As already stated this was tried with app.net. A spectacular failure of marketing aside, no one sprung for it.
This is also partially why ala carte tv programming and iTunes tv is so expensive: People are not willing to pay anywhere close to how much advertisers/marketing/PR firms are.
You don't need to pay to ensure the existence of a microblogging system. pump.io or GNU Social will continue to be around whether or not anyone pays for them.
I would pay for Twitter as well. Though it would be a huge backlash, I think it would clean things up quite a bit.
I was one of the people who sprung for app.net. It was a crazy idea, and it's unfortunate it didn't take off. In the time App.net was buzzing with activity I did notice a significant lack of spam and fake profiles. It was nice, but it seems now most have abandoned it.
I didn't stop using app.net because of a lack of usage, I stopped using it because of the lack of decent clients, coupled with the fact that it was just another walled garden -- not a standardized protocol.
I would pay for twitter for a subscription if they let developers sell as many twitter clients to subscribers because twitter's clients are not very good.
Then they would lose the majority of users. Its a lot harder to increase your price from $0.00 to $0.01 than increasing your price from $0.01 to $1.00.
>(By the way, if significant portions of your userbase are capable of becoming addicted to your product, consider that it may not be fully ethical to produce it.)
Would this also apply to products like Uber? I use it all the time, and can't imagine life without it. Am I addicted to it? Is it an unethical company because people love to use it and it provides value to their lives?
I chose the word "addiction" pretty specifically - does it enrich the user's life? Uber does. (And you probably don't have a desire to use Uber for hours every day).
Social gaming (someone mentioned below) does, to a point, and then it's engineered to go way, way beyond that point.
It's complicated of course - and there's a spectrum - but I think a bad sign is if your architecture is intended to hack the reward systems of your customers.
"I use it all the time" - you might find it more economical to buy a car. I fail to see how anyone could be addicted to something as basic as transport. It's like saying you're addicted to using BART or MUNI.
I think you mean the micro-transaction social gaming industry.
If you re-read what you quoted (emphasis mine):
"By the way, if significant portions of your userbase are capable of becoming addicted to your product, consider that it may not be fully ethical to produce it."
You would pay for Twitter, but you would not outbid the advertisers, who unlike you are willing to subsidize the people who won't pay for Twitter. Which is just a complicated way of saying that if Twitter charged for access, it would charge substantially more than you'd expect them to.
tptacek is right. It's even worse, if you consider two-tiered pricing (ad supported, and paid), since advertisers want the expensive types who would pay for access, so they would pay less for the ad supported user group than you would think.
Twitter could charge for something. They already do (ads). However, some advertisers will always pay more to reach those on a platform like Twitter, especially those who are likely wealthy, and those budgets are large enough to overwhelm whatever you would pay to avoid ads.
If, however, you are simply arguing that Twitter should add some cool features that you have to pay for, then you are correct. They could, and may.
while you might be willing to pay for Twitter, if that happened, you'd quickly not want to since it would become a ghost town and any value you get from the service would be wiped out.
Not so sure about that one... today Twitter only earns $1 per user per quarter (as of Q1'14) ... if they were to charge for a premium ad-free experience, they could get away with $1 per month, which would be 3x what they make in ads...
Excuse my slight condescending tone, but I don't think he really understands what twitter is for, and who benefits from its service. The model explained, which was tried by app.net, doesn't coincide with the real idea behind twitter in the first place.
A neighbor once said to me, we should pay to use the sidewalks in our city; I don't think she understood the ramifications of such a move, but it made sense in her mind because she /could/ pay for the sidewalk and the model worked for her. -yet she didn't understand that the sidewalk wasn't even necessarily meant for her. The same sides she paces, kids use to travel to school everyday, homeless persons use to panhandle, families use to travel to work everyday, and every once in a while some lune is up there with a sign expressing their view.
Twitter is no different. Sure we use twitter to post about our latest projects and greatest food pictures, however somewhere someone is using twitter to alert his friends that government and police are encroaching the neighborhood, quick alerting those near about a wildfire, or trying to start
Just because you could pay for want, doesn't mean someone else has the means to pay for necessity. I don't mind sharing a common good/service even though I know someone else might not be paying the same amount as I.
> I don't think he really understands what twitter is for
I can't really hold that against anyone since I can't figure out what it's for ether.
> she didn't understand that the sidewalk wasn't even necessarily meant for her. ... homeless persons use to panhandle, ... and every once in a while some lune is up there with a sign expressing their view.
She probably fully knew this and this was exactly what she was trying to prevent.
Basically, just like this from elsewhere in the comments -
> I would pay for Twitter as well. Though it would be a huge backlash, I think it would clean things up quite a bit.
I think the app.net guys have been trying to differentiate themselves from being "Yet Another Twitter Clone", but that's how I first found out about them.
The problem is with something like twitter, you don't know how valuable it's going to be for you until start using it for a length of time. I'd probably be hesitant to pay even $5 for it if I though I might only tweet once or twice. Of course I'd be willing to pay more if it became a valuable social or business tool but I have no way of knowing.
So it that sense people can and should use it anyway they want. And paying for it doesn't/shouldn't change that. I have a certain way of using Twitter that makes it valuable for me. But a lot of people I know seem to be shouting without listening or engaging. But hey, if that works for you, go right ahead.
Also for the other arguments:
- I do feel social pressure in following back. So that's just personal I guess.
- I always felt the "favorite" feature is a bit 'off'. I used to use this to bookmark tweets with interesting links (read later kind of thing). But now it seems to be used as the "Like" for Twitter. But Twitter itself isn't utilizing it as such.
People favoriting tweets doesn't change your timeline.
You can go to "Discover" but that is not the same. So I always felt Twitter is missing a feature OR they are not utilizing the Favorite thing the right way.
It's very easy to be friends with someone on Facebook but not follow them. In the upper right of every post is a menu that lets you unfollow them. At least today, the concept of "friend" is more about access permissions than "following"
But ultimately Twitter vs. Facebook is a very dull argument. Yes, the design of the platform makes a difference, but ultimately any individual's experience is going to be dominated by the people they interact with. Just because a person tries platform X and doesn't like it doesn't mean that everyone else is going to have the same experience.
But neither of these would be what they are as paid services. Their primary value depends on the vast number of users and that just doesn't happen with paid services.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 96.2 ms ] threadThis is also partially why ala carte tv programming and iTunes tv is so expensive: People are not willing to pay anywhere close to how much advertisers/marketing/PR firms are.
I was one of the people who sprung for app.net. It was a crazy idea, and it's unfortunate it didn't take off. In the time App.net was buzzing with activity I did notice a significant lack of spam and fake profiles. It was nice, but it seems now most have abandoned it.
Well, there goes the gaming industry.
Would this also apply to products like Uber? I use it all the time, and can't imagine life without it. Am I addicted to it? Is it an unethical company because people love to use it and it provides value to their lives?
Uber doesn't have a monopoly in ride-sharing, and Twitter doesn't have a monopoly in microblogging.
Would you say you have an addiction to Uber?
Social gaming (someone mentioned below) does, to a point, and then it's engineered to go way, way beyond that point.
It's complicated of course - and there's a spectrum - but I think a bad sign is if your architecture is intended to hack the reward systems of your customers.
I think you mean the micro-transaction social gaming industry.
If you re-read what you quoted (emphasis mine):
"By the way, if significant portions of your userbase are capable of becoming addicted to your product, consider that it may not be fully ethical to produce it."
If, however, you are simply arguing that Twitter should add some cool features that you have to pay for, then you are correct. They could, and may.
A neighbor once said to me, we should pay to use the sidewalks in our city; I don't think she understood the ramifications of such a move, but it made sense in her mind because she /could/ pay for the sidewalk and the model worked for her. -yet she didn't understand that the sidewalk wasn't even necessarily meant for her. The same sides she paces, kids use to travel to school everyday, homeless persons use to panhandle, families use to travel to work everyday, and every once in a while some lune is up there with a sign expressing their view.
Twitter is no different. Sure we use twitter to post about our latest projects and greatest food pictures, however somewhere someone is using twitter to alert his friends that government and police are encroaching the neighborhood, quick alerting those near about a wildfire, or trying to start
Just because you could pay for want, doesn't mean someone else has the means to pay for necessity. I don't mind sharing a common good/service even though I know someone else might not be paying the same amount as I.
I can't really hold that against anyone since I can't figure out what it's for ether.
> she didn't understand that the sidewalk wasn't even necessarily meant for her. ... homeless persons use to panhandle, ... and every once in a while some lune is up there with a sign expressing their view.
She probably fully knew this and this was exactly what she was trying to prevent.
Basically, just like this from elsewhere in the comments -
> I would pay for Twitter as well. Though it would be a huge backlash, I think it would clean things up quite a bit.
Remember the saying "if you are getting it for free, you are the product"?
Twitter get's my time and data, adverts are displayed to me and I get to use the service.
Here's my own short opinion about it: https://medium.com/p/710ed2905929
Twitter is not a service it is (more) a protocol.
So it that sense people can and should use it anyway they want. And paying for it doesn't/shouldn't change that. I have a certain way of using Twitter that makes it valuable for me. But a lot of people I know seem to be shouting without listening or engaging. But hey, if that works for you, go right ahead.
Also for the other arguments: - I do feel social pressure in following back. So that's just personal I guess.
- I always felt the "favorite" feature is a bit 'off'. I used to use this to bookmark tweets with interesting links (read later kind of thing). But now it seems to be used as the "Like" for Twitter. But Twitter itself isn't utilizing it as such.
People favoriting tweets doesn't change your timeline.
You can go to "Discover" but that is not the same. So I always felt Twitter is missing a feature OR they are not utilizing the Favorite thing the right way.
But ultimately Twitter vs. Facebook is a very dull argument. Yes, the design of the platform makes a difference, but ultimately any individual's experience is going to be dominated by the people they interact with. Just because a person tries platform X and doesn't like it doesn't mean that everyone else is going to have the same experience.
But neither of these would be what they are as paid services. Their primary value depends on the vast number of users and that just doesn't happen with paid services.