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Comment by lancewiggs | Hacker News Reader

Everyone looks bad here, but I want to focus on Twitter. For me this case is yet another demonstration that Twitter sees its customers as advertisers and places low priority on the community.

I pay Twitter nothing, and yet the service is valuable to me. So instead of continuously crippling the service in the name of goodness knows what, why not actually charge users for a premium experience. Things like customer service that works, a gold member status flag, controls on swapping account ownership, analytics and so on. Offer 3 paid levels - personal, business and corporate, and obviously keep the free level forever. Once revenue comes from customers, then perhaps it will help in understanding that while other revenue night be larger, the true value of Twitter is derived from the community.

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> So instead of continuously crippling the service in the name of goodness knows what, why not actually charge users for a premium experience.

Because then they couldn't justify their $50 Billion valuation. They'd "just" be a $1 billion company or something.

Sites like Twitter or Facebook could be perfectly fine profitable ventures that worked in their users' interests. But instead they got unobtainable market values, so they have to look like they're on track to meet them, and the easiest way to do that is to exploit their users.

I constantly think this about free services. There are a lot of things I'd love to pay a small monthly fee for that would give me peace of mind that the company is actually going to try and do things in my best interests and not in the interests of it's real 'customers', the advertisers.

Just today I got a notification from Facebook saying that videos are going to play silently automatically in my feed on my phone, meaning that if I'm on mobile data, my cap will be used quicker. This is the kind of thing I'd like to be able to pay to avoid.

Or look into alternatives in the microblogging space. What ever happened to Status.net/ostatus?

But the problem with alternatives is the fact that they're alternatives. Not what other people are using. If it's a social app, it's important.

I dug a little deeper, and ostatus is a currently working group committee within the w3c.

If I was the cio at oh, say an org in the public realm (generic government agency for example), I'd rather have control over the publishing and namespace of its tweet-like messages rather than putting every egg into the single-basket solution. Who knows if twitter will be around 20 years from now?

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

They started pump.io instead. Which is a much more low-level project than StatusNet. Trying to build a federation-server that other people can make services on top of.

Trying to win a market that way. If only one popular site starts to use it, -- you might be getting some network effect out of it.

I think it was a better level to work on. Let others help with the network.

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