[siruva07]

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 understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year.

Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product — our data not for sale — and the companies would make more money! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail).

It's almost a running joke, up there with Daft Punk playing at the trash fence, that Twitter just won't release an edit button. With a move towards paying subscribers, maybe Twitter will listen to its real customers -- content writers -- rather than advertisers.

[rightbyte]

I am a bit cynical about that Spyware-aaS companies like FB would stop spying just becouse you paid them. I mean I bought a Samsung TV for 1000USD and still it tries to show adds and spy. The temptation to increase margins is high no matter what.

I am not that up to date with Twitter. Are they in the same class as FB and Google?

[RankingMember]

> The temptation to increase margins is high no matter what.

yep, I remember when cable tv was ad-free (because who would've dreamt people would be ok with paying a subscription fee while still getting ads shoved down their throat?)

[DavidPeiffer]

I knew someone who was an early adopter of satellite TV. She said during the news, rather than ads, you saw the hosts smoking and chatting.

That sounds so much more pleasant than what we have today.

When cable had no ads, did all programs just run continously? If a channel did a special where they played standard TV programs designed for over the air broadcast (18-23 minutes/episode), did they just play them consecutively or have some other filler to keep on a 30 or 60 minute schedule?

[sharperguy]

In the UK, the BBC channels are still ad-free. Shows like The IT Crowd or Star Trek just play through continuously without ads.

Between shows, they have a short ad break advertising other BBC shows and live broadcasts that will be playing at a later time, but nothing paid.

[ascagnel_]

Premium linear channels in the US (think HBO) do this as well. It's an artifact of programming blocks -- you want your movie/show/sport/etc. to start on the hour or half-hour, but the thing before it rarely will end when you want it to (a few seconds of slack time to switch to the next item). If you have some small-enough unit of time left between the end of the movie and the start of the next slot, you either commission a bunch of micro-length shorts or you run internal promos to fill the gap.

[dan-robertson]

I wouldn’t really call the intermission an ad break as they’re not really trying to sell you something. The main purpose is as a buffer between shows with slightly different timings or with live shows that won’t finish at an exact time (or may overrun like sports matches). You get the same on the radio too though they often have a short news briefing in the gap as well. Very occasionally they will have too large a gap to fill and read a poem.

[larrik]

IT Crowd isn't BBC, though...

[organsnyder]

I think their point is that shows that were produced with ads in mind simply play through with no gaps (similar to how ad-free streaming services play them).

How do they schedule the shows to account for the odd lengths?

[jlelse]

Same in Germany with the public TV channels like ARD, ZDF, etc.

[ISL]

With satellite TV in the 90s, some channels simply blacked out or showed a placeholder in the ad slots -- sometimes the satellite channels were the very feeds that the TV stations were using.

Premium channels would fill the gaps between shows with advertisements for upcoming shows on the same channel or affiliated channels. Coming from broadcast TV, networks like HBO were kind of incredible; no ads, just the thing you went there to watch.

By then, however, the non-premium channels definitely carried ads.

[nomdep]

At least in my country, in the week just after christmas, in several children cable channels, the ads dissapear. Instead the run "ads" for other shows in the channel.

I guess that how TV without ads would look like.

[smileybarry]

In Israel, cable/satellite company-owned channels only ads shown for other shows or channels. That's not because they're nice, but because they're legally barred from showing "real" ads (only commercial, free OTA channels can do that; gov-owned public access only shows ads for their own shows, same reason). Plus those ads are just between programs and never in the middle of one. They still get very repetitive, though.

[larrik]

In the USA, the Disney Channel is mostly like this year round.

[devlopr]

tcm is like this.

[deckard1]

> She said during the news, rather than ads, you saw the hosts smoking and chatting.

Sounds like she was viewing the direct feed or something. There is a documentary called "Spin" which was recorded footage of the downtime between ads. You can see, for example, George H.W. Bush chatting up Larry King. There is footage of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and others. The people being recorded don't seem to realize that the satellite feed continues during a break or downtime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(1995_film)

[deckard1]

In addition to cable going to ads, it deserves mention that many shows today feature brand advertising right in the program.

I pay for Netflix, but go watch a Korean drama and they are clearly advertising Subway, KFC, Samsung, etc. right there in the show through the show itself.

Movies do this too, and you paid for that expensive ticket. Wayne's World even did a parody of this in 1992:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjB6r-HDDI0

Advertising is incredibly pervasive in our modern society and only going to increase.

[TimPC]

cable tv always had ads because the cable subscription goes to an infrastructure provider not the content provider. If the infrastructure provider was the content provider there is a substantial incentive to reduce or eliminate ads a la Netflix and Amazon Prime which largely restrict ads to brief promotions of other content on the network.

[julianlam]

I don't believe this is correct. Certain cable television channels were originally ad free (e.g. USA, Nickelodeon) because they competed against free OTA broadcasts which were ad supported.

Similarly to pay per view.

That those channels now show commercials (and has for a long enough time that people think "it was always like this") just cements our expectations that commercials are a fact of life.

[organsnyder]

Those infrastructure providers pay a ton of money to the content providers. I've heard that ESPN is the single largest cost of most cable plans.

[macspoofing]

>I am a bit cynical about that Spyware-aaS companies like FB would stop spying just becouse you paid them.

So am I. The problem is that the paying members are also the same members that are most valuable to advertisers (because they have disposable cash and are probably 'power users' of the platform), so there is an incentive to 'sell them' to advertisers as well.

[TimPC]

If we get enough global privacy laws with sufficient teeth, it may be possible for paid models to offer a low risk alternative to spying where you would be constantly at risk of fines for poor decisions on how you implement your data collection. It would be quite a change in the way the internet works financially, but it seems like companies would be likely to adapt to it were it to happen.

[disgruntledphd2]

The trouble with paid social media is that the value is in the network, and becomes much less attractive if lots (maybe 90% of users) don't pay, and hence are removed from the service.

You could do freemium, but you'd make a lot less money (FB would anyway, maybe this would work for Twitter) without reducing your support costs.

So yeah, I'm not sure this would work in the current setup (even global privacy laws with teeth will move from individual level ads to cohort level ads). The trouble is not that subscription services are worse, it's that ads are super profitable if you're a really big service.

[boogies]

> companies [don’t] stop spying just becouse you paid them

I think Windows (10 especially) is Exhibit A here (its “users” are definitely the product, but MS is happy to take their free money — or not, you can download it for $0 from their site, and cheap activation keys are easy to find), and the world’s first trillion dollar company is Exhibit B — its end-users are customers in many senses of the word, and they’re not the product, but a product that they offer to their walled garden’s developers with strings attached.

[leppr]

A derivative take on this is that getting people used to paying for internet services, would enable more respectful platforms that need the subscription revenue, to exist.

I also would never pay for participation in a monolithic user-generated content platform with questionable "curation" (e.g. Youtube Premium), but directly paying for hosting/moderation/admin work is still the way forward IMO.

[rozab]

Correct. I don't understand why people suggest direct revenue streams would help in this regard. Have you seen Facebook's profit margins? They don't need to spy on people.

[throwawayboise]

I think you're right, but if people had to pay even a few dollars a month for Facebook and Twitter I think it would make a big dent in amount of nonstop drivel and shitposting that goes on. And that's another reason it won't happen, it would reduce eyeballs for the ads.

[simias]

Indeed, and especially if they already have the tracking tech anyway. Why bother turning it off?

I wish that paying for Spotify meant that my privacy would be respected, but I have zero illusions that they basically gather at least as much data as free customers.

[user-the-name]

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.

[siruva07]

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/1353737949729468416)

[bachmeier]

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

[Spivak]

I mean it's not an insurmountable problem though. As long as likes and RTs are tied to a specific version of a Tweet and you can see the edits and associated likes it's fine.

[kristiandupont]

Even setting aside the UX issues in this, I think this is underestimating the complexity. I don't know anything about Twitters infrastructure but obviously we are not talking about a single postgres instance here. Effectively turning every tweet into a linked list with connected retweets, likes etc. is a significant data model change for a system of this scale.

[reidjs]

For now let's just add a "*" to the original post to give all the retweeters deniability. I'd bet 99% of edits are for grammar/spelling/readability.

[user-the-name]

That just makes it even more confusing. So you edit your tweet, but all the people who retweeted are still showing the wrong version and you can't do anything about it.

It kind of makes the situation worse than it is now.

[davidivadavid]

It's not the "wrong" version. It's the original version, as per when they quoted it. There's really no other way it could work.

When you quote someone, you repeat what they said, not what they might repeat some time in the future. When you quote a book, you write down what's written in the book. Not what the author writes in the next edition.

You may in time edit/remove/amend your tweet to comment on further changes.

[nefitty]

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.

[JoshTriplett]

> 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".

[siruva07]

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”

[saagarjha]

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

[davidivadavid]

So keep the original message when you retweet. That doesn't seem like an insurmountable amount of conceptual complexity.

[user-the-name]

That just makes the feature weird and broken.

[davidivadavid]

How?

[willj]

I think the lack of an edit button is helpful on a couple fronts:

- it makes authors think more before posting; if there are typos, or it isn’t exactly what they want to say, and it gains traction, they can’t fix it, so they work to make it right the first time

- Most people ignore edit histories [citation needed; based on my own experience and knowledge of others’]. As a result, if the post is edited, the conversation can get fragmented and confusing for later readers

That said, I’d love it if there were a way to see deleted tweets, at least of politicians

[nefitty]

The deleted tweet view is obviously not a part of Twitter yet, but here’s a service from ProPublica for this specific use case: https://www.politwoops.com/countries

[ballenf]

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.

[thomasahle]

> Deleting and reposting hurts and would eliminate engagement statistics.

Maybe there should be a maximum number of characters edited. If I have liked/retweeted a tweet, and its author then completely rewrites it,I would want my "engagement" eliminated.

[RL_Quine]

Am considering taking Tesla private at $9420. Funding secured.

Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.

Am considering taking Tesla private at $42. Funding secured.

[conradfr]

Also why not make editing available for n minutes? Perfect for typos.

[thomasahle]

That's probably an even better approach, though famous people may have a lot of engagements during that time.

Maybe just make editing work like deletion/repost: Remove all likes a retweets. Then after n minutes it becomes an unattractive thing to do.

[user-the-name]

Because if you immediately notice it, delete and repost works just as well.

[mnx]

no way to prevent just adding a 'not' while still allowing sensible editing.

[user-the-name]

Because you can completely change the content of a post after it gets traction.

[notafraudster]

While I agree with the general replies to the parent comment, it seems like the magnitude of this problem is relatively small given the staffing Twitter has who could solve it. Even the general problem of "Can we tell if an edit changes the connotation of a sentence?" seems like it is solveable at Twitter's scale.

[siruva07]

A time or engagement based restriction would prevent this, i.e. having 3-5 minutes to edit the tweet, at which point the edit button is locked. Revision history would still show. "Undo Send" a la Gmail, but for tweets.

[user-the-name]

But if the tweet has only been live for a few minutes, you might as well delete and repost.

[ajanuary]

"Revision history would still show"

Except in a distributed system like Twitter (including client and server) there is no single timeline, and amateur digital forensics will erroneously say "aha, but you retweeted it before it was edited"

[Spivak]

As long as RTs and likes are tied to a specific version of the Tweet then it's no real problem.

[corobo]

> and any solution that tries to deal with those just ends up being equivalent to what already exists: Delete and repost.

I'd love this honestly. Even if it was just a delete and repost under the hood, generally I find I want an edit button just after posting and noticing all the typos.

As long as the interface interacted like an edit form rather than have me copy and then rebuild the tweet I'd be good to go.

[thebean11]

It would be bad UX. Users would expect it to edit (keeping likes, retweets, replies, timestamp etc) but it would actually delete and repost which is a very different thing on Twitter.

[corobo]

That would by why I included my use case. Limit it to the first 2 minutes or whatever.

Users would get used to it within days either way.

[user-the-name]

Mastodon has a "Delete and repost", which deletes the post, and copies the contents to the posting field so you can edit and repost.

[corobo]

Twitter has users, can't beat that feature. I'll use Mastodon when it's worth the server admin haha

[user-the-name]

Bit angry, are we.

[corobo]

Angry at what?

[skinkestek]

Mastodon has this :-)

[notahacker]

> Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product — our data not for sale — and the companies would make more money! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail).

So my inbox is the product? I think the number of people willing to pay $36 per annum to not see sponsored content in amongst all the organic marketing spam in newsfeeds is a negligible proportion of the user base, especially since ad blockers can be configured to hide it anyway.

[sneak]

> I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service.

I don't. Centralization of censorship ability in a small number of platforms is a bad thing for everyone. Twitter and Instagram or any other centralized censor becoming a "better service" makes our whole society worse.

It's time to leave Twitter and never look back. Only assholes tell other adults what they're allowed to see or read.

I tolerated Twitter deciding what I was allowed to write for a dozen years. When they started censoring search and dictating what I was allowed to read, I deleted my account.

Sharecropping on someone else's platform is a dead end.

[Nacdor]

> 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.

[Jugurtha]

I think this opinion is popular because Substack is still a baby that hasn't had to deal grown-up situations. We're always pure and grandstanding when we're young and we don't have to make hard decisions, for we're not in hard situations that require them in the first place.

It's easier for a service to say "We'll always stand by our users" when they have like two users, and none of are heads of states, controversial personalities with huge audiences, diplomats, operatives, etc.

Let's wait and see what Substack's position will become when it becomes a service that matters.

[reidjs]

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.

[Nacdor]

No, I'm mainly referring to the NY Post which was pre-emptively banned before Twitter had fact-checked their story. Even after it was proven that the story was true, Twitter refused to unlock their account. It took weeks of immense public pressure and even then the NY Post might've still been forced to delete the "offending" tweets just to satisfy Twitter and get their account back.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1354077568555692034

No sane journalist would rely on Twitter for income after that.

[NicoJuicy]

> Even after it was proven that the story was true

Where did you get that that story was true? It was mostly fake but with some elements of truth in it. The story itselve didn't even seem credible was my POV.

Source?

[Nacdor]

The email authenticity was verified via DKIM signature.

I'm not going to break it down point-by-point because you're just shifting the goalposts now. Twitter and FB let plenty of fake and exaggerated stories run wild when they say something negative about Trump. For example, the fake stories about Trump telling people to "Drink/inject bleach", the fake stories about him calling COVID a "hoax", and the fake stories about him calling Nazis "very fine people".

All of those were debunked -- even by left-leaning fact-checkers -- yet none of them were removed or penalized on the social media platforms.

[NicoJuicy]

If you have a whole text and sometime can't debunk a certain paragraph, that doesn't mean the story is true.

> Many can't be validated. They are sent from domains that don't use DKIM to sign outgoing emails.

> There are other timestamps in the email headers/metadata, but they aren't validated by DKIM, and hence, could be forged.

> I personally have many doubts about where this email came from, and the overall "narrative" they are trying to push. Regardless, I can validate the basic facts about this email.

Like I said: it contains elements of truth. Someone send a guy one email to verify that one explicitly...

[dakna]

Words matter, especially when you are the so called leader of the free world. It is not the responsibility of the media to make sure every interpretation of meaning and context is as close as possible to the intention (which is unknown anyway) to shield a public representative from himself.

Or as Steve Jobs put it: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering."

A good spin has at least one verifiable element and the rest is vague enough to not be accountable, but still gets the message out.

[throwawayboise]

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

[TimPC]

Twitter has done far more than silence Trump. The NY Post article they shut down before the election turned out to be more true than false. It wasn't an attempt to incite a coup, it was an attempt to report some inconvenient facts about the son of a man who is now president and corruption. I'm glad Biden is president as I think it was a needed change that will be good for the US and the world but I still found this shut down of information deeply troubling.

[motoboi]

If they charge 5 to 15 reais per month 80% of Brazil’s users will exit Twitter and Facebook for the free competitor the same day. I suppose the same would happen anywhere the exchange rate is unfavorable.

A price for FB in Brazil? R$ 1 ($0,2). And the free option would still get a huge market share.

[Tenoke]

For what is worth, those users also earn them much lees revenue, so the cost can be lower, too.

[mrisoli]

It's a matter of perception, especially in poorer countries like Brazil, why would anyone pay money for something that was previously free?

Good example of this is WhatsApp, IIRC it was free for a year then charged $1 for lifetime access, people still scrambled to get around the app(download illegal APKs, or recreate accounts).

[FalconSensei]

Exactly. There are 2 problems with requiring payments in Brazil:

1 - Most people will not want to pay. They will spend a whole day/weekend trying to find a free alternative, even if it costs just a couple bucks.

2 - Many, many people don't have credit cards. You would need to support boleto or debit. Generating and managing boletos adds cost, so you would need to increase your fees not to lose money

[strogonoff]

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 status positively influence network valuations and allow them to charge more for ads; armies of troll and no-value accounts greatly inflate the numbers; the loser turns out to be legitimate users. If we are sure they remain afloat if we pay them, why should we worry about product’s popularity more than our own treatment?

They are not central parks or public squares. They don’t have the obligation of being free. They are free to discriminate subscription prices between countries, which many companies do today (Apple Music is 5 times cheaper in India than in the US[0]).

And if geographical price discrimination is not enough, if I’m poor I have the freedom to use another social network that charges less or nothing; when I (hopefully) grow my income and get fed up with myself being a product of X I can choose to invest into a more expensive tier of social networking and move my social presence[1] to Y—what’s wrong with that?

I suspect that normalizing paid options could make social networking more heterogenous, encourage competition, and likely benefit the society in the long run.

[0] https://www.cashnetusa.com/blog/which-countries-pay-most-and...

[1] If https://datatransferproject.dev pans out, I could perhaps even take my posts with me.

[FalconSensei]

> 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 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.

[hderms]

Presumably none of these big players want to charge money for a pro service because it would be difficult to walk back on w.r.t ad revenue. The ad purchasers would probably take issue with it, especially given that they're explicitly valuing their user base at presumably less than they're charging for advertising access to them.

Not to say it couldn't work, but I'm guessing the reason it hasn't been tried is at least partially do to there being no going back

[boogies]

> Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product

You’re not the product in the Fediverse, where Pleroma says you can run a small server for ~$4/month (https://pleroma.social/blog/2021/01/13/the-big-pleroma-and-f...). Or you can join someone else’s instance and donate eg. to GNU Social’s lead developer on Liberapay (https://liberapay.com/diogo/donate) or Mastodon on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/mastodon, $1/month gives you access ironically to a Discord channel).

[nunez]

I am absolutely not convinced that Facebook and their like would make more money as a paid service. People are okay with giving up (or not knowing that they are giving up) privacy to use products like social media. Unlike television (where there aren’t any free alternatives), Facebook would lose market share overnight if a somewhat-competent but free competitor sprang up.

I am also not convinced that people would pay to just get rid of ads, especially when there are free and easy alternatives available.

I _am_ convinced that a company like Facebook will try to launch a paid content service with their own exclusives since that seems to be the thing that big content providers are doing.

[throwawaysea]

I am very fearful of where that goes. Twitter and Facebook delete lots of conversations that offend their progressive political sensibilities. Even if people paid for these services, they would still be operating within those biased chambers as a result. I would rather have someone independent like Substack win this space instead of seeing these companies take it all just because of their financial warchests and the power of network effects making them immune to competition.

[Applejinx]

Funnily enough, just last week I deleted both Facebook and Twitter, even though they 'cost me nothing'.

[csomar]

> 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.

[stonecraftwolf]

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.

[jtsiskin]

Facebook makes $30-40 ARPU in the US+Canada.

https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3...

[siruva07]

Got it. Looks like I pulled my figure on a quarterly basis which syncs with this annualized math.

FB is on the high end of ARPU. Most other services are cents to low dollars.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/facebook-towers-over-rivals-...

[krrrh]

It’s important to factor in how much cost savings Facebook could realize by eliminating most of its advertising department and associated engineering when looking at how moving off an advertising model might affect profitability. I have no idea what the magnitude of this is, but a good portion of that $30-40 has to get chewed up by spending on stuff that makes the platform less useful to the end users.

[enos_feedler]

100% agree with the business model switch. I think products have a natural business model and for Twitter it's not advertising. I think it took time for the market to have appetite to pay for more subs, but it's here now. I really think this takes Twitter to the next level.

[dumbfounder]

The second you charge you cut out a large chunk of your audience. The second you cut out a large chunk of your audience you give up what makes Twitter useful. Facebook has the same issue, if only 10% of your friends are on there, why would you want to be there?

[0x1F8B]

> Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter.

Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter.

[tenebrisalietum]

I'm sure they would figure out a way to roll it into your phone bill.

I think it would be a good thing. This sounds harsh but honestly most of the the types of people that are unwilling to pay $1-3 per month for the service are probably the types that don't make the service a better social network.

It would also hopefully disincentivize government agencies and maybe even politicians from using it as a channel of communications since it's more along the lines of a traditional business arrangement and not a "free, TV-like" service.

[nathias]

I won't believe that until I see it, you can most definitely both pay and be the product.

[patrickaljord]

There is no way in hell Twitter is going to give up on ads any time soon. Maintaining a service like Twitter costs hundreds of millions of dollars in infra and workers and it's highly unlikely that Revue could cover those costs. Even if by some miracle, Revue manages to pays the bill, it would be impossible to justify to shareholders giving up on such a huge source of revenue that is ads.

tl;dr twitter giving up on ads ain't happening