Would Anyone Really Be Willing To Pay For Access To Tweets?

The Velvet Rope economy continues its exclusionary spread. 

One possible unintended consequence of benefit to the general public may be further erosion of support for big tech's tax and legal protections given how much of the ostensibly universal internet is now unavailable to anyone not willing or able to pay for access. JL

Jacob Kastrenakes reports in The Verge:

Twitter announced the ability for users to charge their followers for access to additional content. The payment feature, called Super Follows, will allow Twitter users to charge followers and give them access to extra content. That could be bonus tweets, access to a community group, subscription to a newsletter, or a badge indicating support. Twitter sees it as a way to let creators and publishers get paid directly by their fans.

Twitter announced a pair of big upcoming features today: the ability for users to charge their followers for access to additional content, and the ability to create and join groups based around specific interests. They’re two of the more substantial changes to Twitter in a while, but they also fit snugly into models that have been popular and successful on other social platforms.

The payment feature, called Super Follows, will allow Twitter users to charge followers and give them access to extra content. That could be bonus tweets, access to a community group, subscription to a newsletter, or a badge indicating your support. In a mockup screenshot, Twitter showed an example where a user charges $4.99 per month to receive a series of perks. Twitter sees it as a way to let creators and publishers get paid directly by their fans.

COMMUNITIES COULD BE TWITTER’S TAKE ON FACEBOOK GROUPS

Direct payment tools have become increasingly important for creators in particular in recent years. Patreon has been hugely successful, and other platforms including Facebook, YouTube, and even GitHub have all launched direct creator payment features. Twitter will presumably take a cut — the company has been hinting at subscriptions features that would offer it a new source of revenue — though it doesn’t appear to have said yet what that fee will be.

Twitter’s mockup of its Communities feature.

 Image: Twitter.

Twitter also announced a new feature called Communities, which appear to be its take on something like Facebook Groups. People can create and join groups around specific interests — like cats or plants, Twitter suggests — allowing them to see more tweets focused on those topics. Groups have been a huge success for Facebook (and a huge moderation problem, too), and they could be a particularly helpful tool on Twitter, since the service’s open-ended nature can make it difficult for new users to get started on the platform.

There’s no timeline yet for when either of these features will launch. Twitter listed them as “what’s next” for its platform during a presentation for analysts and investors this afternoon.