Even if you paid for it, they'd still have the economic incentive to extract money by selling your data and such.
I would prefer to pay for Twitter
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: I would prefer to pay for Twitter
#12I would pay for Twitter as well. Though it would be a huge backlash, I think it would clean things up quite a bit. I was one of the people who sprung for app.net. It was a crazy idea, and it's unfortunate it didn't take off. In the time App.net was buzzing with activity I did notice a significant lack of spam and fake profiles. It was nice, but it seems now most have abandoned it.
You do understand that the paid aspect of app.net guaranteed that it would fail? Usage is oxygen, fees are suffocation.
Re: I would prefer to pay for Twitter
#13You would pay for Twitter, but you would not outbid the advertisers, who unlike you are willing to subsidize the people who won't pay for Twitter. Which is just a complicated way of saying that if Twitter charged for access, it would charge substantially more than you'd expect them to.
Re: I would prefer to pay for Twitter
#14>(By the way, if significant portions of your userbase are capable of becoming addicted to your product, consider that it may not be fully ethical to produce it.) Well, there goes the gaming industry.
Exactly.
Would this also apply to products like Uber? I use it all the time, and can't imagine life without it. Am I addicted to it? Is it an unethical company because people love to use it and it provides value to their lives?
Re: I would prefer to pay for Twitter
#15You don't need to pay to ensure the existence of a microblogging system. pump.io or GNU Social will continue to be around whether or not anyone pays for them.
the problem with social networks isn't so much the quality or usability of the platform, but whether or not relevant people use them.
bingo.
Re: I would prefer to pay for Twitter
#16>(By the way, if significant portions of your userbase are capable of becoming addicted to your product, consider that it may not be fully ethical to produce it.) Well, there goes the gaming industry.
Exactly. Would this also apply to products like Uber? I use it all the time, and can't imagine life without it. Am I addicted to it? Is it an unethical company because people love to use it and it provides value to their lives?
It's only unethical if a) Uber has a monopoly and b) they charge a surplus (i.e. price-fixing) due to said monopoly.
Uber doesn't have a monopoly in ride-sharing, and Twitter doesn't have a monopoly in microblogging.
Re: I would prefer to pay for Twitter
#17Excuse my slight condescending tone, but I don't think he really understands what twitter is for, and who benefits from its service. The model explained, which was tried by app.net, doesn't coincide with the real idea behind twitter in the first place.
A neighbor once said to me, we should pay to use the sidewalks in our city; I don't think she understood the ramifications of such a move, but it made sense in her mind because she /could/ pay for the sidewalk and the model worked for her. -yet she didn't understand that the sidewalk wasn't even necessarily meant for her. The same sides she paces, kids use to travel to school everyday, homeless persons use to panhandle, families use to travel to work everyday, and every once in a while some lune is up there with a sign expressing their view.
Twitter is no different. Sure we use twitter to post about our latest projects and greatest food pictures, however somewhere someone is using twitter to alert his friends that government and police are encroaching the neighborhood, quick alerting those near about a wildfire, or trying to start
Just because you could pay for want, doesn't mean someone else has the means to pay for necessity. I don't mind sharing a common good/service even though I know someone else might not be paying the same amount as I.
Re: I would prefer to pay for Twitter
#18You would pay for Twitter, but you would not outbid the advertisers, who unlike you are willing to subsidize the people who won't pay for Twitter. Which is just a complicated way of saying that if Twitter charged for access, it would charge substantially more than you'd expect them to.
tptacek is right. It's even worse, if you consider two-tiered pricing (ad supported, and paid), since advertisers want the expensive types who would pay for access, so they would pay less for the ad supported user group than you would think.
Re: I would prefer to pay for Twitter
#19Even if you paid for it, they'd still have the economic incentive to extract money by selling your data and such.
[deleted]
Re: I would prefer to pay for Twitter
#20Isn't there a paid Twitter clone that nobody uses that allows you to do exactly that, pay for it?