars (besides supporting the side and allowing it to not run ads) would prevent people from finding ways to DoS or circumvent this unless they spend huge amounts of money. The site could also distribute some of this money back to "viral" content in an effort to further reward originality and reduce sponsorships. And while the pay would be proportionally better than YouTube and other platforms, nobody is getting rich or making their full income (and you still get flagged for promoting stuff), so it wouldn't defeat the purpose. Just something to encourage people to make content and help kickstart the new platform.

dublinben 4y ago
Many people share this desire, which is why real "social networks" have moved to invite-only groups on chat services like Discord, Whatsapp, Slack etc. It turns out they're actually a better way to keep up with the real people you know, without any annoying ads or influencers crowding out the organic content.

nitwit005 4y ago

No, they absolutely want normal users to pay. They're just struggling to find features people will pay for. Long before Musk did his blue checkmark nonsense, YouTube was trying to get people to sign up for YouTube Premium.

brutusurp 4y ago

One hilarious/dystopian component is that we are paying a company to gather, verify, and sell our data. Shouldn't this be the other way around? IMO, yes...