Proposal to Twitter. I want to pay for my account | Hacker News Reader

Proposal to Twitter. I want to pay for my account

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48 pointsthomasdd55 comments

People always do this. No you don't want to, don't try and be a User-Hero. And if for some insane reason you do want to, implementing and supporting it would cost more than they would ever take in revenue because no one else wants to pay apart from companies who then get preferential treatment.

I disagree - I've been requesting this on-and-off for years.

In the same way I passively pay Netflix to be able to stream movies, I'm happy to passively pay Twitter each month for the flow of conversation if it allows them to exist in the long-run, and get better.

If its viable for them to charge me $7 to $10 a month so I get an ad-free experience and they can wean off ads as main revenue source, then great. Sign me up.

Netflix is currenlty billions in debt, http://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-raising-800-million-i...

Which needs to be put in the context of its 6.78B in revenue.

Debt in of itself isn't a bad thing. Apple has $79 billion in debt. Facebook has $3B in debt. Microsoft is $60B in debt.

They have debt because they don't want to move money from foreign accounts to the US so they borrow money to pay dividends, but they don't have net debt.

Meh; user funding saved metafilter a couple years ago. User supported ads free model certainly will generate more money per enrolled user than would have been made on advertising. The trick is to keep the costs of the program low, and avoid giving people bad incentives that break the store for non paying users. This isn't actually difficult... It's not like they need to set up payment systems from scratch anyways....

Reddit has a successful reddit gold program. I think it could be successful on twitter.

Gold makes reddit a pittance in comparison to advertising, unfortunately. It doesn't even make enough to keep the servers running.

Well that's not true entirely according to Yishan Wong. [1]

Reddit and Twitter operate in the same hemisphere of community-driven applications — so it is within the realm of possibility that Twitter would have to bring some sort of "Gold" subscription model to their platform (who knows maybe it will be more widely adopted at Twitter). But all-in-all, they're both fighting the same battles: censorship, ad revenue slumps, and user growth. [2] And those are not easy problems to fix.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/howredditworks/comments/1oyhjw/redd...

[2] http://www.dailydot.com/via/twitter-moments-reddit-upvoted-m...

> It doesn't even make enough to keep the servers running

That's irrelevant, because most people don't pay for Gold. The important question is this: How much does Reddit make on Gold per user compared to how much they make from ads per-user? I sincerely doubt reddit is pulling in $4/user/mo in ads.

I'm paying for Github and I don't use any of the paid features. Why? Because I want their business to stay. The big difference is GH has a significantly better idea to make money with: paying for progressive, useful enhancements. I don't think you can do that on Twitter; maybe you could have, once. Like showing images in your stream could have been a paid addon. I have no idea if it would have worked or not, but nowadays, if they would want to make money like this, it's probably a paid "pro" account, a badge, practically, because of they go full pay-only, they will lose too many sources of sell-able data.

EDIT: read comment by mi100hael; apparently I need to follow news better, and I'm taking my praises back.

> I'm paying for Github and I don't use any of the paid features. Why? Because I want their business to stay.

lolwut. GitLab offers for free most of the stuff GitHub makes you pay for. And GitHub is run by a bunch of SJWs that have gone so far as to remove repos because a comment in the code used the word "retard." And despite being a platform for sharing source that hosts many prominent free software projects, the platform is 100% proprietary closed source. They offer absolutely nothing of value that can't be had better elsewhere.

> so far as to remove repos because a comment in the code used the word "retard."

o.O

I've missed this, reading about it now, and I'm off to modify some subscription settings.

I do. I thought about this for months. Always when I read tweets in the morning, seeing all the non-sense Ads non-relevant to my preferences in contrast of tweets and account I choses very precise. If this idea is nothing new, then pardon me. Anyway thanks.

For me, it's not about being a "user hero." It's because if I pay for an account, I become a customer, and not part of their product. It completely changes the relationship in a way that is more favorable to me, which is why I suspect they will never do it.

Pandora has a successful 3$ month ad free program

It's $5/mo or $55/year. And the vast majority of the money is still from advertising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Radio#Business_model

Between

> advertising comprised 88% of Pandora's total revenues

and

> the vast majority of Pandora's users remain on the free, ad-supported model

There's really no way to know how revenue compares on a per-user basis between paid and ads.

Music is universal, and enhances quality of life. If Twitter went away, I promise there would be no difference in quality of life. No one is going to pay for Twitter.

Is your argument that if Pandora went away, quality of life would change?

For those using it to listen to music, yes. When people inevitably move onto whatever is post Twitter, people will still need to listen to music.

Pandora is one of many music services. If Pandora shut down, they will just move to another, quality of life will not change.

That's my point. If Twitter shut down, it wouldn't matter, so people aren't going to pay for it. Tweeting isn't a quality of life enabler, music is.

if anyone wants to do this right now, just create a promoted account ad campaign and promote your own twitter account.

Now you get the privilege of paying for twitter and perhaps more followers too.

This is really funny because it's such a good idea that absolutely nobody will listen to.

I'm surprised that Twitter hasn't added a cost for verification, considering these accounts have functionality that many of us don't have (i.e. ability to filter interactions, etc). Sure, people can opt to not pay for verification, but considering the value that top end users get from a presence on Twitter, it almost seems to be a no-brainer to add a verification charge.

My only worry for going ad-free for a fee is that it provides an argument for adverts to become even more of an inconvenience. If I could pay $5 a month to skip adverts, then what is to stop Twitter from throwing a ton of ads on their platform and then saying "if you don't like it, pay us".

In the first few years, twitter had a hard cap on the number of followers (I think it was like 10,000), and people with large audiences were forced to manage their followers.

I wondered if they could have started charging 'brands' and celebrities to break that barrier, but keep it free flowing for the hoipoloi like us.

Initially, it made sense, but nowadays I see loads of people that aren't really all that notable with verified status, namely people that work for the press in some way, or have had something notable happen to them. I know two people with verified status on Twitter. One is a writer for a trashy celebrity mag, and one is basically a Twitter loudmouth that was in the news recently. In my opinion, these people don't really need verification, as they're using Twitter as a medium to have conversations with everyone, whereas some notable people might want to manage who they speak to.

You could always have multiple paid levels. $10 a year if you're a business and you want to use Twitter as a customer service portal. $100 a year for the badge if you have over 10,000 followers. $1,000 a year if you want to filter who can tweet you.

I think Google's contributor program strikes an equitable balance. Twitter could probably take the same approach.

I would absolutely pay for a twitter account. to remove ads but also support a viable path to stay independent and functional. Twitter does a huge amount of good in the world, and are important for freedom of ideas in many countries

Pay for advertising your account on there. That's how you support them. We don't need subscriptions for normal users. No one is going to pay that.

Just to add to the brainstorm: they could charge users who have over, say, 5k followers a monthly fee to reach 100% of the audience instead of some arbitrary mix of them. The fee would increase with the # of followers.

It's in the spirit of, but not exactly like, Facebook charging businesses to reach more of their followers by "boosting" posts.

It would align the fees with the users who value most directly from using the service as a mass media broadcast device -- a lot of whom are businesses or quasi-businesses. They could waive fees for governments, educational institutions, non-profits, whatever.

Ask App Dot Net how that turned out. (Although there are definitely network effects in play here that Twitter would have the advantage of.)

I want to pay $3/month for twitter, but I don't think they'll ever add it.

Proposal to Twitter: let us own you as a public utility and turn into a co-operative.

If this were serious, it were a proposal to the shareholders. People at Twitter might like it to be a public utility, but shareholders will just laugh at you.

And who's going to pay for the infrastructure + thousands of engineers working at Twitter ? this isn't realistic.

What's unrealistic is the need for thousands of employees at Twitter.

Public utility doesn't mean no one gets paid. You're the one not being realistic.

You're the one not being realistic if you really think Twitter shareholders and VC will accept a hair cut to make the corporation a "public utility". That's ridiculous. Twitter is a mediocre social network, just because it is popular doesn't make it "public utility".

No, you.

How about the way it was 18 months ago? I'd pay for that but not what it is today.

Other than having public direct contact with individuals and brands I never saw the point of twitter. I thought I was in the minority a couple of years ago when Twitter was growing exponentially. Now I see it's the other way around.

I'm not surprised their ad revenue has been falling about 80% in the last 2 years. There's little communication in 140 characters and the chaotic stream of tweets is unattractive to most users.

Maybe Twitter could be more vaulable if owned by Google or Facebook, and integrated in the services of those giants.

I'm amazed by the amount of abuse that's prevalent on Twitter. This is based on observation of replies to tweets by certain individuals. Abusive comments being retweeted and fav'd is such a commonplace. It's hard to imagine how can one continue using the platform.

It's apparent that there are huge number of accounts that are created in order to promote individuals, governments, products, ...

Twitter seems to be only interested in user base growth (which would directly affect its valuation).

It's about who you follow. I never see any abuse on Twitter, but I am ruthless about unfollowing anybody who is overly negative or abusive. I also have a few mute filters for topics I'm not interested in. It makes for a much better experience.

I wouldn't ever pay for twitter, or any other social media. I am like 99% of users, and this is a non-stater.

There was App.net once ... Where you have to actually pay to use it [1] and it was ad-free twitter clone. It failed.

1 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

You need to take into account that twitter is losing users and not precisely due to the recent changes. They need to change and get new features to gain popularity, wether you like it or not. That's my view, maybe I'm wrong.

You pay $7/month to stay the same? Or any other improvement you want?

Good question! but I don't know the answer. maybe its a paradox :) I know everything has to move forward and evolve! Anyway, I like the 140 Character limit on Twitter. My post is acctualy exactly 140 characers long :) as most of my tweets. Just wanted to point out, that the current popularity of Twitter is based on current state. And maybe some payment options would be fine for people who care andn consider Twitter as the source of news and knowledge.

Twitter's problem is that either it's losing users, or not growing fast enough. Adding paid accounts doesn't address that.

After this year's election season, I might be willing to pay for a phrase/keyword filter that hides specific tweets from me :)

You don't need Twitter to add that, you can have that feature today - get a 3rd party Twitter client, like Fenix on Android or Tweetbot on iOS & Mac. Both have the feature to mute by keyword (and yes, I did have Trump / Clinton / Election as mute words this year).

Both are paid software, but the $15 USD for Tweetbot Mac is absolutely worth it to me... in fact, I think it's a bargain for something I use every day.

(As a bonus, the third party clients are still ad-free as well, and no "while you were away" feature.)

If you're serious, why not launch an 'awareness' campaign about it?

I was part of their beta for awhile and requested this as well. No response.

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