Comment by david_shaw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by david_shaw | Hacker News Reader

> we are dropping the Member price from $50/year to $36/year.

I think this is a great move.

We see a lot of posts on HN about raising the price to increase your userbase, but $50 was too high for a product in such an early release stage. Great for those die-hard early adopters (probably the people after whom Dalton was chasing), but terrible for the everyday Twitter user who is tired of the horrific signal-to-noise ratio on that service.

That said, my opinion would be that $24/year would be even better for an annual subscription. $2/mo is a lot of money for a "Twitter clone," but is cheap enough that it would be easy to convince your friends or colleagues to sign up. $36 might have hit the price point that I'll give it a shot as a (relatively) early adopter, but I'm not sure. $5/month, almost double the annual subscription fee, is too much for a thirty day trial run.

I'm one of the (few?) believers that app.net can really take off. I've tried Twitter, and while I'm relatively active, I can't help but feel that I'm lost in the oft-cited "echo chamber." I'm looking for a service with Twitter-like abilities, strong interaction and an intelligent community, and I think app.net will (someday) be it.

Congrats to Dalton for lowering the price in what must lead to hugely increased participation.

> I'm looking for a service with Twitter-like abilities, strong interaction and an intelligent community, and I think app.net will (someday) be it.

I'm curious... Considering your version of Twitter only consists of who you follow, why do you believe it would be better if those same people were elsewhere?

I think it will be better simply because spammers can sign up for hundreds of Twitter accounts and spam like crazy. When they get booted they just re-sign up. Doing so at app.net means paying $36 bucks, far less likely.

That goes for normal people too, when they pay something they tend to respect it a bit more. Forums have been doing this for years.

Right, but none of that has any effect on your own tweet stream (unless you follow spammers).

If you are talking about searching, the only way search is valuable is if a service gains critical mass, and the only way that happens is if the barrier to entry is low enough that enough users join the service, which will include spammers.

Actually, you can be @-messaged or direct messaged even by people you don't follow, so spammers still have an in.

Spammy @mentions is what blocking is for. Also, you don't get @mention notifications if you don't follow them (see settings. may or may not be enabled by default).

You can only DM people where you both follow each other.

I'm assuming that "spam" is largely either @spam or follow-spam. Also, I suspect that blocking @mention after @mention gets a little old after a while.

It takes half a second to block, and how often do you actually have to block people? I block maybe 1 or 2 / week.

I get almost a dozen spam mentions or mentions directed at a misspelled username everyday. That adds a lot of overhead to my usage that get old to the point where I don't even want to read my mentions steam anymore. Certainly less frequently than I used to.

I'm @derek on Twitter, so I have the same issue. If App.net ever got popular, these names would have the exact same issue. So, that's not a compelling reason to switch.

> Also, you don't get @mention notifications if you don't follow them

Most of the people I follow on Twitter I found in this way. An echo chamber is not what I go to Twitter for.

Actually, I think the quality of your stream will improve. People value things more if they pay for it. In this case, you pay for being a part of a community. It is expected that people will try to keep/improve the quality of the community.

Call me crazy but a lot off people on app.net sound like they are participating in some kind of pyramid scheme. "Just invest some money and your time and app.net will be awesome. I'm having a great time, you'll have to believe".

Lowering the price to $36 after the initial "kickstarter" doesn't scream success to me. If it is that good people would have joined en masse for $50, no?. Will the price be discounted again in two months after everybody who's willing to pay $36 has joined?

Agreed. I'm not sitting here thinking "Oh, well, $50? Not interested... wait, only $36, count me in, then!"

It's like a more desperate grab for customers, but unwilling to admit that the model may not be right.

Yeah, not sure the audience that refuses to pay $50 but will happily pay $36 is all that big.

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