[perihelions]

This seems eerily similar to what people feared could happen to the web in the absence of net neutrality, only with the role of the ISP this time replaced by a platform content referrer. A multi-tiered web: premium lanes for corporate sponsors with money changing hands.

>"On iOS and desktop, Twitter Blue members will enjoy a fast-loading, ad-free reading experience when they visit many of their favorite news sites available in the US from Twitter, such as The Washington Post, L.A. Times, USA TODAY, The Atlantic, Reuters, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed, Insider and The Hollywood Reporter."

[bri3d]

I don't think the fear with network neutrality was ever the idea of a content aggregator buying content on behalf of a subscriber, was it?

My understanding of the argument with network neutrality was that the combination of the network provider as a natural monopoly and the network provider's ability to render content inaccessible would result in a fragmented Internet - you can only run so many wires to a house, and if Provider B cut off Content A, you might not get Content A anymore.

I don't see how this is the same thing.

[perihelions]

It's qualitatively different, but there's some similarities in appearances. The end-user viewpoint, if this trend grows, is that the majority of the internet could present as a set of subscription packages -- the more you buy, the more of the internet you can access, and at higher service levels. Because of these new financial incentives, previously open, ad-supported websites will shift to becoming closed, subscription services: as the friction for end-users to subscribe to things goes down (because of federation*), this becomes more common. The open web goes dark. Conversely, since this is also an income source for the platforms/referrers, they'll want to boost referrals to partnering companies higher than non-partners -- tiered service. It's true this isn't the hard severity of an ISP throttling, or cutting off, non-partnering websites; but it's a soft analogue of it.

*(This friction can be zero. You needn't take any positive action to subscribe to the Nth website; rather the platforms you subscribe to abstract that away for you, as they monitor all your clicks and visits, and handle the income-splitting transparently behind the curtains. Basically the Spotify model, for the open WWW).

[Talanes]

> Conversely, since this is also an income source for the platforms/referrers

But in this scenario it's not. The platform is funneling part of it's revenue to the partners. There could be less direct incentives for boosting the partners (subscribers feel like they're getting more value when articles come from an ad-free partner, etc...)

[black_puppydog]

Maybe they just mean that when you don't load all the ads, things can actually load pretty fast? 0:-)

[perihelions]

Yes, they're providing different quality experiences, but not actually throttling bits like in the net neutrality scenario.

[peytoncasper]

How is this any different from any other sort of bundling done by Apple news or Google news?

You're free to obtain a subscription to any of those media companies personally and simply follow the link without Twitter Blue.

Most people likely aren't going to want to manage multiple subscriptions and will instead opt to not read the article. At least with Twitter Blue the user doesn't have to worry about multiple subscriptions and can simply read the story when they want to.

Additionally, they now have a notification that indicates that they won't immediately hit a paywall when they click on the link.

Ultimately, media companies need to be compensated, and this doesn't seem to be disadvantaging anyone...

[holler]

Yeah my first thought re: news/scroll was that it sounds exactly like Apple News.