Twitter acquires Revue | Hacker News Reader

Twitter acquires Revue

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227 pointscamillovisini259 comments

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.

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/1353737949729468416)

> 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

"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"

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

Perhaps, but you are talking about creating rather complex machinery in order to support a tiny feature. If the only argument in favor is engagement statistics (would those take edits into consideration as well?), I certainly see why Twitter doesn't care too much.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”

Retweets still convey a tweet to your followers much more directly than a "like" does.

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

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

That just makes the feature weird and broken.

How?

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.

> 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.

Mastodon has this :-)

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.

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.

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

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

Bit angry, are we.

Angry at what?

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?

> 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?)

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?

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.

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

tcm is like this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

IT Crowd isn't BBC, though...

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?

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

Certainly up through the 90s the 'big ticket' and imported shows started on the hour or :30 and everything else slotted around that. Secondary programmes often started at :50 or :15 as a result.

https://www.transdiffusion.org/content/uploads/2016/10/19991...

If timings were really awkward they would pad five or ten minutes with a short filler about hot air ballooning or pottery making or somesuch

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.

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

> 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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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).

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.

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

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).

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

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.

> 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.

> 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).

(Correction: “social networks played a significant role” -> “network effects played a significant role”)

> 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.

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

> 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.

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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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-...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

In the new era of monopolistic common carrier platforms, you have to BUILD INTO YOUR BUSINESS PLAN what happens when you get screwed by, say, the Apple App Store, YouTube, or Twitter, et. al. It's a business risk, just like fire or flood. You have to have a contingency ready to go at a moment's notice. By example, Parler didn't.

I read somewhere that parler actually did have a contingency plan, but their backup host pulled out on them too.

just build your own internet

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.

Revue's homepage[0] says:

> You own your list, forever > Bring the audience you’ve built, and take it with you anytime. You are in control.

0 - https://www.getrevue.co/

Or just drop the entire thing (Vine reference)

> Starting today, we’re making Revue’s Pro features free for all accounts and lowering the paid newsletter fee to 5%

...and there goes Substack's entire business.

Overall, this is great for writers however. The missing component to Substack was the discovery/social mechanism. From a strategic perspective, it's easier to bolt on newsletter sending than it is to build a new social network.

So this was always a huge risk for Substack as a platform. But hey, there's also an alternate universe where Twitter stays dumb and lazy and never crushes Substack. So I see why investors took the risk.

But I see no path forward for Substack if Twitter manages to not completely botch this.

Not exactly. The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now.

I think it's the same thing with Slack, Slack only exists because Microsoft teams is made by Microsoft.

I swear to God it's mostly a placebo effect, but you're like oh yeah we're using slack we're the cool kids now. Many companies will have a single breakaway team that uses slack just to feel cool.

But if $10 a month makes a developer happier she might produce another $500 in value.

> The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now.

I see "current press sentiment" as an irrelevant factor. Just wait until some prominent right winger heads to Substack and the journalists start aiming their sights.

The point is, if I'm going to start a paid newsletter, am I willing to give up an extra 5% of my income for the same feature set?

The answer is hell no. Substack will have to lower their prices, and then the feature war will begin. Twitter will always have the upper hand given they can directly integrate newsletter sign up forms into twitter.

But hey, bureaucratic incompetence is endemic at Twitter, so they might screw up this obvious path to victory they have in front of them.

To each their own, but given the major questions around how much power Twitter has, I don't see a lot of free and open journalism happening there.

Ideally the entire reason you pay for this type of content is because you don't want to just read CNN. If Twitter is perceived as controlling your content anyway, why pay for it

IMHO, the only solution is a fairly complicated decentralized structure with economic incentives for all.

Even then you have gatekeepers for hosting and payment processing.

Exactly the problem cryptocurrency was created to address.

We use both Slack and Teams. I strongly disagree that it's the 'cool factor' making Slack better. Teams is just a pain to use for 70% of my day-to-day messaging needs. Teams works well for meetings and large presentations. For intra-team communication and bot integration, Slack wins hands down for my team.

Teams works.

Your team is just used to Slack.

At the same time , if it costs 2k in lost productivity to switch, it's easier to keep using Slack.

I agree Slack is better though. I can't imagine if I started a new team I'd fight for slack over teams though

> The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now.

Can you explain? I use Twitter daily (hourly) and haven't read anything that lessened my opinion of them. Are you talking about censorship / Trump stuff? Personally they have not gotten on my bad side with any of that.

> Slack only exists because Microsoft teams is made by Microsoft

I'm also not sure what you mean by this. Microsoft Teams exists because of Slack.

Let's see if the DOJ goes after them for predatory pricing first. Twitter may have bought themselves enough favor with the Biden administration that he'll let it slide.

A few of Substack's writers wouldn't be allowed for long on a Twitter-owned platforms, and they know it. Writers like Greenwald, Yarvin, and Taibbi are all to varying degrees, transgressive enough and critical enough of social media to perceive the extra cut Substack takes as a reasonable ask in exchange for a greater level of platform security.

Substack will certainly lose a lot of writers, but I think it'll be safe as a profitable niche alternative.

Aren't they all active on Twitter? Greenwald certainly is. It's a major part of their brand-building effort already at the very least

Yarvin isn't, to my knowledge. It's a matter of how they communicate on the platform, vs off. It's entirely feasible for them to present their more anodyne content on the platform, while still expressing a wider range of ideas and opinions off of it. This has been the smartest strategy for a while. Twitter doesn't usually care what you do outside their platform.

> It’s a matter of how they communicate on the platform, vs off. It’s entirely feasible for them to present their more anodyne content on the platform, while still expressing a wider range of ideas and opinions off of it.

Greenwald’s Twitter is no more anodyne than his substack; the only real difference seems to be the usual kinds of adaptation to microblogging vs. long-form.

> A few of Substack’s writers wouldn’t be allowed for long on a Twitter-owned platforms, and they know it.

Maybe, but two of your three examples clearly would be allowed, and quite active, for quite a while "on a Twitter-owned platform":

> Writers like Greenwald,

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald (1.5M followers, since Aug 2008)

> Yarvin,

The only one without an obvious verified account on Twitter. There's a no-activity @CurtisYarvin regular account, though.

> and Taibbi

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi (0.5M followers, since May 2009)

You're conflating mantaining a presence on the platform, with the willingness to make it your source of income. It's a matter of risk mitigation with consideration to Twitter's history of moderation.

I cited them not because they've been deplatformed, I cited them because they've at various points commented on media and platform censorship.

Considering Twitter's response to the Hunter Biden NYP story, and the fact that Greenwald left The Intercept over its inwillingness to publish his opinion piece on it, I doubt he would trust a company under Twitter to host his content.

Yarvin is an obvious no - being a neoreactionary who makes often despicable-sounding commentary, Twitter would be unlikely to keep him online and commercialized with pressure from activist groups.

Taibbi is quite moderate, but from interviews, I'd place him in a similar to bucket to Greenwald in terms of demanding editorial independence, and a durable revenue stream from his host platform.

This is a smart move by Twitter. Substack has taken off considerably. Rather than watch all their prized users go publish long form content on a platform outside their orbit, Twitter just pulled a platform into their orbit.

The thing I’m curious about is how creative Twitter will get with integrating the platforms. There have been a lot of missed opportunities with previous Twitter acquisitions IMO.

I don’t thin substack crowd would trust Twitter with their content.

The Substack crowd is already on Twitter, and is where they got their audience from.

That is an overstatement. I might be a dinosaur, but in my case it is the other way around. I mostly follow people I have learned about elsewhere. Also, if Twitter decides to ban one of them, I will still have access to substack where the articles are.

I think Twitter would be okay if the history professor with the $1m Substack comes over to them and people like Glenn Greenwald stay at Substack though.

You are right. I am biased by my substack subscriptions list

History professor with 1m substack? Is this a specific reference?

Yep: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-co...

This is a really smart acquisition for Twitter to make. I'm subscribed to a number of substacks (and Patreons) that I only discovered through creators on Twitter.

Job #1 for twitter should be making it easy to subscribe to Revue newsletters from within Twitter. Please do not put the team that rolled out Fleets in charge of Job #1 ;)

What did you dislike about Fleets rollout?

I don't normally answer questions for others, but I feel uniquely qualified to chime in on this one!

I am a pretty heavy Twitter user and have been for a long time. It's really the only "social" thing I use.

I know Fleets is a Twitter thing... I remember seeing it someplace, maybe a story on Hacker News or something? Was it something like a replacement for Vine maybe? Or was it something with threaded conversations? Am I seeing Fleets in my feed? What do they look like? Are they being used at all?

I really have no idea what Fleets is and I use Twitter all the time. Whatever Fleets is I agree with pboutros, don't put that same team in charge of anything else, this rollout didn't work.

(I may be missing something totally obvious and awesome here! Maybe Fleets is the greatest thing since Google+ and I'm to set in my ways to notice or care? This could very well be another "It's not you, it's me" thing and I'm too dense to see it.)

Fleets are Instagram Stories - Now On Twitter.

I think they appear just in mobile app, but also not sure, I use the web Twitter on phone.

They do appear on the mobile app. One person out of the hundreds I follow uses them, so therefore I am reminded that they exist, even though I never watch them. If that person happened to stop creating them, I would not know what they are or that they exist.

You would, because the app will still waste the screen space for the fleets bar even if nobody is using it, just so it can push the button for creating a new one in front of you all the time.

They are incongruous with how I see most people using twitter. If I wanted the fleet, I would follow them on instagram.

This space is quite interesting. You have the gorilla at the picnic (Substack), the stagnating old timers (TinyLetter), the member management platforms (Memberful, probably Mailchimp), the link dump creators (curated.co) and the spunky indie upstarts (Buttondown).

There's membership feature on gumroad as well: https://gumroad.com/gumroad/p/introducing-gumroad-membership...

Yeah, but I guess by going free, Revue is going to grab a good chunk of the space.

For example, curated.co seems nice, but $25 bucks a month for sending a newsletter that doesn't even have a single subscriber?

MailChimp owns TinyLetter.

Will twitter penalize substack users like it had penalized sharing of instagram pictures by removing the preview embedded in tweets?

Instagram pictures don't show up on Twitter because Facebook blocked it. They did that in response to Twitter blocking Instagram from finding contacts via Twitter. Its FAANG in-fighting from like 8 years ago that I'm still kind of surprised hasn't been sorted out by now.

More like NATFAG in-fighting in this case

wow that's a terrible acronym.

How about FATNAG…oh wait, that's still not not great.

FANTAG rolls of the tongue.

I listened to a podcast that included this story, it was a Facebook decision. Mark phoned and gave them a few hours heads up that 'Instagram' had decided not to allow the embeds any more. They actually got it delayed 24 hours or something like that to avoid breaking Twitter.

If that is the case then I hope they are split up on antitrust grounds. But somehow I doubt the current administration will go after big tech.

It will be interesting to see what the terms of the deal are. I've used Revue to publish a paid newsletter and it works great. Not quite as polished as Substack, but the lower take rate will certainly be enough for some customers to switch imo.

The Creators arms race is in full swing, and the winner will be who can deliver the way to most monetize your existing audience AND expand your audience. Twitter already has a strong interest graph and is well positioned here

I ve seen people talking about owning their twitter audience but the suggestion was to move away from twitter and towards self-hosting. Substack is promoted as a temporary in-between. Interesting that twitter thinks authors want to lock long-form content in there. What happens after the inevitable next Purge?

> What happens after the inevitable next Purge?

Most authors are not going to be "purged" full stop.

The good ones won't go to a platform that purges speech. It may be OK for content marketers, but i don't see journalists that don't like to mince their words (e.g. greenwald) choosing to host their content on twitter.

Greenwald is an avid Twitter user, and is hardly in any danger of being de platformed for any of his views.

"Most" definitely messes with the business model. The requirement is for only enough to get everyone else to fall in line. It also helps to make selections idiosyncraticly arbitrary to maintain strategic ambiguity instead of drawing a clear line.

Oy. Another company wanting a piece of the 'newsletter' pie, and access to your mailing list.

Yeah.

But I'll still keep subscribing to the best mailing list, so...

Does anyone else find it ironic Revue official blog is hosted on Medium?

https://blog.getrevue.co

Well, a newsletter is not a blog after all. It's intended to be consumed in an email client, not a browser.

I’m curious as to why Twitter chose to do this as an acquisition rather than build their own. It doesn’t seem particularly hard to build from an engineering perspective, and I doubt Twitter needs to acquire the Revue user base given their existing profile and reach.

They buy creators this way. In social networks and winner-take-all market it's logical.

Somewhat related, I use https://typefully.app to write tweet threads and schedule their posting. Why tweet threads instead of blogging, as many HN users ask? Tweets get traction and build an audience (yes, owning your platform is better than a corporation owning your platform, but you have to go where the eyeballs are) with which I can drive traffic, users and customers to other sites I want them to see.

Twitter is also an amazing community, I've had many good interactions there that are simply not possible in other social media platforms. Where else can you get Paul Graham or Balaji Srinivasan to reply to you?

As a user of Twitter who mainly reads tweets rather than writing them, I hope this isn't just a way to make larger volumes of misinformation go viral. Obviously, that's not Twitter's intention, but they want to make money, and viral misinformation seems to be an effective strategy for making money.

The reason I raise this issue is because the important characteristic of Twitter is that others can call out the misinformation quickly. It's not perfect, of course, but it's better than a newsletter, where it's just a blob of misinformation with nobody able to call out the BS.

That's the first time I hear of Twitter as a platform inherently efficient against misinformation. If anything, it seems uniquely primed to spread it and reward users for doing so.

Oh, Twitter's definitely not a tool "against misinformation". My concern is actually that it's so efficient at spreading misinformation and now they want to take away the ability to call out the misinformation.

It'll be interesting to see what Substack does in response to this. I can imagine that they'll lose some folks because Twitter's taking a lower rate.

Or they could win some folks because of ... Twitter.

My prediction: bundling. Most of the good content (excluding self-hosted) is now arguably on Substack, but the subscription model is still one-to-one and doesn’t allow them to take advantage of the network effects. There’s a limited number of subscriptions I’m willing to pay for. Bundling economics, if done right, could extract a higher monthly fee from me into the platform. After all, the marginal cost of providing content to me is negligible, so anything I’d be willing to pay for but not enough for to justify another subscription is money left on the table.

You know the joke that tech just rediscovers the pre-tech economy?

Like a rideshare company will pick up groups of passengers from a location and drop them to the same location in the direction you're going - oh, you just discovered buses. That kind of thing?

This is heading towards a you just discovered online magazines/newspapers jokes.

Consider: - bundle the best writers together

- pay them a salary so they feel some comfort

- have an editor who decides

- brand it so people trust the name

etc

Ha, that’s fair, but a magazine-style model is only one way to go. Something like diminishing cost for adding additional subscriptions (with the discount split between the newsletters I subscribe to) would be effective in making me spend more there. (And probably abandon an off-substack paid subscription)

Clearly and unsurprisingly this is to compete with Substack. Great move.

Now, regarding character limits, beyond linking to a personal website or having a newsletter, I have seen avid content creators posting images containing small essays directly on Twitter to allow a deeper in-app reading experience.

Maybe this should be a next, and less trivial, problem for Twitter to work on.

I wholeheartedly agree. Making automatic alt-text available for those types of posts would go a long way in addressing the accessibility issues that plague image posts on Twitter. Their current UX for adding alt-text is painful and content authors are unlikely to use it... Seems like a great place for automation/OCR

If the OCR is good enough to deal with these text posts, isn't it already built into screen reading software that would make the alt-text duplication unnecessary?

Not if you’re on a smartphone. This is one of the problems with mobile — no way to have one app interact with another. Many people with disabilities rely on this sort of functionality on desktop and cannot use it on mobile. The only accessibility features that exist are the ones the OS implements.

Curious: was this an acqui-hire? Anybody have intel about deal terms?

As someone who moved away from Twitter, the last thing I need in my life is another Twitter-owned property. The politics of the last month aside, Twitter is a foul, trite, snide place where the worst of us are trumpeted to the loudest voice and widest audience. The negativity and incentive to waste hours and focus are pervasive in every community I've participated in. Of course, YMMV. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to curate and filter away those things that I abhor about Twitter. A few weeks removed and my mental state feels all the better for it. Color me cynical, but I'll pass on another attempt for Twitter to monetize my attention.

I find it somewhat ironic that Twitter has only now banned Trump. They allowed him to stay on his platform so more people would sign-up, follow him and get radicalised. Now he's no longer the President, they've suddenly acquired morality. Fool me once, eh.

Didn't they ban him as a protective measure to curb additional violence after he incited the storming of the capitol?

I don't think twitter's tactics are as nefarious as you make them out to be.

They banned him after his Presidency. He did greivous harm and acts of hate before that, but only now are Twitter giving it the attention it deserves. Anyone else would have been banned long before now. He has incited a great deal of violence with racist dogwhistles, and only now he's facing any sort of punishment. The argument of 'free speech' falls apart when you factor this in.

<sigh> I hear you. But Twitter is an incredible service. From the Arab spring to people like @balajis who broke COVID (for me at least) before major news networks.

The only interactive we have as users is positive (a heart or retweet) vs negative (thumbs down on Youtube, downvote on reddit).

I think a broken heart, </3, essentially as a downvote, could do a lot to make Twitter more of a community that rewards and punishes, rather than just allows people to exist in their own eco-chamber. The politicians of the last month would have likely seen way more downvotes / broken hearts than favs and retweets, and that might have done something for them personally...it's at least worth a test if anyone at Twitter reads this :).

> I think a broken heart, </3, essentially as a downvote,

God please no, that's the reason I love Twitter. The day people start downvoting Tweets because they disagree, instead of replying, is the day I make my account private, or leave the service.

> YMMV

It does, enormously. I've reached out to people via Twitter and had nothing but great experiences. I've had dialogue with people I would never have had access to before. IME, so long as you stick away from politics, Twitter is fine but, of course, this depends on who you follow and interact with.

I like it but I have a policy to unfollow if they start to tweet about anything they don’t work in. So a programmer that talks about politics is going to be unfollowed. Also they have to consistently be able to educate me and not just say things I agree with.

Works pretty well. Main drawback is that it’s just singular focus nerds.

A drawback is that people don’t always seem charitable in their thoughts of why I choose to unfollow.

I guess I could just as easily follow their blogs instead of Twitter though.

Muting words related to political topics or the meme of the week can make a huge improvement in your Twitter timeline.

I’m bummed that Twitter limits the mute list to only 200 words. I’m maxed out and have to remove a word when I want to mute a new one.

I suspect that one problem on Twitter is how wide you "open the door". If you crack it open just a little (i.e. limited follows), you can have a nice, useful, informative stream there, without all the negativity. But if you insist on opening the door fairly wide (i.e. lots more follows), you're effectively inviting the whole world in.

And guess what? "the whole world", taken as a whole, isn't so great.

Will this be a competition for substack?

That's what i was thinking -- this is Twitter's version of substack.

Me too. I’m really not optimistic about the content that Twitter will curate here; I worry that they’ll out-compete substack by peddling their usual outrage addiction, perhaps not right away but in time. The content that one might see on substack will be eventually buried on Twitter in exchange for the content that is most likely to make you click links. Here’s to hoping I’m wrong.

Substack seem to me to be genuinely trying to build a better online platform, so I expect they will build a better one (for reasoned debate rather than dopamine-drive outrage) than twitter.

I agree, but I'm not optimistic that "better platform" is sufficient to win. Notably, Twitter's secret sauce is addiction, thus it's inherently difficult for many people to choose the healthier option (at least in a long-term capacity). Moreover, as a platform, Twitter can provide an audience a lot more readily than SubStack. I'm concerned that there's enough of SubStack's model that Twitter can copy without compromising their addiction-peddling business model that they will be able to out-compete SubStack, to the world's detriment.

Interesting they're framing it as Revue joining twitter rather than Twitter acquiring Revue.

It’s standard “we got bought up” jargon, but it is weird way of saying it.

Joining indicates some come goal or success, but it has become Silicon Vally slang for: Our product is dead but at least we made some money.

Revue looks amazing. But why so many twitter permissions required to login?

Why is the Revue model preferable to a blog with a tip jar and RSS?

I understand why Twitter wants in on a lucrative game, but I don't understand the value proposition for writers or readers. I struggle to see how, as a regular person on the internet, I benefit from a "public square" that will hijack my brainstem to maximize engagement, sell my attention and browsing habits to 3rd parties, and suspend my account with no warning if I run afoul of a black-box censor.

Well, for one, it's not a tip jar, but more of a blog + exclusive content.

Other than that, not much but an easy setup... if you're from a country that supports receiving money from Stripe. If not, sucks to be you!

It's preferable because people don't want to have to click through multiple screens to do PayPal/Visa Checkout authentication to give somebody $3.

Nobody knows what RSS is either. Even back in mid-00s, I would sometimes struggle to add a blog to my Firefox feed (this was pre-Chrome). On some sites you'd click the RSS button and it would work. On other sites clicking it would display incomprehensible XML markup, causing me to abandon the site.

That's fair, although to me that suggests we need to create easier self-hostable blog/newsletter tools, not all migrate to Twitter's next big fishtank

also some would only put a snippet in their RSS feed rather than the whole article

I forgot about that! That's another reason why I eventually stopped bothering with it.

Tips/micropayments are bad customer experiences. From Stratechery (multi-line quote):

-----------

I am instinctually skeptical of micropayments for a whole host of reasons:

- First, you have to have attach a payment method; it is hard to overcome that level of friction for just a few cents

- Secondly, if said payment method is a credit card, you need to deal with the fact the fees on a credit card transaction start around $0.29

- Third, there is the psychological burden imposed on customers who need to continually choose whether or not to make a purchase

To date the only sort of business that has succeeded with micropayments are free-to-play games: the App Store supplies the payment method (and eats the credit card fees), most games obfuscate the money spent (by selling in-game currency), and even then the strategy succeeds by hooking a small number of “whales” who play the game compulsively; most never pay.

This, in my estimation, would never work for a newspaper or magazine: there is too much competition when it comes to content, the price of any one piece couldn’t be priced high enough to overcome fees, and getting people to pay is hard. Moreover, while a subscription model caps the amount of revenue you earn per customer, it also reduces the likelihood said customer will explore alternatives: it is set and forget, while a micropayment asks for consideration every single time.

-----------

https://stratechery.com/2016/blendle-launches-in-the-u-s-an-... (paywalled)

I'm conflicted about this move. I was listening to Reply All the other day and they mentioned platform diversity and I've seen a number of discussions on here around platform diversity. Twitters ability to buy a feature like this makes it harder to compete with. It benefits writers in a way that it adds in-demand functionality to an existing popular platform but also harms writers and consumers because of the rising demand of platform diversity.

Use Revue, build a sizeable distribution list, so I can get banned for expressing my thoughts? So I can be treated like a pedophile for saying something unpopular that doesn't align with their radical leftist ideology? No thank you. There's a lot of other subscription services for me to take a risk that big with anyone associated with Twitter.

Probably a win for Substack, as a take-over by less-diverse-on-purpose Twitter will drive away those who seek diversity of opinions.

Although, I can already feel the cancel-pressure building up in and around Substack, just by writing this.

I dont think this is a win for substack. Before this acquisition Substack was probably the leading product in this category. Im sure if Substack polled it’s publishers on what they want most, people would say “more paid subscribers”. Twitter is a platform that can offer this from day 1. A chance to have your newsletter promoted to new eyeballs with a strong interest in what you write about. Substack needs to grow the reader side organically and so the race is on. Substack needs to turn into twitter faster than twitter can build substacks tools. Twitter just acquired a company to accelerate this process. How can substack accelerate?

You seem to be more concerned with 'cancel culture' than the actual viability of your hypothetical 'unpopular opinion' newsletter.

The "viability of your hypothetical 'unpopular opinion'"?? Are you serious? You're already taking shots and focusing on my beliefs without first addressing the risk that Big Tech and its affiliates pose to merely not being censored or banned? You're the kind of person that should work at Twitter. You'll fit right in, bud.

Good point, bad analogy. Twitter treats pedophiles really well.

Lol, you make a good point.

And so, we now enter the tumblr phase of Twitter.

twittr

If you write anything important or at all at risk of becoming controversial twitter should be nothing more than a promotion engine.

I used Revue for a while and basically decided I didn't want to do a regular newsletter. (Never had any interest in directly monetizing.)

I do still have a blog but I mostly publish on various platforms that have fairly heavy-duty promotion machinery. But depending upon how Revue is integrated into Twitter, I'd take a look again.

I was making a tool to bookmark tweets and convert threads into articles , https://twimark.io , this acquisition could move some users who write long threads to revue. I wonder what the effects will be

Am I the only one who sees Revue, Substack etc. as a niche market? I can see why it appeals to Silicon Valley types/HN readers; after all this website is a content aggregator so it makes sense we all have a shared interest in written work. That said I think that the blog "industry" is dying more than it is growing.

To me, media seems to be trending towards quick, consumable, visually stimulating content, ie YouTube, TikTok and the like. The reason such content is more engaging and profitable is because it's a lot easier to turn it into a feed: one does not scroll through a newsletter for hours on end, and long form content tends to be the type that you put more thought into reading instead of simply moving on to the next piece.

Advertising runs on eyeballs but subscriptions do not, and it feels to me like Twitter seem to think that creating a well integrated platform to drive more Twitter discussion is a good idea, but really to me it feels like blogs and Tweets run perpendicular to each other: anyone who's read a decent amount of Twitter conversation knows that deeply thought out and sensible it is not.

Maybe they see being able to be "in" conversations about paywalled content will incentivize people to pay up, and will subsequently start pushing Revue content on people's feeds to try and create such a mentality? Or maybe Twitter don't care about making Revue "part of" Twitter and just think it's a growing market worth capitalising on. Only time will tell.

In a way it sort of reminds me of podcasts. They work well only for a group of people who have the time to consume long content, and while it works as a large niche, I can't see it growing into a Twitter-scale mass market, so I wouldn't trust it to be around for a particularly long time.

TWEET 1/7: It's ironic that the way Twitter proposes to improve its platform for writers is to move them off Twitter proper.

TWEET 2/7: Writers use Twitter begrudgingly because that's where the eyeballs are, but it is a terrible communications platform for any writing longer than a single tweet.

TWEET 3/7: Microblogging is core to its brand, but I shudder whenever I see a thread marked 1 of 22. Because of the character limitation, the writing on Twitter has a wooden cadence.

TWEET 4/7: The best thing Twitter could do for writers is give them some way to go beyond the standard character limit within the core platform.

TWEET 5/7: The limit doesn't need to be lifted entirely; maybe anything beyond the limit can be hidden by default, but with an option to reveal it.

TWEET 6/7: Restricting how writers write can sometimes encourage better writing. But Twitter is one of the largest communications platforms in the world, and it's got to reckon with that.

TWEET 7/7: Imagine if, instead of a char limit, you could only write rhyming couplets! It would be fun as a niche site, but not as a site used to communicate breaking news and longer, more thoughtful writing.

COUPLET 1/1: Twitter's a major communications hub, like it or not. Its restrictions on writing are a big blind spot.

Or alternatively (in my humble opinion), they should stop trying to be what they're not (a long form blogging platform) and instead stick to what they excel at (short broadcasts that are hashtag groupable and searchable).

The problem isn't Twitter trying to be something it's not, it's that the short broadcasts that are hashtag groupable just is not a useful platform. People want long form writing platforms, but don't want to choose between Twitter, where people are, and blogging, where people aren't.

I totally agree with this:

> People want long form writing platforms, but don't want to choose between Twitter, where people are, and blogging, where people aren't.

But this:

> short broadcasts that are hashtag groupable just is not a useful platform

I completely disagree with.

It's been proven to be a very useful platform indeed. Again, not for long form blogging, but for short to-the-point announcements that can instantly reach a wide audience (and that can be grouped with related announcements and quickly searched for) - I think it's incredibly useful.

Hey you edited your tweets thats not allowed #followtherules

While censorship people for their writings (based on whatever the US elites that happen to be mainstream in 2020 consider acceptable)?

To the degree that even the sitting President, right or wrong, can be shut down?

Yeah, pass...

"Revue by Twitter"

It's interesting that the tech giants keep tagging their names onto the brands they acquire. Does that really help?

I know that the tech crowd exists in a bubble and that the hatred for the tech giants on HN doesn't really reflect the feelings of the general public... but even outside the tech sphere, are there really many people who like Twitter as a company? Most people just seem to tolerate the companies behind their preferred platform. It doesn't seem to me like there would be many who would be more likely to engage with a new brand as a result of its association with Twitter. If anything, I'd expect the opposite effect.

I’ve heard that it might be for anti trust reasons (but with putting Facebook on all of its properties). Properly establishing who owns what up front makes the average user more aware of the consolidation of platforms

If Revue were a big company perhaps. In this case I think its just to give Revue more value through the brand association.

I’ve seen that argument a few times recently as well but I don’t find it at all persuasive. Public perception of market competition isn’t relevant to antitrust law. That the public is more aware of a company’s anti-competitive behavior doesn’t somehow absolve or even lessen the potential liability for the anti-competitive behavior.

Or perhaps I just don’t understand the point they’re trying to make? I’ve yet to come across this antitrust/branding argument where the rationale has been explained but I’d definitely be curious to hear the legal theory.

The only thing I can come up with is that being aware of the damages in advance of a purchasing decision might in some cases serve to limit said damages relative to being unaware of them. Not sure it applies in a monopoly setting where awareness of damages doesn't give you an alternative though. It gets more complicated when damage is speech instead of a financial exploit on a product.

Interesting that they don't do "GitHub by Microsoft", or "NPM by Microsoft". Maybe there's some insight in there somewhere...

Microsoft wants to keep their corporate stink off of those brands as to not taint their market dominance and continued growth. It appears to be working.

They're slowly working other, less-Microsoft-branded proprietary stuff into them, like Azure and VSCode.

GitHub and NPM however remain without even a mention of their ownership and decisionmaking entity.

Some of the marketing for these things they've even taken to posting on unaffiliated domains, like we saw on HN yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903358

They're trying really hard to not remind people that the same people who put ads in your start menu also own and control your favorite free code host, too.

Call it Microsoft GitHub whenever you can.

Everyone knows github. Adding microsoft to the name doesnt get more sign ups. Npm doesnt even get sign ups this way. I have no idea what Revue is. Adding Twitter to the name gives it instant credibility.

We are "Reviewed by Twitter" and we are here to help.

Seems like substack discovered a market and now they’re competing

This is really great acquisition. Maybe this is the path towards building the paid Twitter service?

shout out to writefreely, https://github.com/writeas/writefreely

this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool.

Thanks for the link! Starred / bookmarked, will look closer before jumping onto substack or revue (twitter's new thing).

Writefreely is awesome, and their devs were highly available in my experience with them. Discovered when Medium went the way of paywalls, I've donated several times to help keep the project alive.

I take a look at write.as (the hosted version), and find one of the first posts in the community section: https://write.as/tmo/5-30-am-coffee-to-kick-things-off

This post has just over 1800 characters (copy/pasted everything visible into Notepad++), no images whatsoever, and it takes 776ms to load and transfers 238 kilobytes.

Why are minimalist seeming web sited often so obese (https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)?

dunno. is it due to scripts on html page that does highlighting? or

Cool, this is a Dutch company right? Congrats!

second mention of writefreely on HN today...

writefreely, https://github.com/writeas/writefreely

this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool.

AGPLv-3.0 goodness

Fascinating. I wonder what happened to Medium?

No idea what happened because I stopped using it after they started adding all the accessibility friction. The UI was decent, original. And giving the reader an idea of the "Reading time" of each article was a nice touch.

But yeah, that friction got to be a little too much.

They're blocked for me where ever I can block them, just because I got sick of innocently following a link and being ambushed by Medium and their hassle. Or 'friction', to euphemize.

Will this be Twitter's Instagram?

Will this be Twitter's Tumbler?

My money is on the latter.

What is the product here?

Are you allowed to disagree?

At what point are those kind of acquisitions anticompetitive?

Why are comments about twitter's censorious nature being downvoted? The two main topics here (in my view) are 1. Twitter's response to Substack and how this move will impact the two companies and 2. the fact that some of Substack's most prominent users are writers who are refugees from other platforms (Andrew Sullivan from New York magazine, Bari Weiss from the New York Times etc.) who left because of the suppression-of-unpopular-speech trends that Twitter is now famous for.

So Revue is what, Substack minus fees plus twitter viewpoint-enforcement? In any event I think this topic (censorship) at least bears discussion and I encourage users here not to downvote the discussion in the name of "suppressing right wingers" or similar. Twitter does not just ban right wingers. Take a look at the list of prominent people banned from twitter[0], it includes people such as Talib Kweli, Zuby (both rappers), "The IT Crowd" creator Graham Linehan, numerous political satire accounts, numerous feminists, and numerous artists and others for death threats towards such potential victims as "the Planters mascot Mr. Peanut," "a dead mosquito" and "the country Austria" (issued by an Austrian artist).

If you have strong contrary views, you are probably in the danger zone for getting a twitter suspension or ban if someone wants to make a point of reporting you. Censorship should definitely be part of this discussion of Revue.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#List_of_no...

I tried to use Twitter for advertising my business. Reason why I have chosen Twitter is because somebody has told me that I can tweet via SMS, which fits perfect to my livestyle w/o smartphone. But after I have followed several dozens of similar businesses in short period of time (1 hour to find them all) my account was banned. Also I could not set up tweeting from SMS. That was my first and last experience with Twitter.

Twitter is in an interesting position as a business. They can buy new platforms all they like but I, and many others, will never consider them because they have already poisoned the well when it comes to censorship. I would never consider them a useful platform for publishing, whether long-form or short. They're destined to be a home for partisans that agree with their orthodoxy and perhaps people with nothing vaguely controversial to say.

I fear the internet will bifurcate due to problems like this.

The internet split long ago, and the vast majority of western consumers won’t give two shits about non-progressive voices getting drowned.

I’m not judging either way, and there is certainly something ironic about Apple using slave labour while taking the moral high ground against hateful assholes and their refusal to moderate.

But it’s the way the wind blows, and you’re honestly not going to be able of resisting.

In the EU we’re certainly going to regulate big tech, but the result wouldn’t lead to Trump not getting banned for inciting violence, if anything it would probably have happened sooner and with a public mandate.

And good luck building a marketable platform out of the users who get kicked off the mainstream internet.

Curious if Twitter will carry-over their draconian (and selectively enforced) censorship rules to Revue.

I assume this was discussed as part of the acquisition? Will publishers have free reign to discuss topics that they want to publish on or do Twitter "rules" govern what's allowed to be discussed?

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