from Hacker News

Twitter acquires Revue

by camillovisini on 1/26/21, 12:07 PM with 259 comments

by siruva07 on 1/26/21, 1:35 PM
Excellent acquisition. Twitter will definitely compete and take marketshare from Substack with lower fees from 20% to 5%. I hope this acquisition is actually a stepping stone for Twitter to become a much better service.
Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. No political ads to worry about. No interference with the product experience. And believe it or not, if I understand correctly these services (FB, Twitter) have an ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of just $5-8 per year.
Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product — our data not for sale — and the companies would make more money! Knowing that my message would get received, I'd happily pay to slide into the DMs like people do to me on LinkedIn (mostly service providers, but I've gotten some great biz dev connections from InMail).
It's almost a running joke, up there with Daft Punk playing at the trash fence, that Twitter just won't release an edit button. With a move towards paying subscribers, maybe Twitter will listen to its real customers -- content writers -- rather than advertisers.
by prestigious on 1/26/21, 3:46 PM
You would have to be a complete idiot to try and build your revenue on something owned by Twitter. They will shut you down at any time, for any reason, with no recourse.
by pembrook on 1/26/21, 2:10 PM
> Starting today, we’re making Revue’s Pro features free for all accounts and lowering the paid newsletter fee to 5%
...and there goes Substack's entire business.
Overall, this is great for writers however. The missing component to Substack was the discovery/social mechanism. From a strategic perspective, it's easier to bolt on newsletter sending than it is to build a new social network.
So this was always a huge risk for Substack as a platform. But hey, there's also an alternate universe where Twitter stays dumb and lazy and never crushes Substack. So I see why investors took the risk.
But I see no path forward for Substack if Twitter manages to not completely botch this.
by jhunter1016 on 1/26/21, 2:44 PM
This is a smart move by Twitter. Substack has taken off considerably. Rather than watch all their prized users go publish long form content on a platform outside their orbit, Twitter just pulled a platform into their orbit.
The thing I’m curious about is how creative Twitter will get with integrating the platforms. There have been a lot of missed opportunities with previous Twitter acquisitions IMO.
by pboutros on 1/26/21, 1:27 PM
This is a really smart acquisition for Twitter to make. I'm subscribed to a number of substacks (and Patreons) that I only discovered through creators on Twitter.
Job #1 for twitter should be making it easy to subscribe to Revue newsletters from within Twitter. Please do not put the team that rolled out Fleets in charge of Job #1 ;)
by cjlm on 1/26/21, 2:04 PM
This space is quite interesting. You have the gorilla at the picnic (Substack), the stagnating old timers (TinyLetter), the member management platforms (Memberful, probably Mailchimp), the link dump creators (curated.co) and the spunky indie upstarts (Buttondown).
by orliesaurus on 1/26/21, 3:26 PM
Will twitter penalize substack users like it had penalized sharing of instagram pictures by removing the preview embedded in tweets?
by coreyrab on 1/26/21, 2:53 PM
It will be interesting to see what the terms of the deal are. I've used Revue to publish a paid newsletter and it works great. Not quite as polished as Substack, but the lower take rate will certainly be enough for some customers to switch imo.
by ryanwiggins on 1/26/21, 2:43 PM
The Creators arms race is in full swing, and the winner will be who can deliver the way to most monetize your existing audience AND expand your audience. Twitter already has a strong interest graph and is well positioned here
by cblconfederate on 1/26/21, 4:08 PM
I ve seen people talking about owning their twitter audience but the suggestion was to move away from twitter and towards self-hosting. Substack is promoted as a temporary in-between. Interesting that twitter thinks authors want to lock long-form content in there. What happens after the inevitable next Purge?
by stakkur on 1/26/21, 5:26 PM
Oy. Another company wanting a piece of the 'newsletter' pie, and access to your mailing list.
by alberth on 1/26/21, 11:22 PM
Does anyone else find it ironic Revue official blog is hosted on Medium?
https://blog.getrevue.co
by nojs on 1/26/21, 8:34 PM
I’m curious as to why Twitter chose to do this as an acquisition rather than build their own. It doesn’t seem particularly hard to build from an engineering perspective, and I doubt Twitter needs to acquire the Revue user base given their existing profile and reach.
by cercatrova on 1/26/21, 3:35 PM
Somewhat related, I use https://typefully.app to write tweet threads and schedule their posting. Why tweet threads instead of blogging, as many HN users ask? Tweets get traction and build an audience (yes, owning your platform is better than a corporation owning your platform, but you have to go where the eyeballs are) with which I can drive traffic, users and customers to other sites I want them to see.
Twitter is also an amazing community, I've had many good interactions there that are simply not possible in other social media platforms. Where else can you get Paul Graham or Balaji Srinivasan to reply to you?
by bachmeier on 1/26/21, 2:30 PM
As a user of Twitter who mainly reads tweets rather than writing them, I hope this isn't just a way to make larger volumes of misinformation go viral. Obviously, that's not Twitter's intention, but they want to make money, and viral misinformation seems to be an effective strategy for making money.
The reason I raise this issue is because the important characteristic of Twitter is that others can call out the misinformation quickly. It's not perfect, of course, but it's better than a newsletter, where it's just a blob of misinformation with nobody able to call out the BS.
by AndrewLiptak on 1/26/21, 2:45 PM
It'll be interesting to see what Substack does in response to this. I can imagine that they'll lose some folks because Twitter's taking a lower rate.
by geonnave on 1/26/21, 2:13 PM
Clearly and unsurprisingly this is to compete with Substack. Great move.
Now, regarding character limits, beyond linking to a personal website or having a newsletter, I have seen avid content creators posting images containing small essays directly on Twitter to allow a deeper in-app reading experience.
Maybe this should be a next, and less trivial, problem for Twitter to work on.
by kareemm on 1/26/21, 2:37 PM
Curious: was this an acqui-hire? Anybody have intel about deal terms?
by andrew_ on 1/26/21, 2:08 PM
As someone who moved away from Twitter, the last thing I need in my life is another Twitter-owned property. The politics of the last month aside, Twitter is a foul, trite, snide place where the worst of us are trumpeted to the loudest voice and widest audience. The negativity and incentive to waste hours and focus are pervasive in every community I've participated in. Of course, YMMV. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to curate and filter away those things that I abhor about Twitter. A few weeks removed and my mental state feels all the better for it. Color me cynical, but I'll pass on another attempt for Twitter to monetize my attention.
by thisistheend123 on 1/26/21, 1:24 PM
Will this be a competition for substack?
by malwarebytess on 1/26/21, 3:03 PM
Interesting they're framing it as Revue joining twitter rather than Twitter acquiring Revue.
by devdiary on 1/26/21, 2:42 PM
Revue looks amazing. But why so many twitter permissions required to login?
by walleeee on 1/26/21, 3:32 PM
Why is the Revue model preferable to a blog with a tip jar and RSS?
I understand why Twitter wants in on a lucrative game, but I don't understand the value proposition for writers or readers. I struggle to see how, as a regular person on the internet, I benefit from a "public square" that will hijack my brainstem to maximize engagement, sell my attention and browsing habits to 3rd parties, and suspend my account with no warning if I run afoul of a black-box censor.
by kodah on 1/26/21, 7:34 PM
I'm conflicted about this move. I was listening to Reply All the other day and they mentioned platform diversity and I've seen a number of discussions on here around platform diversity. Twitters ability to buy a feature like this makes it harder to compete with. It benefits writers in a way that it adds in-demand functionality to an existing popular platform but also harms writers and consumers because of the rising demand of platform diversity.
by complianceowl on 1/26/21, 3:15 PM
Use Revue, build a sizeable distribution list, so I can get banned for expressing my thoughts? So I can be treated like a pedophile for saying something unpopular that doesn't align with their radical leftist ideology? No thank you. There's a lot of other subscription services for me to take a risk that big with anyone associated with Twitter.
by doublerabbit on 1/26/21, 2:17 PM
And so, we now enter the tumblr phase of Twitter.
by mberning on 1/26/21, 1:59 PM
If you write anything important or at all at risk of becoming controversial twitter should be nothing more than a promotion engine.
by ghaff on 1/26/21, 9:10 PM
I used Revue for a while and basically decided I didn't want to do a regular newsletter. (Never had any interest in directly monetizing.)
I do still have a blog but I mostly publish on various platforms that have fairly heavy-duty promotion machinery. But depending upon how Revue is integrated into Twitter, I'd take a look again.
by jp1016 on 1/26/21, 8:30 PM
I was making a tool to bookmark tweets and convert threads into articles , https://twimark.io , this acquisition could move some users who write long threads to revue. I wonder what the effects will be
by figgyc on 1/26/21, 6:51 PM
Am I the only one who sees Revue, Substack etc. as a niche market? I can see why it appeals to Silicon Valley types/HN readers; after all this website is a content aggregator so it makes sense we all have a shared interest in written work. That said I think that the blog "industry" is dying more than it is growing.
To me, media seems to be trending towards quick, consumable, visually stimulating content, ie YouTube, TikTok and the like. The reason such content is more engaging and profitable is because it's a lot easier to turn it into a feed: one does not scroll through a newsletter for hours on end, and long form content tends to be the type that you put more thought into reading instead of simply moving on to the next piece.
Advertising runs on eyeballs but subscriptions do not, and it feels to me like Twitter seem to think that creating a well integrated platform to drive more Twitter discussion is a good idea, but really to me it feels like blogs and Tweets run perpendicular to each other: anyone who's read a decent amount of Twitter conversation knows that deeply thought out and sensible it is not.
Maybe they see being able to be "in" conversations about paywalled content will incentivize people to pay up, and will subsequently start pushing Revue content on people's feeds to try and create such a mentality? Or maybe Twitter don't care about making Revue "part of" Twitter and just think it's a growing market worth capitalising on. Only time will tell.
In a way it sort of reminds me of podcasts. They work well only for a group of people who have the time to consume long content, and while it works as a large niche, I can't see it growing into a Twitter-scale mass market, so I wouldn't trust it to be around for a particularly long time.
by jawns on 1/26/21, 1:45 PM
TWEET 1/7: It's ironic that the way Twitter proposes to improve its platform for writers is to move them off Twitter proper.
TWEET 2/7: Writers use Twitter begrudgingly because that's where the eyeballs are, but it is a terrible communications platform for any writing longer than a single tweet.
TWEET 3/7: Microblogging is core to its brand, but I shudder whenever I see a thread marked 1 of 22. Because of the character limitation, the writing on Twitter has a wooden cadence.
TWEET 4/7: The best thing Twitter could do for writers is give them some way to go beyond the standard character limit within the core platform.
TWEET 5/7: The limit doesn't need to be lifted entirely; maybe anything beyond the limit can be hidden by default, but with an option to reveal it.
TWEET 6/7: Restricting how writers write can sometimes encourage better writing. But Twitter is one of the largest communications platforms in the world, and it's got to reckon with that.
TWEET 7/7: Imagine if, instead of a char limit, you could only write rhyming couplets! It would be fun as a niche site, but not as a site used to communicate breaking news and longer, more thoughtful writing.
COUPLET 1/1: Twitter's a major communications hub, like it or not. Its restrictions on writing are a big blind spot.
by coldtea on 1/26/21, 3:00 PM
While censorship people for their writings (based on whatever the US elites that happen to be mainstream in 2020 consider acceptable)?
To the degree that even the sitting President, right or wrong, can be shut down?
Yeah, pass...
by CivBase on 1/26/21, 3:26 PM
"Revue by Twitter"
It's interesting that the tech giants keep tagging their names onto the brands they acquire. Does that really help?
I know that the tech crowd exists in a bubble and that the hatred for the tech giants on HN doesn't really reflect the feelings of the general public... but even outside the tech sphere, are there really many people who like Twitter as a company? Most people just seem to tolerate the companies behind their preferred platform. It doesn't seem to me like there would be many who would be more likely to engage with a new brand as a result of its association with Twitter. If anything, I'd expect the opposite effect.
by sturza on 1/26/21, 2:18 PM
Seems like substack discovered a market and now they’re competing
by abinaya_rl on 1/26/21, 2:13 PM
This is really great acquisition. Maybe this is the path towards building the paid Twitter service?
by 2Gkashmiri on 1/26/21, 1:48 PM
shout out to writefreely, https://github.com/writeas/writefreely
this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool.
by vincentmarle on 1/26/21, 3:53 PM
Cool, this is a Dutch company right? Congrats!
by 2Gkashmiri on 1/26/21, 3:40 PM
second mention of writefreely on HN today...
writefreely, https://github.com/writeas/writefreely
this is Activitypub compatible self hosted writing tool.
AGPLv-3.0 goodness
by mschuster91 on 1/26/21, 4:51 PM
Fascinating. I wonder what happened to Medium?
by cccc4all on 1/26/21, 7:49 PM
Will this be Twitter's Instagram?
Or
Will this be Twitter's Tumbler?
My money is on the latter.
by dt3ft on 1/26/21, 3:37 PM
What is the product here?
by rriepe on 1/26/21, 2:01 PM
Are you allowed to disagree?
by julienreszka on 1/26/21, 2:42 PM
At what point are those kind of acquisitions anticompetitive?
by lesstenseflow on 1/26/21, 5:01 PM
Why are comments about twitter's censorious nature being downvoted? The two main topics here (in my view) are 1. Twitter's response to Substack and how this move will impact the two companies and 2. the fact that some of Substack's most prominent users are writers who are refugees from other platforms (Andrew Sullivan from New York magazine, Bari Weiss from the New York Times etc.) who left because of the suppression-of-unpopular-speech trends that Twitter is now famous for.
So Revue is what, Substack minus fees plus twitter viewpoint-enforcement? In any event I think this topic (censorship) at least bears discussion and I encourage users here not to downvote the discussion in the name of "suppressing right wingers" or similar. Twitter does not just ban right wingers. Take a look at the list of prominent people banned from twitter[0], it includes people such as Talib Kweli, Zuby (both rappers), "The IT Crowd" creator Graham Linehan, numerous political satire accounts, numerous feminists, and numerous artists and others for death threats towards such potential victims as "the Planters mascot Mr. Peanut," "a dead mosquito" and "the country Austria" (issued by an Austrian artist).
If you have strong contrary views, you are probably in the danger zone for getting a twitter suspension or ban if someone wants to make a point of reporting you. Censorship should definitely be part of this discussion of Revue.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions#List_of_no...
by eimrine on 1/26/21, 2:22 PM
I tried to use Twitter for advertising my business. Reason why I have chosen Twitter is because somebody has told me that I can tweet via SMS, which fits perfect to my livestyle w/o smartphone. But after I have followed several dozens of similar businesses in short period of time (1 hour to find them all) my account was banned. Also I could not set up tweeting from SMS. That was my first and last experience with Twitter.
by seneca on 1/26/21, 2:14 PM
Twitter is in an interesting position as a business. They can buy new platforms all they like but I, and many others, will never consider them because they have already poisoned the well when it comes to censorship. I would never consider them a useful platform for publishing, whether long-form or short. They're destined to be a home for partisans that agree with their orthodoxy and perhaps people with nothing vaguely controversial to say.
I fear the internet will bifurcate due to problems like this.
by the_drunkard on 1/26/21, 2:58 PM
Curious if Twitter will carry-over their draconian (and selectively enforced) censorship rules to Revue.
I assume this was discussed as part of the acquisition? Will publishers have free reign to discuss topics that they want to publish on or do Twitter "rules" govern what's allowed to be discussed?