Twitter acquires Revue

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/making-twitter-a-better-home-for-writers.html

by camillovisini • 5 years ago

227 259 5 years ago

blog.twitter.com

thisistheend123• 5 years ago

Will this be a competition for substack?

cabalamat2• 5 years ago

That's what i was thinking -- this is Twitter's version of substack.

throwaway8943452• 5 years ago

Me too. I’m really not optimistic about the content that Twitter will curate here; I worry that they’ll out-compete substack by peddling their usual outrage addiction, perhaps not right away but in time. The content that one might see on substack will be eventually buried on Twitter in exchange for the content that is most likely to make you click links. Here’s to hoping I’m wrong.

pboutros• 5 years ago

This is a really smart acquisition for Twitter to make. I'm subscribed to a number of substacks (and Patreons) that I only discovered through creators on Twitter.

Job #1 for twitter should be making it easy to subscribe to Revue newsletters from within Twitter. Please do not put the team that rolled out Fleets in charge of Job #1 ;)

nikivi• 5 years ago

What did you dislike about Fleets rollout?

blakesterz• 5 years ago

I don't normally answer questions for others, but I feel uniquely qualified to chime in on this one!

I am a pretty heavy Twitter user and have been for a long time. It's really the only "social" thing I use.

I know Fleets is a Twitter thing... I remember seeing it someplace, maybe a story on Hacker News or something? Was it something like a replacement for Vine maybe? Or was it something with threaded conversations? Am I seeing Fleets in my feed? What do they look like? Are they being used at all?

I really have no idea what Fleets is and I use Twitter all the time. Whatever Fleets is I agree with pboutros, don't put that same team in charge of anything else, this rollout didn't work.

(I may be missing something totally obvious and awesome here! Maybe Fleets is the greatest thing since Google+ and I'm to set in my ways to notice or care? This could very well be another "It's not you, it's me" thing and I'm too dense to see it.)

whimsicalism2• 5 years ago

They are incongruous with how I see most people using twitter. If I wanted the fleet, I would follow them on instagram.

siruva076• 5 years ago

Excellent acquisition. Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%. I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service.

Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. No political ads to worry about. No interference with the product experience. And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year.

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! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail).

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.

user-the-name9• 5 years ago

An edit button does not make sense for a service like Twitter. There are way to many ways to abuse it, and any solution that tries to deal with those just ends up being equivalent to what already exists: Delete and repost.

siruva076• 5 years ago

Why does an edit button not make sense for a service like Twitter? How would it be abused?

Deleting and reposting hurts and would eliminate engagement statistics.

From a product experience, edited tweets, similar to Slack, could show an "(edited)" that when clicked on let's a user see the version history. That way, it can't be abused, but does allow for minor typos (e.g. https://twitter.com/sir/status/1353737949729468416)

corobo5• 5 years ago

and any solution that tries to deal with those just ends up being equivalent to what already exists: Delete and repost.

I'd love this honestly. Even if it was just a delete and repost under the hood, generally I find I want an edit button just after posting and noticing all the typos.

As long as the interface interacted like an edit form rather than have me copy and then rebuild the tweet I'd be good to go.

rightbyte• 5 years ago

I am a bit cynical about that Spyware-aaS companies like FB would stop spying just becouse you paid them. I mean I bought a Samsung TV for 1000USD and still it tries to show adds and spy. The temptation to increase margins is high no matter what.

I am not that up to date with Twitter. Are they in the same class as FB and Google?

RankingMember• 5 years ago

The temptation to increase margins is high no matter what.

yep, I remember when cable tv was ad-free (because who would've dreamt people would be ok with paying a subscription fee while still getting ads shoved down their throat?)

rozab• 5 years ago

Correct. I don't understand why people suggest direct revenue streams would help in this regard. Have you seen Facebook's profit margins? They don't need to spy on people.

macspoofing• 5 years ago

I am a bit cynical about that Spyware-aaS companies like FB would stop spying just becouse you paid them.

So am I. The problem is that the paying members are also the same members that are most valuable to advertisers (because they have disposable cash and are probably 'power users' of the platform), so there is an incentive to 'sell them' to advertisers as well.

boogies2• 5 years ago

companies [don’t] stop spying just becouse you paid them

I think Windows (10 especially) is Exhibit A here (its “users” are definitely the product, but MS is happy to take their free money — or not, you can download it for $0 from their site, and cheap activation keys are easy to find), and the world’s first trillion dollar company is Exhibit B — its end-users are customers in many senses of the word, and they’re not the product, but a product that they offer to their walled garden’s developers with strings attached.

simias• 5 years ago

Indeed, and especially if they already have the tracking tech anyway. Why bother turning it off?

I wish that paying for Spotify meant that my privacy would be respected, but I have zero illusions that they basically gather at least as much data as free customers.

leppr• 5 years ago

A derivative take on this is that getting people used to paying for internet services, would enable more respectful platforms that need the subscription revenue, to exist.

I also would never pay for participation in a monolithic user-generated content platform with questionable "curation" (e.g. Youtube Premium), but directly paying for hosting/moderation/admin work is still the way forward IMO.

throwawayboise2• 5 years ago

I think you're right, but if people had to pay even a few dollars a month for Facebook and Twitter I think it would make a big dent in amount of nonstop drivel and shitposting that goes on. And that's another reason it won't happen, it would reduce eyeballs for the ads.

boogies2• 5 years ago

Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product

You’re not the product in the Fediverse, where Pleroma says you can run a small server for ~$4/month (https://pleroma.social/blog/2021/01/13/the-big-pleroma-and-f...). Or you can join someone else’s instance and donate eg. to GNU Social’s lead developer on Liberapay (https://liberapay.com/diogo/donate) or Mastodon on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/mastodon, $1/month gives you access ironically to a Discord channel).

motoboi• 5 years ago

If they charge 5 to 15 reais per month 80% of Brazil’s users will exit Twitter and Facebook for the free competitor the same day. I suppose the same would happen anywhere the exchange rate is unfavorable.

A price for FB in Brazil? R$ 1 ($0,2). And the free option would still get a huge market share.

Tenoke• 5 years ago

For what is worth, those users also earn them much lees revenue, so the cost can be lower, too.

notahacker• 5 years ago

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! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail).

So my inbox is the product? I think the number of people willing to pay $36 per annum to not see sponsored content in amongst all the organic marketing spam in newsfeeds is a negligible proportion of the user base, especially since ad blockers can be configured to hide it anyway.

hderms• 5 years ago

Presumably none of these big players want to charge money for a pro service because it would be difficult to walk back on w.r.t ad revenue. The ad purchasers would probably take issue with it, especially given that they're explicitly valuing their user base at presumably less than they're charging for advertising access to them.

Not to say it couldn't work, but I'm guessing the reason it hasn't been tried is at least partially do to there being no going back

sneak2• 5 years ago

I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service.

I don't. Centralization of censorship ability in a small number of platforms is a bad thing for everyone. Twitter and Instagram or any other centralized censor becoming a "better service" makes our whole society worse.

It's time to leave Twitter and never look back. Only assholes tell other adults what they're allowed to see or read.

I tolerated Twitter deciding what I was allowed to write for a dozen years. When they started censoring search and dictating what I was allowed to read, I deleted my account.

Sharecropping on someone else's platform is a dead end.

Applejinx• 5 years ago

Funnily enough, just last week I deleted both Facebook and Twitter, even though they 'cost me nothing'.

nathias• 5 years ago

I won't believe that until I see it, you can most definitely both pay and be the product.

Nacdor3• 5 years ago

Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%.

Twitter's willingness to silence users for political reasons will ensure this service never competes with Substack in any meaningful way.

I don't doubt that it will be popular, but you won't see top-tier independent journalists building their houses on a Twitter's land after what we learned in the past year.

reidjs2• 5 years ago

I assume you're mainly referring to Trump.

Inciting a coup is technically a political reason, but I think most people agree that's a valid reason to silence someone.

Jugurtha• 5 years ago

I think this opinion is popular because Substack is still a baby that hasn't had to deal grown-up situations. We're always pure and grandstanding when we're young and we don't have to make hard decisions, for we're not in hard situations that require them in the first place.

It's easier for a service to say "We'll always stand by our users" when they have like two users, and none of are heads of states, controversial personalities with huge audiences, diplomats, operatives, etc.

Let's wait and see what Substack's position will become when it becomes a service that matters.

patrickaljord• 5 years ago

There is no way in hell Twitter is going to give up on ads any time soon. Maintaining a service like Twitter costs hundreds of millions of dollars in infra and workers and it's highly unlikely that Revue could cover those costs. Even if by some miracle, Revue manages to pays the bill, it would be impossible to justify to shareholders giving up on such a huge source of revenue that is ads.

tl;dr twitter giving up on ads ain't happening

throwawaysea2• 5 years ago

I am very fearful of where that goes. Twitter and Facebook delete lots of conversations that offend their progressive political sensibilities. Even if people paid for these services, they would still be operating within those biased chambers as a result. I would rather have someone independent like Substack win this space instead of seeing these companies take it all just because of their financial warchests and the power of network effects making them immune to competition.

dumbfounder• 5 years ago

The second you charge you cut out a large chunk of your audience. The second you cut out a large chunk of your audience you give up what makes Twitter useful. Facebook has the same issue, if only 10% of your friends are on there, why would you want to be there?

enos_feedler4• 5 years ago

100% agree with the business model switch. I think products have a natural business model and for Twitter it's not advertising. I think it took time for the market to have appetite to pay for more subs, but it's here now. I really think this takes Twitter to the next level.

0x1F8B• 5 years ago

Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter.

Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter.

tenebrisalietum• 5 years ago

I'm sure they would figure out a way to roll it into your phone bill.

I think it would be a good thing. This sounds harsh but honestly most of the the types of people that are unwilling to pay $1-3 per month for the service are probably the types that don't make the service a better social network.

It would also hopefully disincentivize government agencies and maybe even politicians from using it as a channel of communications since it's more along the lines of a traditional business arrangement and not a "free, TV-like" service.

jtsiskin• 5 years ago

Facebook makes $30-40 ARPU in the US+Canada.

https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3...

krrrh• 5 years ago

It’s important to factor in how much cost savings Facebook could realize by eliminating most of its advertising department and associated engineering when looking at how moving off an advertising model might affect profitability. I have no idea what the magnitude of this is, but a good portion of that $30-40 has to get chewed up by spending on stuff that makes the platform less useful to the end users.

siruva076• 5 years ago

Got it. Looks like I pulled my figure on a quarterly basis which syncs with this annualized math.

FB is on the high end of ARPU. Most other services are cents to low dollars.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/facebook-towers-over-rivals-...

csomar• 5 years ago

And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year.

The problem is that they are making the bulk of their money from the top tier of their users (which is a really tiny percentage); and the rest is not monetize-able. If your are making $80-100 from your top guys (who will probably, gladly, pay $5/month subscription), you still come short. And the mass that makes you $0/year is not going to pay at any price, anyway. They are just there to keep the higher value audience.

stonecraftwolf• 5 years ago

Obligatory, but this really seems to confuse the point: their revenue doesn’t come from their users at all. It comes from selling their users to advertisers.

nunez• 5 years ago

I am absolutely not convinced that Facebook and their like would make more money as a paid service. People are okay with giving up (or not knowing that they are giving up) privacy to use products like social media. Unlike television (where there aren’t any free alternatives), Facebook would lose market share overnight if a somewhat-competent but free competitor sprang up.

I am also not convinced that people would pay to just get rid of ads, especially when there are free and easy alternatives available.

I _am_ convinced that a company like Facebook will try to launch a paid content service with their own exclusives since that seems to be the thing that big content providers are doing.

jawns• 5 years ago

TWEET 1/7: It's ironic that the way Twitter proposes to improve its platform for writers is to move them off Twitter proper.

TWEET 2/7: Writers use Twitter begrudgingly because that's where the eyeballs are, but it is a terrible communications platform for any writing longer than a single tweet.

TWEET 3/7: Microblogging is core to its brand, but I shudder whenever I see a thread marked 1 of 22. Because of the character limitation, the writing on Twitter has a wooden cadence.

TWEET 4/7: The best thing Twitter could do for writers is give them some way to go beyond the standard character limit within the core platform.

TWEET 5/7: The limit doesn't need to be lifted entirely; maybe anything beyond the limit can be hidden by default, but with an option to reveal it.

TWEET 6/7: Restricting how writers write can sometimes encourage better writing. But Twitter is one of the largest communications platforms in the world, and it's got to reckon with that.

TWEET 7/7: Imagine if, instead of a char limit, you could only write rhyming couplets! It would be fun as a niche site, but not as a site used to communicate breaking news and longer, more thoughtful writing.

COUPLET 1/1: Twitter's a major communications hub, like it or not. Its restrictions on writing are a big blind spot.

herodoturtle6• 5 years ago

Or alternatively (in my humble opinion), they should stop trying to be what they're not (a long form blogging platform) and instead stick to what they excel at (short broadcasts that are hashtag groupable and searchable).

thesuitonym• 5 years ago

The problem isn't Twitter trying to be something it's not, it's that the short broadcasts that are hashtag groupable just is not a useful platform. People want long form writing platforms, but don't want to choose between Twitter, where people are, and blogging, where people aren't.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

Hey you edited your tweets thats not allowed #followtherules

2Gkashmiri3• 5 years ago

shout out to writefreely, https://github.com/writeas/writefreely

this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool.

chrisweekly• 5 years ago

Thanks for the link! Starred / bookmarked, will look closer before jumping onto substack or revue (twitter's new thing).

andrew_2• 5 years ago

Writefreely is awesome, and their devs were highly available in my experience with them. Discovered when Medium went the way of paywalls, I've donated several times to help keep the project alive.

Tomte• 5 years ago

I take a look at write.as (the hosted version), and find one of the first posts in the community section: https://write.as/tmo/5-30-am-coffee-to-kick-things-off

This post has just over 1800 characters (copy/pasted everything visible into Notepad++), no images whatsoever, and it takes 776ms to load and transfers 238 kilobytes.

Why are minimalist seeming web sited often so obese (https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)?

2Gkashmiri3• 5 years ago

dunno. is it due to scripts on html page that does highlighting? or

mberning• 5 years ago

If you write anything important or at all at risk of becoming controversial twitter should be nothing more than a promotion engine.

rriepe• 5 years ago

Are you allowed to disagree?

cjlm• 5 years ago

This space is quite interesting. You have the gorilla at the picnic (Substack), the stagnating old timers (TinyLetter), the member management platforms (Memberful, probably Mailchimp), the link dump creators (curated.co) and the spunky indie upstarts (Buttondown).

asicsp• 5 years ago

There's membership feature on gumroad as well: https://gumroad.com/gumroad/p/introducing-gumroad-membership...

FalconSensei4• 5 years ago

Yeah, but I guess by going free, Revue is going to grab a good chunk of the space.

For example, curated.co seems nice, but $25 bucks a month for sending a newsletter that doesn't even have a single subscriber?

Kye• 5 years ago

MailChimp owns TinyLetter.

andrew_2• 5 years ago

As someone who moved away from Twitter, the last thing I need in my life is another Twitter-owned property. The politics of the last month aside, Twitter is a foul, trite, snide place where the worst of us are trumpeted to the loudest voice and widest audience. The negativity and incentive to waste hours and focus are pervasive in every community I've participated in. Of course, YMMV. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to curate and filter away those things that I abhor about Twitter. A few weeks removed and my mental state feels all the better for it. Color me cynical, but I'll pass on another attempt for Twitter to monetize my attention.

tentacleuno2• 5 years ago

I find it somewhat ironic that Twitter has only now banned Trump. They allowed him to stay on his platform so more people would sign-up, follow him and get radicalised. Now he's no longer the President, they've suddenly acquired morality. Fool me once, eh.

herodoturtle6• 5 years ago

Didn't they ban him as a protective measure to curb additional violence after he incited the storming of the capitol?

I don't think twitter's tactics are as nefarious as you make them out to be.

siruva076• 5 years ago

<sigh> I hear you. But Twitter is an incredible service. From the Arab spring to people like @balajis who broke COVID (for me at least) before major news networks.

The only interactive we have as users is positive (a heart or retweet) vs negative (thumbs down on Youtube, downvote on reddit).

I think a broken heart, </3, essentially as a downvote, could do a lot to make Twitter more of a community that rewards and punishes, rather than just allows people to exist in their own eco-chamber. The politicians of the last month would have likely seen way more downvotes / broken hearts than favs and retweets, and that might have done something for them personally...it's at least worth a test if anyone at Twitter reads this :).

FalconSensei4• 5 years ago

I think a broken heart, </3, essentially as a downvote,

God please no, that's the reason I love Twitter. The day people start downvoting Tweets because they disagree, instead of replying, is the day I make my account private, or leave the service.

oneeyedpigeon2• 5 years ago

YMMV

It does, enormously. I've reached out to people via Twitter and had nothing but great experiences. I've had dialogue with people I would never have had access to before. IME, so long as you stick away from politics, Twitter is fine but, of course, this depends on who you follow and interact with.

danielscrubs• 5 years ago

I like it but I have a policy to unfollow if they start to tweet about anything they don’t work in. So a programmer that talks about politics is going to be unfollowed. Also they have to consistently be able to educate me and not just say things I agree with.

Works pretty well. Main drawback is that it’s just singular focus nerds.

A drawback is that people don’t always seem charitable in their thoughts of why I choose to unfollow.

I guess I could just as easily follow their blogs instead of Twitter though.

cpeterso• 5 years ago

Muting words related to political topics or the meme of the week can make a huge improvement in your Twitter timeline.

I’m bummed that Twitter limits the mute list to only 200 words. I’m maxed out and have to remove a word when I want to mute a new one.

PaulDavisThe1st• 5 years ago

I suspect that one problem on Twitter is how wide you "open the door". If you crack it open just a little (i.e. limited follows), you can have a nice, useful, informative stream there, without all the negativity. But if you insist on opening the door fairly wide (i.e. lots more follows), you're effectively inviting the whole world in.

And guess what? "the whole world", taken as a whole, isn't so great.

pembrook2• 5 years ago

Starting today, we’re making Revue’s Pro features free for all accounts and lowering the paid newsletter fee to 5%

...and there goes Substack's entire business.

Overall, this is great for writers however. The missing component to Substack was the discovery/social mechanism. From a strategic perspective, it's easier to bolt on newsletter sending than it is to build a new social network.

So this was always a huge risk for Substack as a platform. But hey, there's also an alternate universe where Twitter stays dumb and lazy and never crushes Substack. So I see why investors took the risk.

But I see no path forward for Substack if Twitter manages to not completely botch this.

offtop54• 5 years ago

Not exactly. The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now.

I think it's the same thing with Slack, Slack only exists because Microsoft teams is made by Microsoft.

I swear to God it's mostly a placebo effect, but you're like oh yeah we're using slack we're the cool kids now. Many companies will have a single breakaway team that uses slack just to feel cool.

But if $10 a month makes a developer happier she might produce another $500 in value.

pembrook2• 5 years ago

The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now.

I see "current press sentiment" as an irrelevant factor. Just wait until some prominent right winger heads to Substack and the journalists start aiming their sights.

The point is, if I'm going to start a paid newsletter, am I willing to give up an extra 5% of my income for the same feature set?

The answer is hell no. Substack will have to lower their prices, and then the feature war will begin. Twitter will always have the upper hand given they can directly integrate newsletter sign up forms into twitter.

But hey, bureaucratic incompetence is endemic at Twitter, so they might screw up this obvious path to victory they have in front of them.

ajford• 5 years ago

We use both Slack and Teams. I strongly disagree that it's the 'cool factor' making Slack better. Teams is just a pain to use for 70% of my day-to-day messaging needs. Teams works well for meetings and large presentations. For intra-team communication and bot integration, Slack wins hands down for my team.

nwsm• 5 years ago

The Twitter brand isn't looking so hot right now.

Can you explain? I use Twitter daily (hourly) and haven't read anything that lessened my opinion of them. Are you talking about censorship / Trump stuff? Personally they have not gotten on my bad side with any of that.

Slack only exists because Microsoft teams is made by Microsoft

I'm also not sure what you mean by this. Microsoft Teams exists because of Slack.

splaytreemap• 5 years ago

Let's see if the DOJ goes after them for predatory pricing first. Twitter may have bought themselves enough favor with the Biden administration that he'll let it slide.

crocodiletears3• 5 years ago

A few of Substack's writers wouldn't be allowed for long on a Twitter-owned platforms, and they know it. Writers like Greenwald, Yarvin, and Taibbi are all to varying degrees, transgressive enough and critical enough of social media to perceive the extra cut Substack takes as a reasonable ask in exchange for a greater level of platform security.

Substack will certainly lose a lot of writers, but I think it'll be safe as a profitable niche alternative.

kixiQu• 5 years ago

Aren't they all active on Twitter? Greenwald certainly is. It's a major part of their brand-building effort already at the very least

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

A few of Substack’s writers wouldn’t be allowed for long on a Twitter-owned platforms, and they know it.

Maybe, but two of your three examples clearly would be allowed, and quite active, for quite a while "on a Twitter-owned platform":

Writers like Greenwald,

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald (1.5M followers, since Aug 2008)

Yarvin,

The only one without an obvious verified account on Twitter. There's a no-activity @CurtisYarvin regular account, though.

and Taibbi

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi (0.5M followers, since May 2009)

geonnave• 5 years ago

Clearly and unsurprisingly this is to compete with Substack. Great move.

Now, regarding character limits, beyond linking to a personal website or having a newsletter, I have seen avid content creators posting images containing small essays directly on Twitter to allow a deeper in-app reading experience.

Maybe this should be a next, and less trivial, problem for Twitter to work on.

d3sandoval• 5 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree. Making automatic alt-text available for those types of posts would go a long way in addressing the accessibility issues that plague image posts on Twitter. Their current UX for adding alt-text is painful and content authors are unlikely to use it... Seems like a great place for automation/OCR

oneeyedpigeon2• 5 years ago

If the OCR is good enough to deal with these text posts, isn't it already built into screen reading software that would make the alt-text duplication unnecessary?

abinaya_rl• 5 years ago

This is really great acquisition. Maybe this is the path towards building the paid Twitter service?

seneca• 5 years ago

Twitter is in an interesting position as a business. They can buy new platforms all they like but I, and many others, will never consider them because they have already poisoned the well when it comes to censorship. I would never consider them a useful platform for publishing, whether long-form or short. They're destined to be a home for partisans that agree with their orthodoxy and perhaps people with nothing vaguely controversial to say.

I fear the internet will bifurcate due to problems like this.

moksly• 5 years ago

The internet split long ago, and the vast majority of western consumers won’t give two shits about non-progressive voices getting drowned.

I’m not judging either way, and there is certainly something ironic about Apple using slave labour while taking the moral high ground against hateful assholes and their refusal to moderate.

But it’s the way the wind blows, and you’re honestly not going to be able of resisting.

In the EU we’re certainly going to regulate big tech, but the result wouldn’t lead to Trump not getting banned for inciting violence, if anything it would probably have happened sooner and with a public mandate.

And good luck building a marketable platform out of the users who get kicked off the mainstream internet.

doublerabbit• 5 years ago

And so, we now enter the tumblr phase of Twitter.

herodoturtle6• 5 years ago

twittr

sturza• 5 years ago

Seems like substack discovered a market and now they’re competing

eimrine• 5 years ago

I tried to use Twitter for advertising my business. Reason why I have chosen Twitter is because somebody has told me that I can tweet via SMS, which fits perfect to my livestyle w/o smartphone. But after I have followed several dozens of similar businesses in short period of time (1 hour to find them all) my account was banned. Also I could not set up tweeting from SMS. That was my first and last experience with Twitter.

bachmeier3• 5 years ago

As a user of Twitter who mainly reads tweets rather than writing them, I hope this isn't just a way to make larger volumes of misinformation go viral. Obviously, that's not Twitter's intention, but they want to make money, and viral misinformation seems to be an effective strategy for making money.

The reason I raise this issue is because the important characteristic of Twitter is that others can call out the misinformation quickly. It's not perfect, of course, but it's better than a newsletter, where it's just a blob of misinformation with nobody able to call out the BS.

Bakary• 5 years ago

That's the first time I hear of Twitter as a platform inherently efficient against misinformation. If anything, it seems uniquely primed to spread it and reward users for doing so.

bachmeier3• 5 years ago

Oh, Twitter's definitely not a tool "against misinformation". My concern is actually that it's so efficient at spreading misinformation and now they want to take away the ability to call out the misinformation.

kareemm• 5 years ago

Curious: was this an acqui-hire? Anybody have intel about deal terms?

devdiary• 5 years ago

Revue looks amazing. But why so many twitter permissions required to login?

julienreszka• 5 years ago

At what point are those kind of acquisitions anticompetitive?

ryanwiggins• 5 years ago

The Creators arms race is in full swing, and the winner will be who can deliver the way to most monetize your existing audience AND expand your audience. Twitter already has a strong interest graph and is well positioned here

jhunter1016• 5 years ago

This is a smart move by Twitter. Substack has taken off considerably. Rather than watch all their prized users go publish long form content on a platform outside their orbit, Twitter just pulled a platform into their orbit.

The thing I’m curious about is how creative Twitter will get with integrating the platforms. There have been a lot of missed opportunities with previous Twitter acquisitions IMO.

AzzieElbab3• 5 years ago

I don’t thin substack crowd would trust Twitter with their content.

the_reformation• 5 years ago

The Substack crowd is already on Twitter, and is where they got their audience from.

mcintyre19943• 5 years ago

I think Twitter would be okay if the history professor with the $1m Substack comes over to them and people like Glenn Greenwald stay at Substack though.

AndrewLiptak• 5 years ago

It'll be interesting to see what Substack does in response to this. I can imagine that they'll lose some folks because Twitter's taking a lower rate.

woodpanel2• 5 years ago

Or they could win some folks because of ... Twitter.

paulgb2• 5 years ago

My prediction: bundling. Most of the good content (excluding self-hosted) is now arguably on Substack, but the subscription model is still one-to-one and doesn’t allow them to take advantage of the network effects. There’s a limited number of subscriptions I’m willing to pay for. Bundling economics, if done right, could extract a higher monthly fee from me into the platform. After all, the marginal cost of providing content to me is negligible, so anything I’d be willing to pay for but not enough for to justify another subscription is money left on the table.

omarhaneef• 5 years ago

You know the joke that tech just rediscovers the pre-tech economy?

Like a rideshare company will pick up groups of passengers from a location and drop them to the same location in the direction you're going - oh, you just discovered buses. That kind of thing?

This is heading towards a you just discovered online magazines/newspapers jokes.

Consider: - bundle the best writers together

- pay them a salary so they feel some comfort

- have an editor who decides

- brand it so people trust the name

etc

coreyrab• 5 years ago

It will be interesting to see what the terms of the deal are. I've used Revue to publish a paid newsletter and it works great. Not quite as polished as Substack, but the lower take rate will certainly be enough for some customers to switch imo.

the_drunkard• 5 years ago

Curious if Twitter will carry-over their draconian (and selectively enforced) censorship rules to Revue.

I assume this was discussed as part of the acquisition? Will publishers have free reign to discuss topics that they want to publish on or do Twitter "rules" govern what's allowed to be discussed?

coldtea• 5 years ago

While censorship people for their writings (based on whatever the US elites that happen to be mainstream in 2020 consider acceptable)?

To the degree that even the sitting President, right or wrong, can be shut down?

Yeah, pass...

malwarebytess• 5 years ago

Interesting they're framing it as Revue joining twitter rather than Twitter acquiring Revue.

mrweasel• 5 years ago

It’s standard “we got bought up” jargon, but it is weird way of saying it.

Joining indicates some come goal or success, but it has become Silicon Vally slang for: Our product is dead but at least we made some money.

complianceowl3• 5 years ago

Use Revue, build a sizeable distribution list, so I can get banned for expressing my thoughts? So I can be treated like a pedophile for saying something unpopular that doesn't align with their radical leftist ideology? No thank you. There's a lot of other subscription services for me to take a risk that big with anyone associated with Twitter.

woodpanel2• 5 years ago

Probably a win for Substack, as a take-over by less-diverse-on-purpose Twitter will drive away those who seek diversity of opinions.

Although, I can already feel the cancel-pressure building up in and around Substack, just by writing this.

enos_feedler4• 5 years ago

I dont think this is a win for substack. Before this acquisition Substack was probably the leading product in this category. Im sure if Substack polled it’s publishers on what they want most, people would say “more paid subscribers”. Twitter is a platform that can offer this from day 1. A chance to have your newsletter promoted to new eyeballs with a strong interest in what you write about. Substack needs to grow the reader side organically and so the race is on. Substack needs to turn into twitter faster than twitter can build substacks tools. Twitter just acquired a company to accelerate this process. How can substack accelerate?

rchaud3• 5 years ago

You seem to be more concerned with 'cancel culture' than the actual viability of your hypothetical 'unpopular opinion' newsletter.

complianceowl3• 5 years ago

The "viability of your hypothetical 'unpopular opinion'"?? Are you serious? You're already taking shots and focusing on my beliefs without first addressing the risk that Big Tech and its affiliates pose to merely not being censored or banned? You're the kind of person that should work at Twitter. You'll fit right in, bud.

spacesword• 5 years ago

Good point, bad analogy. Twitter treats pedophiles really well.

complianceowl3• 5 years ago

Lol, you make a good point.

orliesaurus• 5 years ago

Will twitter penalize substack users like it had penalized sharing of instagram pictures by removing the preview embedded in tweets?

pr0zac• 5 years ago

Instagram pictures don't show up on Twitter because Facebook blocked it. They did that in response to Twitter blocking Instagram from finding contacts via Twitter. Its FAANG in-fighting from like 8 years ago that I'm still kind of surprised hasn't been sorted out by now.

TechBro8615• 5 years ago

More like NATFAG in-fighting in this case

mcintyre19943• 5 years ago

I listened to a podcast that included this story, it was a Facebook decision. Mark phoned and gave them a few hours heads up that 'Instagram' had decided not to allow the embeds any more. They actually got it delayed 24 hours or something like that to avoid breaking Twitter.

throwawaysea2• 5 years ago

If that is the case then I hope they are split up on antitrust grounds. But somehow I doubt the current administration will go after big tech.

CivBase• 5 years ago

"Revue by Twitter"

It's interesting that the tech giants keep tagging their names onto the brands they acquire. Does that really help?

I know that the tech crowd exists in a bubble and that the hatred for the tech giants on HN doesn't really reflect the feelings of the general public... but even outside the tech sphere, are there really many people who like Twitter as a company? Most people just seem to tolerate the companies behind their preferred platform. It doesn't seem to me like there would be many who would be more likely to engage with a new brand as a result of its association with Twitter. If anything, I'd expect the opposite effect.

whomst• 5 years ago

I’ve heard that it might be for anti trust reasons (but with putting Facebook on all of its properties). Properly establishing who owns what up front makes the average user more aware of the consolidation of platforms

enos_feedler4• 5 years ago

If Revue were a big company perhaps. In this case I think its just to give Revue more value through the brand association.

elliekelly• 5 years ago

I’ve seen that argument a few times recently as well but I don’t find it at all persuasive. Public perception of market competition isn’t relevant to antitrust law. That the public is more aware of a company’s anti-competitive behavior doesn’t somehow absolve or even lessen the potential liability for the anti-competitive behavior.

Or perhaps I just don’t understand the point they’re trying to make? I’ve yet to come across this antitrust/branding argument where the rationale has been explained but I’d definitely be curious to hear the legal theory.

cocktailpeanuts• 5 years ago

Interesting that they don't do "GitHub by Microsoft", or "NPM by Microsoft". Maybe there's some insight in there somewhere...

sneak2• 5 years ago

Microsoft wants to keep their corporate stink off of those brands as to not taint their market dominance and continued growth. It appears to be working.

They're slowly working other, less-Microsoft-branded proprietary stuff into them, like Azure and VSCode.

GitHub and NPM however remain without even a mention of their ownership and decisionmaking entity.

Some of the marketing for these things they've even taken to posting on unaffiliated domains, like we saw on HN yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903358

They're trying really hard to not remind people that the same people who put ads in your start menu also own and control your favorite free code host, too.

Call it Microsoft GitHub whenever you can.

enos_feedler4• 5 years ago

Everyone knows github. Adding microsoft to the name doesnt get more sign ups. Npm doesnt even get sign ups this way. I have no idea what Revue is. Adding Twitter to the name gives it instant credibility.

walterbell• 5 years ago

We are "Reviewed by Twitter" and we are here to help.

walleeee2• 5 years ago

Why is the Revue model preferable to a blog with a tip jar and RSS?

I understand why Twitter wants in on a lucrative game, but I don't understand the value proposition for writers or readers. I struggle to see how, as a regular person on the internet, I benefit from a "public square" that will hijack my brainstem to maximize engagement, sell my attention and browsing habits to 3rd parties, and suspend my account with no warning if I run afoul of a black-box censor.

input_sh• 5 years ago

Well, for one, it's not a tip jar, but more of a blog + exclusive content.

Other than that, not much but an easy setup... if you're from a country that supports receiving money from Stripe. If not, sucks to be you!

rchaud3• 5 years ago

It's preferable because people don't want to have to click through multiple screens to do PayPal/Visa Checkout authentication to give somebody $3.

Nobody knows what RSS is either. Even back in mid-00s, I would sometimes struggle to add a blog to my Firefox feed (this was pre-Chrome). On some sites you'd click the RSS button and it would work. On other sites clicking it would display incomprehensible XML markup, causing me to abandon the site.

walleeee2• 5 years ago

That's fair, although to me that suggests we need to create easier self-hostable blog/newsletter tools, not all migrate to Twitter's next big fishtank

nerfhammer• 5 years ago

also some would only put a snippet in their RSS feed rather than the whole article

apozem• 5 years ago

Tips/micropayments are bad customer experiences. From Stratechery (multi-line quote):

-----------

I am instinctually skeptical of micropayments for a whole host of reasons:

- First, you have to have attach a payment method; it is hard to overcome that level of friction for just a few cents

- Secondly, if said payment method is a credit card, you need to deal with the fact the fees on a credit card transaction start around $0.29

- Third, there is the psychological burden imposed on customers who need to continually choose whether or not to make a purchase

To date the only sort of business that has succeeded with micropayments are free-to-play games: the App Store supplies the payment method (and eats the credit card fees), most games obfuscate the money spent (by selling in-game currency), and even then the strategy succeeds by hooking a small number of “whales” who play the game compulsively; most never pay.

This, in my estimation, would never work for a newspaper or magazine: there is too much competition when it comes to content, the price of any one piece couldn’t be priced high enough to overcome fees, and getting people to pay is hard. Moreover, while a subscription model caps the amount of revenue you earn per customer, it also reduces the likelihood said customer will explore alternatives: it is set and forget, while a micropayment asks for consideration every single time.

-----------

https://stratechery.com/2016/blendle-launches-in-the-u-s-an-... (paywalled)

cercatrova• 5 years ago

Somewhat related, I use https://typefully.app to write tweet threads and schedule their posting. Why tweet threads instead of blogging, as many HN users ask? Tweets get traction and build an audience (yes, owning your platform is better than a corporation owning your platform, but you have to go where the eyeballs are) with which I can drive traffic, users and customers to other sites I want them to see.

Twitter is also an amazing community, I've had many good interactions there that are simply not possible in other social media platforms. Where else can you get Paul Graham or Balaji Srinivasan to reply to you?

dt3ft• 5 years ago

What is the product here?

2Gkashmiri3• 5 years ago

second mention of writefreely on HN today...

writefreely, https://github.com/writeas/writefreely

this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool.

AGPLv-3.0 goodness

prestigious• 5 years ago

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.

TheRealDunkirk• 5 years ago

In the new era of monopolistic common carrier platforms, you have to BUILD INTO YOUR BUSINESS PLAN what happens when you get screwed by, say, the Apple App Store, YouTube, or Twitter, et. al. It's a business risk, just like fire or flood. You have to have a contingency ready to go at a moment's notice. By example, Parler didn't.

rwcarlsen• 5 years ago

I read somewhere that parler actually did have a contingency plan, but their backup host pulled out on them too.

gnicholas2• 5 years ago

With Revue and Substack, do the authors have access to subscriber email addresses? If so, that would somewhat blunt concerns like this, both directly (if you are booted off the platform) and indirectly (presumably the platforms would be less aggressive in their rules/enforcement if it is easy for authors to leave).

mshroyer• 5 years ago

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/logistics

I'm saving the Substack mailing list regularly to my hard drive, and if I go somewhere else I'll let you all know.

So this is possible on Substack at least.

Some Substacks also use a custom domain name, which would make migration off the platform even easier.

rexf• 5 years ago

Revue's homepage[0] says:

You own your list, forever Bring the audience you’ve built, and take it with you anytime. You are in control.

0 - https://www.getrevue.co/

corobo5• 5 years ago

Or just drop the entire thing (Vine reference)

vincentmarle• 5 years ago

Cool, this is a Dutch company right? Congrats!

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

I ve seen people talking about owning their twitter audience but the suggestion was to move away from twitter and towards self-hosting. Substack is promoted as a temporary in-between. Interesting that twitter thinks authors want to lock long-form content in there. What happens after the inevitable next Purge?

whimsicalism2• 5 years ago

What happens after the inevitable next Purge?

Most authors are not going to be "purged" full stop.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

The good ones won't go to a platform that purges speech. It may be OK for content marketers, but i don't see journalists that don't like to mince their words (e.g. greenwald) choosing to host their content on twitter.

adolph• 5 years ago

"Most" definitely messes with the business model. The requirement is for only enough to get everyone else to fall in line. It also helps to make selections idiosyncraticly arbitrary to maintain strategic ambiguity instead of drawing a clear line.

mschuster91• 5 years ago

Fascinating. I wonder what happened to Medium?

herodoturtle6• 5 years ago

No idea what happened because I stopped using it after they started adding all the accessibility friction. The UI was decent, original. And giving the reader an idea of the "Reading time" of each article was a nice touch.

But yeah, that friction got to be a little too much.

kbelder• 5 years ago

They're blocked for me where ever I can block them, just because I got sick of innocently following a link and being ambushed by Medium and their hassle. Or 'friction', to euphemize.

lesstenseflow• 5 years ago

Why are comments about twitter's censorious nature being downvoted? The two main topics here (in my view) are 1. Twitter's response to Substack and how this move will impact the two companies and 2. the fact that some of Substack's most prominent users are writers who are refugees from other platforms (Andrew Sullivan from New York magazine, Bari Weiss from the New York Times etc.) who left because of the suppression-of-unpopular-speech trends that Twitter is now famous for.

So Revue is what, Substack minus fees plus twitter viewpoint-enforcement? In any event I think this topic (censorship) at least bears discussion and I encourage users here not to downvote the discussion in the name of "suppressing right wingers" or similar. Twitter does not just ban right wingers. Take a look at the list of prominent people banned from twitter[0], it includes people such as Talib Kweli, Zuby (both rappers), "The IT Crowd" creator Graham Linehan, numerous political satire accounts, numerous feminists, and numerous artists and others for death threats towards such potential victims as "the Planters mascot Mr. Peanut," "a dead mosquito" and "the country Austria" (issued by an Austrian artist).

If you have strong contrary views, you are probably in the danger zone for getting a twitter suspension or ban if someone wants to make a point of reporting you. Censorship should definitely be part of this discussion of Revue.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#List_of_no...

stakkur• 5 years ago

Oy. Another company wanting a piece of the 'newsletter' pie, and access to your mailing list.

herodoturtle6• 5 years ago

Yeah.

But I'll still keep subscribing to the best mailing list, so...

figgyc• 5 years ago

Am I the only one who sees Revue, Substack etc. as a niche market? I can see why it appeals to Silicon Valley types/HN readers; after all this website is a content aggregator so it makes sense we all have a shared interest in written work. That said I think that the blog "industry" is dying more than it is growing.

To me, media seems to be trending towards quick, consumable, visually stimulating content, ie YouTube, TikTok and the like. The reason such content is more engaging and profitable is because it's a lot easier to turn it into a feed: one does not scroll through a newsletter for hours on end, and long form content tends to be the type that you put more thought into reading instead of simply moving on to the next piece.

Advertising runs on eyeballs but subscriptions do not, and it feels to me like Twitter seem to think that creating a well integrated platform to drive more Twitter discussion is a good idea, but really to me it feels like blogs and Tweets run perpendicular to each other: anyone who's read a decent amount of Twitter conversation knows that deeply thought out and sensible it is not.

Maybe they see being able to be "in" conversations about paywalled content will incentivize people to pay up, and will subsequently start pushing Revue content on people's feeds to try and create such a mentality? Or maybe Twitter don't care about making Revue "part of" Twitter and just think it's a growing market worth capitalising on. Only time will tell.

In a way it sort of reminds me of podcasts. They work well only for a group of people who have the time to consume long content, and while it works as a large niche, I can't see it growing into a Twitter-scale mass market, so I wouldn't trust it to be around for a particularly long time.

kodah• 5 years ago

I'm conflicted about this move. I was listening to Reply All the other day and they mentioned platform diversity and I've seen a number of discussions on here around platform diversity. Twitters ability to buy a feature like this makes it harder to compete with. It benefits writers in a way that it adds in-demand functionality to an existing popular platform but also harms writers and consumers because of the rising demand of platform diversity.

cccc4all• 5 years ago

Will this be Twitter's Instagram?

Will this be Twitter's Tumbler?

My money is on the latter.

jp1016• 5 years ago

I was making a tool to bookmark tweets and convert threads into articles , https://twimark.io , this acquisition could move some users who write long threads to revue. I wonder what the effects will be

nojs• 5 years ago

I’m curious as to why Twitter chose to do this as an acquisition rather than build their own. It doesn’t seem particularly hard to build from an engineering perspective, and I doubt Twitter needs to acquire the Revue user base given their existing profile and reach.

machiaweliczny• 5 years ago

They buy creators this way. In social networks and winner-take-all market it's logical.

ghaff• 5 years ago

I used Revue for a while and basically decided I didn't want to do a regular newsletter. (Never had any interest in directly monetizing.)

I do still have a blog but I mostly publish on various platforms that have fairly heavy-duty promotion machinery. But depending upon how Revue is integrated into Twitter, I'd take a look again.

alberth• 5 years ago

Does anyone else find it ironic Revue official blog is hosted on Medium?

https://blog.getrevue.co

pier25• 5 years ago

Well, a newsletter is not a blog after all. It's intended to be consumed in an email client, not a browser.

Twitter acquires Revue

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