Twitter Debuts Subscriptions To 'Super Users' in New Revenue Push (bloomberg.com) 47
Twitter unveiled its long-awaited subscription service, offering paying customers exclusive features for rescinding tweets and organizing posts as part of a push to ease the social network's dependence on advertising revenue. From a report: Dubbed Twitter Blue, the product will cost $2.99 a month for access to tools including the ability to "undo" a post before it goes out publicly, organize bookmarked tweets into folders, and more easily read long tweet threads. Subscribers will also get faster service for customer-support claims, can choose from new app colors and will have the ability to modify the Twitter app icon on iOS devices. The subscription model could help Twitter diversify its business at a time when the pandemic has underscored the risks of a heavy reliance on digital advertising. [...] The product suite is being pitched to the most prolific of Twitter's 200 million daily users, including journalists, social media managers and those who use the site as their primary news source, said Sara Beykpour, the product lead in charge of subscriptions. "Twitter Blue is aimed at customers who are our most engaged, our most passionate super users who really want to take their experience to the next level," said Beykpour, who declined to estimate the size of the target group. "There is something special about this cohort that we're really learning about."
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The hilarious thing is that you can already customize the icon of any app on iOS. Well, not really, but there's an Apple-supplied work-around that - well, works.
Basically you can create a Shortcut [apple.com] that launches an app and then add it to your homescreen with a custom name and icon. iOS users have been using this feature to create "custom themes" for iOS considering iOS is otherwise pretty much un-customizeable.
The flaw with this is that launching the shortcut will cause you to get a notification that the Sho
Fuck you pay us (Score:2)
Re:Fuck you pay us (Score:5, Insightful)
We are going to hide feature that should a part of the normal exp for $40 a year cause fuck you.
It is hard to fault these social media companies for treating customers as the product when the very thought of having customers pay for their services produces this kind of reaction from so many people.
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I hate twitter. I loathe it, it's a cesspool of idiocy. That said - they have by definition built a product that is provably not shit and the reason I hate it is the people who infest it. Not sure if you're aware of how many people use twitter and how important it has become to our culture just over the last decade.
Their product is not, by definition, shit - it's very, very successful.
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Great (Score:2)
A product that people use a lot is now charging money to people that use it.
Love it.
Way better than the old model. I'll buy it.
Re:Great (Score:5, Interesting)
Way better than the old model. I'll buy it.
"Why not both?"
Sadly it looks like Twitter Blue doesn't replace the ad-supported model. Instead you'll be paying an extra $36/year to get features like "an edit option that should have always existed" and "a slightly less terrible layout."
But you'll still get ads and they'll still be tracking you. (Remember, like Facebook, Twitter gets to see what websites you're looking at if they embed a "tweet this page" feature or any tweets.)
At least based on their Twitter Blue help page [twitter.com] and the blog post announcing Twitter Blue [twitter.com].
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This looks like they decided to adopt the 90s shareware model.
Maybe they should have a free 40-day trial, and then ask people to pay when they log in but give them a 'continue trial' button that works forever?
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That was the first thing I looked at. For what little I use Twitter these days, I've found that the PWA on Firefox Mobile with an Ad-Blocker installed gives me the feature I actually want: No more promoted tweets.
Seems as though that's not a feature this new for-pay scheme includes and nothing else on offer is worth $36/year.
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Depends on the widget a page uses. Based on the Twitter for Websites [twitter.com] documentation it's the "follow" button that I was really think of because it does a ping back to Twitter to determine the number of followers you have. (I thought the "tweet" button did something similar to indicate how many people had used it. Guess I remembered wrong.)
However, if you look at the documentation for the tweet button link [twitter.com] you'll see that if you follow their instructions exactly, you end up loading their JavaScript library to
Who, exactly? (Score:2)
96% of Twitter users have 500 followers or fewer.
The other 4% are likely community managers, teams, and other people who already have methods of addressing these artificial shortcomings.
I look forward to hearing how many people actually sign up for this.
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There's one born every minute I guess (Score:2)
I love this idea. We should introduce even more charges designed to separate fools from their money, if only so I can watch it happen.
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I think it's a great ideal. The only down side is you have to have a twitter account.
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Interesting that we have progressed to the point where a company asking its customers to pay for its services is considered to be some kind of con or predatory behavior. I feel we should be welcoming these companies finding revenue sources other than advertising.
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I feel we should be welcoming these companies finding revenue sources other than advertising.
Except that's not what's happening. More and more it's becoming like cable TV: you pay for the subscription, and you get ads anyway.
As far as I can tell, Twitter Blue doesn't replace the advertising model that Twitter currently uses. Instead, it's solely an additional revenue stream. Twitter Blue users will still be tracked and still be shown "relevant ads." Or at least, none of the Twitter pages [twitter.com] about the service [twitter.com] mention hiding ads.
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As far as I can tell, Twitter Blue doesn't replace the advertising model that Twitter currently uses.
No, it doesn't. And in no way would such a transition happen overnight. But that transition will never happen if they don't start getting people used to paying for their services. Politicians are unlikely to have widespread support for shutting down companies people like to use, so they aren't going to outright ban their funding model overnight. But if enough momentum can be built to have customers pay for these services, change is possible.
I still find significant change unlikely, but it needs to start som
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Oh, I'm not criticizing them. Far from it. Like the audiophile companies that sell O2-free cables of hundreds of dollars, I can only say; chase that cash. No judgement from me towards the companies.
I am, however, absolutely judging folks who pay for the cesspool that is twitter. That's like "buying gold" on reddit.
Re: There's one born every minute I guess (Score:2)
I'd have added a dedicated personal pronouns field. Give it free to transgendered people, but at a cost to everybody else.
Failure to pay will lead to a loss of virtue points. Arguing against it will see them denounced for opposing Twitter doing something for transgenders. Cheating by putting pronouns in the bio will clearly differentiate them from transgenders, also leading to denouncements and struggle sessions.
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You're my kind of people.
Why pay for cancer when you can get it for free? (Score:4, Interesting)
Twitter is a cancer. You're much better off quitting it than paying for it.
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It is perhaps a cancer for society as a whole. But for marketing departments and influencers they make big money by using the Twitter platform. Not everyone would be better off they quit Twitter.
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But for marketing departments
Which, hilariously, makes Twitter great for one thing: bitching at the poor suckers running social media accounts to get help after attempts to get help from official support channels have failed.
If you remember when Google banned Re-Logic's YouTube account [arstechnica.com] he first posted the news to Twitter [twitter.com]. It was there that it went viral, was picked up by the tech press, and finally Google faced enough pressure to get an actual human to look at things.
But other than pseudo-anonymously trolling celebrities and company's
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It is perhaps a cancer for society as a whole. But for marketing departments and influencers they make big money by using the Twitter platform. Not everyone would be better off they quit Twitter.
Lots of people make money selling cancer
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Twitter has it's uses.
Like keeping up with what depraved acts Antifa are up to. [twitter.com]
And announcements from police for when and where Antifa are having their mostly peaceful protests of arson and property destruction [twitter.com], so I can avoid those areas and not risk being charged by a feckless and corrupt county DA should I have to defend myself.
Other than that...
Re: Why pay for cancer when you can get it for fre (Score:1)
speaking of cancer, heres the overthrow narrative (Score:2)
Someone must get all their news from leftist blue checkmarks on Twitter and CNN.
But yeah, I understand the amount of brain melting propaganda from your side that clutches their pearls over the capitol riot, and not the 1B in property damage and 30 plus murders that occurred in the 'firey, but mostly peaceful protests' during the course of an entire year that was incited by leftist race-agitators. Some dude taking Pelosi's lecturn does not a coup-detat make.
Oh and try not to be one of those dipshits that act
"dependence on advertising revenue" (Score:2)
By which they mean "Advertisers are pulling because our platform has been associated with hate, harassment, doxxing, distribution of kiddie porn, organized crime, and so on"
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Advertisers don't give a damn about any of that. Advertisers have been pulling out because online advertising is less effective than nothing at all in terms of generating revenue for anyone other than the advertising companies grifting the advertisers.
Hopefully a Sign (Score:1)
Re: Hopefully a Sign (Score:1)
Can't wait to be a twitter super user (Score:2)
sutweet make me a sandwich [xkcd.com]
Si mejorar para bien (Score:1)
Yeah, no. (Score:1)