Hacker News Reader

> The NYPost (or basically any news outlet and their readers) became dependent on Twitter on their own choice (or on their own laziness),

I'm curious what exactly you think they could have done to not end up here. I'm not aware of Twitter even offering a paid service that they could use, and network effects mean that failing to publish on Twitter just means that fewer people will see your stuff.

View on HN

Most news outlets used to have RSS feeds which, once upon a time before it was removed from a lot of big websites (such as news outlets), allowed lots of people to get a feed of what was published. It worked for a lot of years and, if kept up and published, it could probably have given Twitter a run for its money. You could share the feeds you followed or even build public feeds from that (there are stil a bunch of them, mostly named after planets, for very niche things), so you could have a network effect.

Twitter doesn't have a paid service for users (it has paid access to their API, just in case somebody on this site still had doubts about what really is their core business), I was just making a (probably poorly phrased) example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com