Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

This is very intriguing. I'm most interested to see over time if super following is used mainly for:

1. Real-time financially valuable tweets from experts (market analysts, crypto experts, breaking news that can move stock markets, etc.), where the tweets are perceived as genuinely worth paying for

2. Supporting creative types -- musicians, comedians, etc. -- not necessarily for the tweets themselves, but just to support them because you like them, and maybe you'll get early access to show tickets too or something

3. Paying for content that's genuinely interesting in itself, e.g. short newsletters in tweet form.

I'm not sure the price is high enough for #1 to be a viable business model. I'm not sure enough people will voluntarily pay #2 to make a dent (or they already use Patreon instead). And #3 seems particularly ill-suited to Twitter's short-form.

But we'll see -- it would be nice if this did wind up supporting people financially.

Seems like they're trying to get back a piece of the Patreon pie, similar to Twitch with all its (now) built-in sponsorship options.

> the tweets are perceived as genuinely worth paying for

If the information is really so valuable, then either:

1) the expected value of paying for it is positive, the purveyor would be better playing the market themself (or working for a hedge fund...) than selling it

2) the expected value of paying for it is negative, the people buying for it are wasting their money

Not all market transactions are done to make money on the trade itself, many are done to protect a larger business interest. This is very uncommon on stock markets, but is very common on commodity markets. You don't generally hear much discussion of commodity markets because they are not the big way (at least not today) for people doing trading to make it rich quick.

Most consumer level goods have become insulated from price fluctuations in commodity markets, but there is still some variation at the consumer level in the price of fresh fish and meats, and sometimes fresh fruits and vegetables.

At the scale restaurants buy, and especially large chains or higher scale restaurants, price fluctuations can make a big impact on profitability. Getting tipped off early to a situation that might impact prices can allow a company to lock in a futures contract at the current prices for delivery later on when prices have risen before the people selling know that prices are about to go up.

The result is that the people gathering the data and producing information may not be in a position to get value directly, they are not already trading in those commodity, but people already doing that trading may get value from better or faster information on the market.

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