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Comment by aerosmile | Hacker News Reader

The truth is that someone's gotta pay the bills. Pleasing the crowd by giving the content away is easy; finding a way to pay the bills while upsetting the least amount of people who are strategically important for the next month's bills is the hard part.

We can speculate why Jack left, but the lagging stock price certainly didn't help him. So if anything, rather than criticizing him for not giving away the content for free, it seems the guy should have done more of the opposite (to prevent someone else taking his job who will do all that and then some).

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Twitter never "paid the bills" under his leadership. That's what added insult to the injury of removing previous open functionality: they pissed everybody off and didn't even make money as a result. A better idea has been obvious for more than a decade.

Twitter is most valuable to the "influencers" who have lots of monetizable followers, e.g. the various Kardashians with their beauty tips. Therefore, those influencers should be charged for the value that Twitter represents to them. They would gladly pay a percentage of the fees they receive for marketing the various products they recommend, for a Twitter experience that made that marketing more effective. It's hard to imagine why Twitter executives have missed this.

holy crap, yes, this is exactly how Twitter can monetize decentralization.

Charge the kardashian clan x amount of dollars to run a managed version of Twitter's software on kardashian.com and allow for full interoperability with other services that speak a common protocol (the w3c has a protocol. use it!)

you can also have governments and other institutional actors running the hosted software (then you can have @AOC@HOUSE.gov and @Biden@Whitehouse.gov and @x@doj.gov and @professor@mit.edu and @talkinghead@nbc.com) these all can operate as white-labeled instances of the managed Twitter service (basically, how Google Apps worked but with Twitter's software).

Yeah, this won't work.

Parent post reads as very sarcastic to me

unfortunately, I'm making a serious pitch.

Are you just reinventing email?

Email is not public

That would probably only be used by donald@trump.com, and also make them substantially less able to target ads if adopted

Would the influencers actually pay, or just move to TikTok and Instagram?

it's less about where the influencers move to and more about where the audience moves to (they're the ones that view ads).

Everyone knows that audiences can go anywhere (every time there's been a huge technological shift they've made the jump - Radio -> Television. Newspapers -> Twitter et cetera). Influencers go where the engagement is. What I'm trying to say is pay attention to where the audience is at.

I think you have it backwards, or at least you're missing half of the equation. The influencers are also valuable to Twitter, not just the other way around.

Exactly this. Also, AFAIK most large content sponsorship deals take place off the platform between independent business entities. Most sponsored content on YouTube works like this, and YouTube doesn't get a single cent from most of those deals, only a share of video ads revenue. How Twitter can do any better here remains to be seen, and ceding control of the client certainly won't make it any easier.

This is basic network effect. All sorts of social media platforms have monetized their users. Twitter hasn't really tried.

You could just have a rule that any commercial content requires a pro account. Casual users can use the product for free, but those who wish to use the platform for business purposes need to pay a monthly account fee.

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