> Still, even if you cut the userbase by a third to 141 million daily addicted users — which I think vastly overstates Twitter’s elasticity of demand amongst its core user base
Am I reading this correctly, that he believes Twitter would retain considerably more than two thirds of their daily addicted users if they asked them for ~$4/month? Even two thirds sounds grossly unrealistic to me. I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed. I’d even be more than a little surprised if one in ten stayed if you asked them for $1/month.
(I’m mostly a non-spender and non-user of social media. All I’m basing this on is my feelings and observations of the fickleness of consumption and people’s commonly-irrational behaviour around free things.)
I'd expect it to be more like 1 in a hundred staying. Certainly I'd take it as an excuse to cut the tie and try to find which discords people had fled to. They'd probably lose a third of their users simply by annoucing the plan.
There is one plan which they've never considered and probably never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay for the "content creators" you like.
> There is one plan which they've never considered and probably never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay for the "content creators" you like.
Twitter rolled out Super Follows[1] and Twitter Blue[2] a few months ago
twitter blue launched in the US on november 9. i think it's a little early to call it DOA.
super-follows launched widely around the same time, after being in private beta since september. at least in my anecdotal experience, i see quite a few high-profile twitter personalities have enabled it - no idea how many people are actually paying them though.
Super Follows work well, Twitter Blue just doesn't have much pull to it since it doesn't allow editing tweets. People won't drop Patreon immediately, but over time we'll see Super Follows more since Twitter can provide more chances of discovery over Patreon.
Not just Discord, every little social circle would spin up local mastodon instances. It would be really good for decentralization actually, I kinda want them to do this lmao
>Not just Discord, every little social circle would spin up local mastodon instances.
The Hacker News force is strong in this one.
on edit: born of familiarity with the genre here, but no there is not going to be a great upswelling of everyone running to spin up local mastodon instances. Except in some of the techie market, and not even all of us have the time for that.
Maybe a bit tangential to the original comment, but starting my potentially controversial rant on Mastodon and Twitter:
The real problem with Mastodon, is that it's too similar to Twitter! People try out new sites because they have something different in terms of content creation or consumption (Discord, with its real-time communication and flow of conversations, Tiktok for its instant video creation and consumption, etc...) But Mastodon has nothing new to show off, since it's basically a Twitter clone (yeah, with some extra features like federation, but seriously why use it when you have Twitter?)
Mastodon has basically become Twitter for ex-Twitter people who don't want to deal with ratios and wild crowds and have their own "cozy" space. And I've observed people trying to move to Mastodon and realize it's a very quite place and immediately jump back in on Twitter after a month... I understand that there is a niche of people who dig that kind of cozy stuff, but most people still just love the wildness of Twitter where anyone can be commented on, retweeted, quote-tweeted, "ratioed", and "get judged and fucked by the audience". Yes, it's also one of the most horrible and deranged places of the Internet, but people accept that and still log in because we have our own death drives to fulfill. We know that cigarettes and drugs are harmful, but isn't that the point?
There is only so much that one microblogging app differs from another, or one chat app from yet another chat app. But there's more to Mastodon than what you describe. The fact that you have chronological timelines, and not some random algorithmically generated list and recommendations flying in from everywhere, is really refreshing. This means too that when you first use Mastodon, your UI is mostly empty. It seems quiet. The impatient ones then already leave. If you take the time to build your following, then you get a great personal timeline. And the server instance you choose can already give you a nice community in the server timeline. The fediverse is small compared to Twitter user base, but with millions of users there's plenty to explore and engage with. And there's better netiquette in general.
Twitter also has chronological timelines, there’s a button on the top right.
> The fediverse is small compared to Twitter user base, but with millions of users there's plenty to explore and engage with.
…no, there isn’t. The population mainly consists of cartoon child porn artists and enthusiasts (pawoo.net), tech people (official and semi-official instances), small groups of queer people (on smaller closed instances), and that’s mainly it (from what I’ve seen). Engagement on smaller instances seems to be very low, with most toots being 0-1 likes and almost no comments posted on them.
> And there's better netiquette in general.
No, mob/clique mentality from Twitter is already there (but even more amplified by the federation aspect, since instances can ban other instances) The reason Mastodon doesn’t have that much drama is simply because there aren’t enough people there, and I predict a mass migration to Mastodon will be accompanied by the most dramatic controversies.
Oh, I totally agree on all counts. I have no reason to use Mastodon while Twitter still exists and is free. OTOH I'm currently working at a company building a social platform specifically targeted at crypto communities, and it's fun to think about what sorts of different features we can offer to that space of users and their specialized needs.
Please do. A wide portion of the Twitter audience wants crypto/NFT guys to disappear from Twitter, to the extent that they’re making blocklists and using third-party apps to filter out crypto-related posts and people. You’ll make life better for both sides.
Since I don't have enough karma to downvote I'll say why I hate this kind of comment.
1) It violates HN's comment guidelines, "Be kind." "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. "
2) It tries to put you above all the "nerds". As if you're so much smarter than the borderline asperger nerds that are somehow incapable of putting any thought into usability of products.
3) You're one of us, you're here on Hacker News. This is a giant non-monolithic forum.
4) It lacks imagination and it's stuck in the status quo. Innovation doesn't just appear fully formed out of a slick FAANG press conference. Innovation happens one curious motivated hacker at a time pushing barely usable tech forward while people like you sneer at them.
My main point is that "Free" is a strong force to reckon with, in the face of a monthly subscription fee. Of course, Mastodon isn't actually free, but it's the sort of situation like IRC, where only one ops guy willing to spend a little bit can host the space for everyone.
At least, this is the logic I and the rest of my Twitter circle (which is fairly large! I've met probably 50-100 people irl through Twitter, got my job through Twitter, have two accounts with follower counts in the thousands, etc) would likely use if planning to jump ship. People who treat Twitter as a pure feed rather than as a social space might be willing to pay, but part of what makes Twitter such a great news source is that _anyone_ can post current happenings, and how many of those _anyones_ with small accounts will be willing to pay just to use the platform once every week or two?
Of course, Twitter could get around all this by having paid accounts for power users only, but then many of the most important and largest accounts would jump ship and devalue the platform for everyone else, leaving only paid marketing accounts that cater to fans and brands. Not a great situation.
Point being, it's a hard problem, for Twitter to monetize without losing the thing that makes it a great platform, and my guess is charging all users a flat subscription fee ain't gonna cut it, and would produce an exodus to the next-most-similar platform, i.e. Mastodon.
While i agree with you that this is an unlikely future, trump is launching a mastadon instance for himself and his followers, so it is totally a thing that people are doing - slowly.
In fact, the domain of your account could actually be a huge social symbol. Maybe celebrities use @verified.social while everyone else gets @twitter.com or @trump.social or whatever.
masto.host is pretty much the standard managed platform for people who don't want to run their own Mastodon. $7 is only a little more expensive than this proposed price, and you can host a few friends on it.
> There is one plan which they've never considered and probably never will: something like Twitch, where you can pay for the "content creators" you like.
They will never do this.
Twitter has become a self-absorbed status tool for people who believe the supposedly correct things. These days, one of those things is thin-skinned censorship. Allowing payments would reveal that their most popular users are people that do not agree with the worldviews of the Twitterati.
If it comes down to charging marketers for some hand-wavy conception of "reach" that can't be attributed, or direct attribution that would definitively show that Twitter is a biased dumpster fire, Twitter will always pick the former.
Discord is great because of community discoverability and ease of joining IMO. My main gripe with IRC is that I need to add a whole separate server with a separate login to access different channels (which is, ofc, a feature and not a bug). This means I end up with like 4-5 different servers coexisting in my irssi instance. On top of that, I need access to a persistent server session, as some of these servers ban cloud IRC providers like IRCCloud.
Overall, Discord is just a lot better for getting small groups spun up quickly. That said, I also have to use Discord for certain work client communities (mostly in the crypto space), and it's annoying to maintain a separate professional Discord identity from my social one. The compromise I've settled on is that I use social login in the web client and work login on Desktop, but on mobile I have to pick one or the other, or do a lot of annoying login switching. So, to some extent, I totally agree. Ironically easier to SSH into my server on my phone and run tmux if I need to access my various IRC sessions.
Your take is correct. Twitter would be decimated by requiring $4/month to use it, and that might be generous. Could they even get 5-10 million paying subscribers? Probably initially, however the network would erode rapidly and those paying subscribers would drop off.
Someone else would simply step in and fill their shoes with an ad model. The ad model works exceptionally well. Twitter's primary problem is and always has been cost bloat. They should have 30-40% operating income margins; instead it's more like 7%. They have always been very poorly operated and very poorly structured as a business. They did $357m in operating income on $4.8b in sales the last four quarters. When Facebook was that size they had 25-30% operating income margins (while growing very fast), there's no reason Twitter shouldn't be able to at least match that at this stage of their business life (there isn't some great 80% growth surge coming next year that they need to be prepared for, staffing up ahead of time).
They could limit their free tier to say 1000 characters and 10 retweets a day, while retaining unlimited browsing and "likes." If you want more than that, subscribe to Twitter Blue. Or watch a 30 second ad to reload your character/retweet inventory. If they do it right they could get obsessive Tweeters paying $99.99 a pop like free-to-pay gamers trying to max out their gear.
Twitters Revenue/Employee Headcount (not counting any contractors) is currently around 636k/employee. As far as FAANG companies go Twitter has an over bloated workforce.
Except for youtube premium you don't have any alternative for the sites available for free. For twitter there is sea of alternatives that does the exact same thing.
None of them even remotely have Twitter's reach, and more importantly content creators ranging from heads of state to Nobel Prize winners to A-list celebrities.
Right, but people are not paying $4 to read this. At least 99% of the market would drop off. I literally just log on to see what hilarious things papa elon tweet, without it I would just... do something better with my time.
> heads of state to Nobel Prize winners to A-list celebrities
I'm reminded of my OH's retort to someone reportedly claiming fluency in multiple languages, "Great, but do they have anything interesting to say in any of them?"
I'm just not interested in Twitter as a source of information. For me, it's a last-ditch-saloon means to complain to companies who can't or won't publish a customer services email address. That's all.
Twitter is the first place every piece of information has been posted on the internet for a decade. Seeing it asap might not matter for you, but it does for many people.
"Good for you, but there are millions of people who don't share this view, including the whole point of this discussion is for those people."
"Good for you," It seems like you were so mad you forgot how grammar works. Maybe take a few days off from your rage echo chamber. I'm pretty sure whatever you were trying to say was wrong, and you provide an example of why discussions about Twitter aren't relevant only to Twitter users. The majority of people, who are disgusted by Twitter, want it gone, because they don't like what it does to people like you. It turns them into these raging bot-like NPCs who can't even speak in intelligible sentences, which makes it easier for Big Brother to control everything, because instead of rightly hating Big Brother, it's brainwashed you into hating people who advocate for free speech and don't want everything in life controlled by whoever happened to inherit the most money.
Absolutely agreed - what’s the thing in common all the listed ‘paid for’ subscriptions have? Good quality content.
What’s twitters general concept? 140 word tweets that are intended to have very little thought go into them in general. That to me is poor quality content.
The key is that none of these have free alternatives, besides NY Times and Washington Post (I don't know what Charter is). Twitter has many free alternatives so it'd be closer to the bottom of this list.
The blue check, calling card of the Twitter cultural elite, is such a highly coveted status symbol that it's almost incomprehensible to me that Twitter hasn't come up with a way to directly monetize it. It's an incredible amount of value just sitting there.
Seems self-defeating if any significant number of people, like me, block every individual from whom I see a promoted tweet. (I assume that such tweets are the only way an individual rather than a corporation would have a non negligible ad spend?)
I guess not many people do as I do. But promoting one’s stupid tweets is a pretty good indication of someone I do not and will never have any interest in hearing from… I suppose I might make an exception for a sufficiently funny/edgy promoted tweet, but I also suspect that twitter enforces stricter content rules on promoted tweets?
or charge few cents per post for users with large number of followers. if you have thousands for followers you should be little careful in terms of what you post. charging money would put some control.
> I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed.
Yep. They don't even need to go to subscription model to be profitable. Keep on doing what they're doing, maybe trim the employee headcount to something more reasonable, and continue to enjoy modest - as in, unsexy but consistent - year-over-year ad revenue gains.
This might work if Twitter was a private company. Their stock has been an enduring stinker and frankly I would bet on it being sold rather than the owners being satisfied with 'unsexy consistency'
Their stock would have done better had they done this long ago.
Their massive headcount is mostly just a drain on profitability, and very hard to argue there's much value add.
Certainly infra, data science etc takes headcount, but last I heard Twitter has hundreds or thousands of product devs and their product has had close to 0 changes in the last 5 years. What do these people do all day, really?
I mean, they are flat from their 2013 IPO, while basically every other tech has rocketed.
I think they should try it. What's the worst that happens? A horrible blight on society goes under or it becomes something worthwhile for the first time in its corporate history. Either way it improves the world!
A move like that could make very transparent how many of those accounts are bots. It seems risky if the active users are inflated (idk if it is the case but it could very well be)
Well funny you say that, but my parents there were telling me about it !! And they cant speak nor read English so there s something going on. I dont follow French stuff much anymore (am in China), but I ve noticed more racial separatism debate in France (like should we do like the US and start defining races in the seemingly positive intention to protect "weak" races or should we continue saying humans are not split in races but are just a messy gradient of weather-dependent attributes losing the ability to target policies at people based on those attributes)
Am I reading this correctly, that he believes Twitter would retain considerably more than two thirds of their daily addicted users if they asked them for ~$4/month? Even two thirds sounds grossly unrealistic to me. I would be astonished if even one in ten stayed. I’d even be more than a little surprised if one in ten stayed if you asked them for $1/month.
(I’m mostly a non-spender and non-user of social media. All I’m basing this on is my feelings and observations of the fickleness of consumption and people’s commonly-irrational behaviour around free things.)