Revue will shut down and all data will be deleted
help.getrevue.co
help.getrevue.co
The majority of the team was cut in the first wave of Twitter layoffs on 4 November (wrote about this [1]) - when 50% of people were let go. By this time, most of them were working on Twitter's long form tweets, which feature was being tested with customers.
So this decision was indirectly made on the first week of the Twitter takeover. In the end, it was perhaps two people left from the old Revue team. Today, there's only the founder of Revue, who wrote this article, everyone else let go AFAIK.
What was very, very surprising to me is how, a month and a half later, Elon Musk replied to a question on how he's open to the idea of acquiring Substack [2]. But he just shut down Revue, which was exactly "Twitter's Substack" version with all the same features: newsletters, support for paid, plus first-class integration into Twitter that Substack does not have.
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/cruel-changes-at-twitter
Google Video was "Google's YouTube" but Google still decided YouTube was worth acquiring.
Every CEO is “open to” any acquisition, just as any VC is “open to” funding any company. At least until someone asks for terms.
The only interpretation of “open to” in the business world is “not a hard, irreversible ‘no’.”
mediuhhh, mediyum, medi...hmmm
ergo: wrong proven
Have you ever read an article where you scroll down and it fades in a dialog asking you to subscribe to their newsletter, and then you have to click "Let me read it first" to keep going? The platform that site is running on is Substack.
But yes now that you described it, I remember that experience but didn't associate with the brandname "substack"
I just don't like the blogging experience, I never did. I'd much rather consume my information in video content. I feel like the ways they can convey the information is much more dynamic, and its painfully obvious if they are just trying to fluff the video for time. With some blogs, they add so much fluff writing and reading isn't something I particularly enjoy.
The video experience is getting worse, with in video sponsors. personally, content creators should be forced to tag the video sections that are for sponsorship and the player should be able to automatically skip them.
On the very first screen, I'm asked to select my country and time zone.
Except the time zone selector only has +1 hour increments. You can choose UTC+5 or UTC+6, but you can't choose UTC+5:30 (which is my time zone).
So I had to choose UTC+5.
This multibillion dollar corporation was running a multibillion ad platform where customers couldn't even choose their correct time zone.
No wonder they couldn't make any money, even during the pandemic.
As far as damage goes, I think Musk might still be good for Twitter, maybe even for Revue in the long term.
prestigious on Jan 26, 2021 | prev | next [–]
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.
True, but this also sounds like Google, or Youtube, or Facebook, or Apple, or the Play Store, or payment processors, or github, or...
> Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. ... 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!
or
> 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.
Monkey's paw and all that, but not bad otherwise.
Indeed they did.
It’s telling that the sign in with twitter functionality was broken for a few days after the initial announcement. Was seriously worried I wouldn’t be able to download my subscriber list and content.
Just never got any upvotes.
What does that mean exactly? > "Twitter hasn't obtained permission for you"?
Honestly, I don't think that's a particularly strong legal defense, but IANAL.
I do appreciate the revue team for letting users port their subscribers to other services. This is basic decency, but with Twitter banning links to other social media, I don't know what to expect from them anymore.
It's also one of endless examples of the downsides of acquisition for users (if not the founder/team with equity, who know the game they're playing). I often think of the analogy of rich kids from dysfunctional families who buy a lot of cool stuff and don't really do much with it after their social signal moment. Been on both side of this to some degree in the industry and it's never fun to see the users let down at the end of it.
While this is part of what keeps the industry going, it would be nice to see more open source outcomes for such well designed products. But to end on a positive... well done team, hope you all go on to make awesome things again.
A lot of profile and newsletter links of the form "https://www.getrevue.co/profile/..." are going to be dead very soon.
Next time I try to run a newsletter it will be something I self-host.
Open APIs > short form mobile video > creator owned long form text?
> According to the Times, Substack separately told investors that it saw revenue of just $9 million last year. (It told the Times directly in a story last month that it has hundreds of thousands of paid newsletters now on the platform.)
https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/26/report-substack-the-highly...
Keeping the platform running might be more of a tech endeavour than a business management skill.
Who knows, maybe tech people can learn business easier than business people can learn tech.
Still, some argue MBAs rarely have business experience. Others say they usually predict the next 5 years beard in the direction of the past 5.
what's the Revue alternative?
1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1607936197602562050
2. https://twitter.com/hamishmckenzie/status/132311671881069363...
Just invest in the Substack competitor that your company _already has_...
Shutting down Revue moves more users to Substack
On Twitter, Musk gets dunked on daily, as do his $8/month boosters, all of whom are at the top of the replies (hence creating a larger dunk attack vector).
Substack is more 'buttoned-down', everybody there is trying to be a "thought leader", so it already skews more "rich guys know better", even without considering all the conservative op-ed writers that have paid gigs there.
...
> "Twitter, Inc. has not obtained permission for you to use subscriber information for any purpose."
Twitter thinks it has permission to provide account owners with their subscriber lists but explicitly says that those same account owners have no permissions of their own for the data.
I do not think this is how how most countries' data privacy laws work.
This is a very murky situation and Twitter seem to be writing it all off with a wink and a nod.
According to Revue's platform privacy policy[0], Revue processes subscriber emails as a data processor. Each newsletter publisher owns the email addresses of their respective audiences. Revue would have a legal obligation to make those email addresses available to the newsletter publishers until the shutdown date.
Direct subscribers are users who subscribed themselves via the Revue service. and the privacy policy says nothing about providing direct subscribers' private data to the Publisher.
Their closure announcement does not distinguish between the types of subscriber.
So either the Publisher is only getting the indirect subscribers' info (and isn't being told they are losing the direct subscribers) or the Publisher is getting direct subscriber info which the direct subscriber never agreed to allowing (unless that is a separate agreement from the privacy policy, in which case presumably some permission was indeed obtained).
"Twitter has not obtained permission for you" is not the same as "you have no permissions"
You have whatever permissions you brought to the table, and nothing else.