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Twitter acquires Revue

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Re: Twitter acquires Revue

#231

Post by throwawayboise »

reidjs wrote: post #163
Nacdor wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%. Twitter's willingness to silence users for political reasons will ensure this service never competes with Substack in any meaningful way. I don't doubt that it will be popular, but you won't see top-tier independent journalists building their houses on a Twitter's land after what we learned in the past year.

I assume you're mainly referring to Trump. Inciting a coup is technically a political reason, but I think most people agree that's a valid reason to silence someone.

It's been established that Twitter will ban people because of their views. Now we're just debating where their lines are.

Re: Twitter acquires Revue

#232

Post by csomar »

siruva07 wrote: post #7

Excellent acquisition. Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%. I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service. Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. No political ads to worry about. No interference with the product experience. And believe it or not, if I u…

> And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year.

The problem is that they are making the bulk of their money from the top tier of their users (which is a really tiny percentage); and the rest is not monetize-able. If your are making $80-100 from your top guys (who will probably, gladly, pay $5/month subscription), you still come short. And the mass that makes you $0/year is not going to pay at any price, anyway. They are just there to keep the higher value audience.

Re: Twitter acquires Revue

#233

Post by ballenf »

siruva07 wrote: post #11
user-the-name wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An edit button does not make sense for a service like Twitter. There are way to many ways to abuse it, and any solution that tries to deal with those just ends up being equivalent to what already exists: Delete and repost.

Why does an edit button not make sense for a service like Twitter? How would it be abused? Deleting and reposting hurts and would eliminate engagement statistics. From a product experience, edited tweets, similar to Slack, could show an "(edited)" that when clicked on let's a user see the version history. That way, it can't be abused, but does allow for minor typos (e.g. https://twitter.com/sir/status/135373794972946…

Editing tweets to me is not just a feature, it's a fundamental shift to the nature of the platform. Even bigger than doubling tweet size did.

Twitter is defined by tweets not being polished Facebook or LinkedIn posts. Except for people who don't use it that way, but they feel artificial to me. I'd rather all of Twitter not drift that direction.

And personally, I love that I can't worry about fixing typos. If they're bad enough I delete. If not, move on, stay humble and pay more attention next time.

Re: Twitter acquires Revue

#234

Post by mshroyer »

gnicholas wrote: post #228
prestigious wrote: post #96

You would have to be a complete idiot to try and build your revenue on something owned by Twitter. They will shut you down at any time, for any reason, with no recourse.

With Revue and Substack, do the authors have access to subscriber email addresses? If so, that would somewhat blunt concerns like this, both directly (if you are booted off the platform) and indirectly (presumably the platforms would be less aggressive in their rules/enforcement if it is easy for authors to leave).

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/logistics

> I'm saving the Substack mailing list regularly to my hard drive, and if I go somewhere else I'll let you all know.

So this is possible on Substack at least.

Some Substacks also use a custom domain name, which would make migration off the platform even easier.

Re: Twitter acquires Revue

#235

Post by stonecraftwolf »

csomar wrote: post #232
siruva07 wrote: post #7

Excellent acquisition. Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%. I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service. Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. No political ads to worry about. No interference with the product experience. And believe it or not, if I u…

> And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year. The problem is that they are making the bulk of their money from the top tier of their users (which is a really tiny percentage); and the rest is not monetize-able. If your are making $80-100 from your top guys (who will probably, gladly, pay $5/month subscription), you still…

Obligatory, but this really seems to confuse the point: their revenue doesn’t come from their users at all. It comes from selling their users to advertisers.

Re: Twitter acquires Revue

#236

Post by strogonoff »

FalconSensei wrote: post #230
strogonoff wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that there’s a slight problem with saying “social networks shouldn’t become paid because some users will leave”. This line of reasoning implicitly treats those products as some sort of public good. I imagine it’s beneficial to their owners—but is it to the users? There’s a conflict of interest here. Networks want to be free. Huge account numbers and de-facto public good statu…

> I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that there’s a slight problem with saying “social networks shouldn’t become paid because some users will leave”. Facebook was successful because 'everyone' was on Facebook. It was the one place that I would go and find almost everyone I knew, and if I posted something there, all of them would have access to it. Similarly, I've tried migrating from Twitter to Mastodon. But n…

> Facebook was successful because 'everyone' was on Facebook.

I am not convinced that Facebook became successful because it was open to everyone. Arguably, FB owes its success precisely to its exclusive status in the early days, and to rising prevalence of affordable devices in the world. It’s difficult to know whether it was successful because it became open, or it happened independently. However, I agree that social networks played a significant role in recent past. (I think that could be fading away, though.)

> Similarly, I've tried migrating from Twitter to Mastodon. But no one I know uses it, so why bother?

> I would pay for Facebook/Twitter, but on the condition that other people are also paying. As soon as people start leaving, there's no much point.

I don’t think it’s worth treating FB/Twitter/Mastodon as some sort of window to the whole of humanity. There are interesting people who do not engage or have no presence on Twitter or Facebook.

Competition is tough when the biggest players radically undercut on price by being free thanks to investor and ad money, riding on network effects of the past. However, users are waking up that by engaging on a free ad-supported service they become the product. The way it’s going, more and more people are using ad-supported free platforms to self-promote, campaign, spread different kinds of evangelism, and/or link to profiles to elsewhere online where higher level of engagement is possible. Where they link to is where new social networks have an opportunity.

---

I think plurality of social networks and a single network for everyone both have their problems.

A plurality of networks presents a challenge in that it’s difficult for one person to engage on many disparate platforms (consumes time and effort), but this can be addressed: for example, with paid networks that don’t need to show ads and can thus offer complete APIs, we just might see fully featured multi-network GUI clients bridging them together.

Having a single network where everyone participates, on the other hand, seems unrealistic—even in a single country. This, I think, can not be addressed at all (except by having a government maintain its own censored avenue for discussion, which is only really compatible with a very authoritarian regime).

Re: Twitter acquires Revue

#239

Post by siruva07 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #179
nefitty wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a particularly low-tier way to troll on Reddit. It doesn’t seem like the problem is drastic there, or even here on HN. I think the problem does stem from a retweet having a vibe of “I endorse this message.”, regardless of what the retweeter has written in their bio.

> I think the problem does stem from a retweet having a vibe of “I endorse this message.”, regardless of what the retweeter has written in their bio. At the very least, a retweet always means "I want more people to see this message".

Since Twitter has effectively moved the default away from chronological order, what is really the purpose of a retweet? An upvote is naturally a positive interaction for “suggested tweets my followers should see”

Re: Twitter acquires Revue

#240

Post by saagarjha »

nefitty wrote: post #152
bachmeier wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because rather than retweeting "I hate the KKK" you just retweeted "I support the KKK".

This is a particularly low-tier way to troll on Reddit. It doesn’t seem like the problem is drastic there, or even here on HN. I think the problem does stem from a retweet having a vibe of “I endorse this message.”, regardless of what the retweeter has written in their bio.

I see it occasionally on both platforms, but not very much. Usually it gets caught very quickly.
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