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Comment by weego | Hacker News Reader

People always do this. No you don't want to, don't try and be a User-Hero. And if for some insane reason you do want to, implementing and supporting it would cost more than they would ever take in revenue because no one else wants to pay apart from companies who then get preferential treatment.

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I disagree - I've been requesting this on-and-off for years.

In the same way I passively pay Netflix to be able to stream movies, I'm happy to passively pay Twitter each month for the flow of conversation if it allows them to exist in the long-run, and get better.

If its viable for them to charge me $7 to $10 a month so I get an ad-free experience and they can wean off ads as main revenue source, then great. Sign me up.

Netflix is currenlty billions in debt, http://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-raising-800-million-i...

Which needs to be put in the context of its 6.78B in revenue.

Debt in of itself isn't a bad thing. Apple has $79 billion in debt. Facebook has $3B in debt. Microsoft is $60B in debt.

They have debt because they don't want to move money from foreign accounts to the US so they borrow money to pay dividends, but they don't have net debt.

Meh; user funding saved metafilter a couple years ago. User supported ads free model certainly will generate more money per enrolled user than would have been made on advertising. The trick is to keep the costs of the program low, and avoid giving people bad incentives that break the store for non paying users. This isn't actually difficult... It's not like they need to set up payment systems from scratch anyways....

Reddit has a successful reddit gold program. I think it could be successful on twitter.

Gold makes reddit a pittance in comparison to advertising, unfortunately. It doesn't even make enough to keep the servers running.

> It doesn't even make enough to keep the servers running

That's irrelevant, because most people don't pay for Gold. The important question is this: How much does Reddit make on Gold per user compared to how much they make from ads per-user? I sincerely doubt reddit is pulling in $4/user/mo in ads.

Well that's not true entirely according to Yishan Wong. [1]

Reddit and Twitter operate in the same hemisphere of community-driven applications — so it is within the realm of possibility that Twitter would have to bring some sort of "Gold" subscription model to their platform (who knows maybe it will be more widely adopted at Twitter). But all-in-all, they're both fighting the same battles: censorship, ad revenue slumps, and user growth. [2] And those are not easy problems to fix.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/howredditworks/comments/1oyhjw/redd...

[2] http://www.dailydot.com/via/twitter-moments-reddit-upvoted-m...

I'm paying for Github and I don't use any of the paid features. Why? Because I want their business to stay. The big difference is GH has a significantly better idea to make money with: paying for progressive, useful enhancements. I don't think you can do that on Twitter; maybe you could have, once. Like showing images in your stream could have been a paid addon. I have no idea if it would have worked or not, but nowadays, if they would want to make money like this, it's probably a paid "pro" account, a badge, practically, because of they go full pay-only, they will lose too many sources of sell-able data.

EDIT: read comment by mi100hael; apparently I need to follow news better, and I'm taking my praises back.

> I'm paying for Github and I don't use any of the paid features. Why? Because I want their business to stay.

lolwut. GitLab offers for free most of the stuff GitHub makes you pay for. And GitHub is run by a bunch of SJWs that have gone so far as to remove repos because a comment in the code used the word "retard." And despite being a platform for sharing source that hosts many prominent free software projects, the platform is 100% proprietary closed source. They offer absolutely nothing of value that can't be had better elsewhere.

> so far as to remove repos because a comment in the code used the word "retard."

o.O

I've missed this, reading about it now, and I'm off to modify some subscription settings.

I do. I thought about this for months. Always when I read tweets in the morning, seeing all the non-sense Ads non-relevant to my preferences in contrast of tweets and account I choses very precise. If this idea is nothing new, then pardon me. Anyway thanks.

For me, it's not about being a "user hero." It's because if I pay for an account, I become a customer, and not part of their product. It completely changes the relationship in a way that is more favorable to me, which is why I suspect they will never do it.

Pandora has a successful 3$ month ad free program

Music is universal, and enhances quality of life. If Twitter went away, I promise there would be no difference in quality of life. No one is going to pay for Twitter.

Is your argument that if Pandora went away, quality of life would change?

For those using it to listen to music, yes. When people inevitably move onto whatever is post Twitter, people will still need to listen to music.

Pandora is one of many music services. If Pandora shut down, they will just move to another, quality of life will not change.

That's my point. If Twitter shut down, it wouldn't matter, so people aren't going to pay for it. Tweeting isn't a quality of life enabler, music is.

It's $5/mo or $55/year. And the vast majority of the money is still from advertising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Radio#Business_model

Between

> advertising comprised 88% of Pandora's total revenues

and

> the vast majority of Pandora's users remain on the free, ad-supported model

There's really no way to know how revenue compares on a per-user basis between paid and ads.

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