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Comment by tcsf | Hacker News Reader

Let users pay for the service.

I'd happily pay $10/month for a 'pro' level or whatever they want to call it. I use Twitter constantly, but have always preferred third party apps - Tweetbot is by far the best.

If the pro level killed ads, increased data privacy somehow, and fully opened up every API to third party clients that would be more than worth it IMO. For example, I'm tired of Tweetbot kicking me to the mobile site to view moments.

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Would you foresee the "pro" level to add in controls to minimize the "abuse" issue that Wall Street often points at?

I think that's tricky. If Twitter is perceived to be charging users to not be abused, that's obviously crappy. Paid accounts or not I think there should be better first-party options for controlling who you see and who sees you.

At the same time, if the APIs are fully open, third party clients would be able to build more powerful filtering features. In effect that would allow anyone to build entire sub communities on top of Twitter. This is starting to sound more and more like app.net...

So in essence you end up with the #channels being filtered by third parties? How would those third parties get noticed. Would Twitter offer them some kind of sub domain or special alias?

We would have Twitter the API, and Twitter the umbrella network. You might want to promote a sub group into the larger network, or you may not - similar to reddit in a way.

I imagine invite only groups, time-limited groups for concerts/conferences/sporting events, location-locked groups that you dynamically join and leave as you move around.

I may just be describing iMessage or Slack at this point.

I would definitely like the idea of being able to add a private channel whenever I wanted one. Something like #{myusername}-private-{whatever} and then I could approve or add users to the channel

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