I would prefer to pay for Twitter

You would pay for Twitter, but you would not outbid the advertisers, who unlike you are willing to subsidize the people who won't pay for Twitter. Which is just a complicated way of saying that if Twitter charged for access, it would charge substantially more than you'd expect them to.

Excuse my slight condescending tone, but I don't think he really understands what twitter is for, and who benefits from its service. The model explained, which was tried by app.net, doesn't coincide with the real idea behind twitter in the first place.

A neighbor once said to me, we should pay to use the sidewalks in our city; I don't think she understood the ramifications of such a move, but it made sense in her mind because she /could/ pay for the sidewalk and the model worked for her. -yet she didn't understand that the sidewalk wasn't even necessarily meant for her. The same sides she paces, kids use to travel to school everyday, homeless persons use to panhandle, families use to travel to work everyday, and every once in a while some lune is up there with a sign expressing their view.

Twitter is no different. Sure we use twitter to post about our latest projects and greatest food pictures, however somewhere someone is using twitter to alert his friends that government and police are encroaching the neighborhood, quick alerting those near about a wildfire, or trying to start

Just because you could pay for want, doesn't mean someone else has the means to pay for necessity. I don't mind sharing a common good/service even though I know someone else might not be paying the same amount as I.

>(By the way, if significant portions of your userbase are capable of becoming addicted to your product, consider that it may not be fully ethical to produce it.)

Well, there goes the gaming industry.

Isn't there a paid Twitter clone that nobody uses that allows you to do exactly that, pay for it?

Wasn't that app.net?

When discussing Twitter I always keep this thing in mind http://paulgraham.com/twitter.html

Twitter is not a service it is (more) a protocol.

So it that sense people can and should use it anyway they want. And paying for it doesn't/shouldn't change that. I have a certain way of using Twitter that makes it valuable for me. But a lot of people I know seem to be shouting without listening or engaging. But hey, if that works for you, go right ahead.

Also for the other arguments: - I do feel social pressure in following back. So that's just personal I guess.

- I always felt the "favorite" feature is a bit 'off'. I used to use this to bookmark tweets with interesting links (read later kind of thing). But now it seems to be used as the "Like" for Twitter. But Twitter itself isn't utilizing it as such.

People favoriting tweets doesn't change your timeline.

You can go to "Discover" but that is not the same. So I always felt Twitter is missing a feature OR they are not utilizing the Favorite thing the right way.

The problem is with something like twitter, you don't know how valuable it's going to be for you until start using it for a length of time. I'd probably be hesitant to pay even $5 for it if I though I might only tweet once or twice. Of course I'd be willing to pay more if it became a valuable social or business tool but I have no way of knowing.

It's very easy to be friends with someone on Facebook but not follow them. In the upper right of every post is a menu that lets you unfollow them. At least today, the concept of "friend" is more about access permissions than "following"

But ultimately Twitter vs. Facebook is a very dull argument. Yes, the design of the platform makes a difference, but ultimately any individual's experience is going to be dominated by the people they interact with. Just because a person tries platform X and doesn't like it doesn't mean that everyone else is going to have the same experience.

But neither of these would be what they are as paid services. Their primary value depends on the vast number of users and that just doesn't happen with paid services.

I would pay for Twitter as well. Though it would be a huge backlash, I think it would clean things up quite a bit.

I was one of the people who sprung for app.net. It was a crazy idea, and it's unfortunate it didn't take off. In the time App.net was buzzing with activity I did notice a significant lack of spam and fake profiles. It was nice, but it seems now most have abandoned it.

Even if you paid for it, they'd still have the economic incentive to extract money by selling your data and such.

As already stated this was tried with app.net. A spectacular failure of marketing aside, no one sprung for it.

This is also partially why ala carte tv programming and iTunes tv is so expensive: People are not willing to pay anywhere close to how much advertisers/marketing/PR firms are.

I think twitter needs to find its own path to success, and collections from the users is not it.

Here's my own short opinion about it: https://medium.com/p/710ed2905929

I would pay for twitter for a subscription if they let developers sell as many twitter clients to subscribers because twitter's clients are not very good.

Then they would lose the majority of users. Its a lot harder to increase your price from $0.00 to $0.01 than increasing your price from $0.01 to $1.00.

I would not pay for Twitter because I am already paying for it.

Remember the saying "if you are getting it for free, you are the product"?

Twitter get's my time and data, adverts are displayed to me and I get to use the service.

Everpix charged. It's not a guarantee of survival.

You don't need to pay to ensure the existence of a microblogging system. pump.io or GNU Social will continue to be around whether or not anyone pays for them.

I would pay for twitter.