Some celebrities are ditching Twitter for Community | Hacker News Reader

Some celebrities are ditching Twitter for Community

fastcompany.com

43 pointsaltacc30 comments

Am I incorrectly remembering that Twitter (Twtr) v1 was primarily to share tweets via SMS text messages? Hence the limit of 140 characters (+20 for the username to be added to the message)?

Is this just the wheel gone full circle?

Platforms limit reach of participants with large audiences, in order to encourage them to buy ads.

Participants move away and build their own platform.

Advertising ruins every platform. Just look at Google even, a darling of the early 2000s.

Whoever uses it now must have shares.

This company is a huge VC darling. Take it with a grain of salt. Once your texts become a noisy comms channel itll get rough.

We're only being told to increase shareholder value.

Eh PR bs

I’ve had stuff published on fast company, even ghost wrote some myself

I always thought it was funny seeing articles of unlikely-to-succeed VC funded startups and random corporate comms

https://www.fastcompany.com/company/wework

https://www.fastcompany.com/3057415/adam-neumanns-16-billion...

Are they planning to give them numbers for every country inn the world for all the phones? International texts can get expensive really quickly

If you send them at scale it’s almost free. What you as a consumer pay for sending text messages has no relation to the cost whatsoever.

Remember that you can send and download enormous files from all over the world for free, and these are just less than 140 byte packets.

What I find fascinating about this is how easy (and simultaneously difficult) it’s going to be for FB and Twitter to copy this.

This channel will remove my only remaining use of these platforms.

One of the reasons for moving away from fb is that those with followers end up having to pay to get their posts shown to followers. When you follow someone on fb you expect to to see all their posts, but in reality fb has skewered the algorithm so only a tiny percentage will see the updates. It's probably easier for a band/celeb to pay a flat fee to use something like community instead.

It's a fan club. Over SMS.

I am not sure I understand. The whole point of social media is that you don’t have to talk to people one-on-one and waste time. I literally have no clue what “community” is trying to solve. There is no way that people with a large community will have any meaningful interaction with their followers.

Maybe I'm just a cynic but I don't think a celebrity would actually want meaningful interaction with followers, unless it was with minimal extra effort, just to have their fans think that.

I've been surprised for some time that celebrities just default to the major platforms rather than band together and build platforms that work for them - purpose built to engage with fans efficiently, monetise (Patreon-style member posts, subscriptions, sales, paid downloads and so on).

I know Instagram and co have special modes for those with large audiences, but I'm talking about something built from the ground up to serve the creator or celebrity. Sounds like hell to me, but there are loads of fans who would lap it up.

I think part of the appeal is the fiction that you are in some sense "friends" with the celeb. Sure its obviously not true; In many cases celeb probably doesn't even operate the account. But if they moved to a custom site, it takes away all pretense of you being a celeb's "friend".

Someone should do this for indie bands...

How would this be any different then Community.com? Do you imagine a group chat with the band members or something else?

You could have a themed page with a music player, fans could post their own profiles and friend each other, pick their top 8 friends, one of them is Tom,

We could call it BandSpace...

TL;DR: I want Myspace Bulletins but with text messaging.

I have a band on facebook with 23,000 likes.

Even when I have paid money to promote shows, music, and merchandise, I had no guarantee that what I posted ever got to my audience. There are some (unclear) analytics involved but at the end of the day I don't want to pay a middle man to connect to my audience.

This was one of the best aspects of Myspace: there used to be a bulletin board that would give you a specific feed of bands/friends posts. You could choose to read whichever messages you want and bands could message their audience without having to pay a toll.

With social media, there is so much hype and noise that there is no signal for up and coming bands to really stand out. I frequently see sponsored ads on Instagram of musicians playing in their living rooms and I keep wondering why I am seeing this when I frequently miss posts of bands that I care about.

In my mind, I would love the ability to be able to have fans text a number and receive a message if one of my bands is playing a show in their area. I don't want to send them anything else unless I have a show coming up, new merch for sale, and new music to listen to.

Bands put up messaging/posts to stay relevant on social media. A larger band can hire a team for this, but it adds so much more noise for bands that are small as they have to grind for social media relevance _with everyone else_ instead of working on their music.

It would be the most direct marketing possible without a need for an installable app. It would be a very grassroots thing but I think it's something that needs to happen.

You're certainly not the first person I've heard this from. When we follow someone on fb we expect to see their updates in our feed, but in reality we don't unless they pay for that to happen.

why not signal?

Do people really join twitter to follow celebrities? It’s the commentary by the “unwashed masses” that makes it worth it to me.

Yes, because celebrities often use Twitter for direct communication, and often reveal themselves to be very much like the “unwashed masses”

Twitter contains multitudes. It reminds me of nothing so much as high school, except expanded out a thousandfold, with innumerable cliques and circles that swarm and combine. And some serendipitous incongruities when the streams cross and the mutuals encounter one another, sometimes.

What is the monetization method of Community? Do they charge the celebrities who are using it?

They say in their faq they aren't data mining, using ads, or charging the fans.

Yeah that's it on the blog it explains. The celebrities pay to use it. It's a cool model

(In case this gets deleted)

Grandparent post:

> What is the monetization method of Community? Do they charge the celebrities who are using it? They say in their faq they aren't data mining, using ads, or charging the fans.

Parent post:

> Yeah that's it on the blog it explains. The celebrities pay to use it. It's a cool model

Both posts made by the same (brand new) account.

This is some of the laziest astroturfing on HN I've ever seen. You didn't think we'd see though this?

My fave bit is the "its a cool model" as if charging your customers money to use your product is a new and unique bussiness model.

Wow you faked a shitty question for publicity and didn't even bother to change your account. A bit more effort next time eh?

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