How much would you pay not to use Twitter? Or vice-versa?
Plus ChatGPT arrives on the App Store: aprés quoi, le deluge.
Casey Liss is working on a new app. In case you don’t listen to the Accidental Tech Podcast, Liss is one of the trio of podcasters—alongside Marco Arment and John Siracusa—who have convened every week for the past ten years to record a podcast in which Liss is the essentially genial host, Arment is the moneybags programmer (he helped create Tumblr) and Siracusa is the experienced programmer who likes to talk about things in depth (the first time in an episode he says the words “file system”, Arment rings a front desk bell to mark the moment).
But Liss is also a programmer, currently working on an iOS app that will let you answer the question that bugs many people: “who’s that in this film/TV show/etc?” Yes, you could use iMdb, the internet movie database owned by Amazon, but he thinks it’s a bit junky and slow, so his app called Call Sheet1 uses a different, free database he found online.
The problem is, he can’t be sure that the online database will always be free, especially if his app gets big enough and puts a large enough load on the database: its administrators might begin wondering if “free” is the right price after all. For that reason, and also because it’s good to be rewarded for your work, he’s going for a subscription model.
But now the water gets deeper. How should he charge? Should he charge per week, per month, per year? Should he have a “lifetime unlock” option, where you pay once to effectively subscribe without further charge forever?
While Liss ponders that, consider how you’d charge, if you were going to, for a social network. How much would you charge, and for what special features—or would it just be access?—for Facebook, to Twitter, to TikTok, to Instagram, to Snapchat?
Researching Social Warming, I came across a fascinating study from 2018 where researchers at Stanford paid people to stay off Facebook in a four-week period around the November midterms. In a neat illustration of how attracted people are to round numbers, the researchers picked their sample and control group (who would stay on) by letting people volunteer how much they’d be paid; they’d already decided to offer up to $102, and obligingly half of the respondents offered to take $100 or less for their four-week break. (Afterwards, some people stayed off permanently, so much did they like it.)
Of course being paid to give something up isn’t the same as paying to use it. If someone pays you to give up smoking, you benefit twice over: you’re not spending the money on cigarettes, and you’re getting paid for doing so. If someone is paying you not to use Facebook, you’re getting their money, plus (in the case of those in the study) you’re getting an extra hour each day to do other things. That’s not the same at all as paying to access Facebook.
But would you pay to access some elements of Facebook, or Instagram, or WhatsApp, or the other social networks? Notably, you can now pay for verification on Facebook and/or Instagram in the UK:
People who registered interest in Meta Verified will receive a notification when it becomes available to them. It is rolling out to others in the UK in the coming weeks.
Those approved by Meta will get a verified badge, which the tech firm says will give them more protection from impersonation, in part because it will monitor their accounts to check for fakers.
It says verified users will also get "access to a real person" if they have any issue with their account.
That latter part—access to a “real person”—is definitely valuable, as anyone who has had their account on either of those services will tell you. (I’ve often had desperate friends ask if I have a PR contact they can ask to help after such a problem; the automated system is of course overwhelmed. Turn on 2FA for your account, people!)
The contrast with Twitter Blue, where people pay roughly the same amount to get a blue tick by their name—which used to mean they were notable in some field, or that it was important to know they were who they said they were (in the case of journalists)—is stark. The Twitter Blue idea predates Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and was a bad idea then, back in June 2021: it was aimed at power users, and offered Bookmark folders, Undo Tweet (which gave you 30 seconds after pressing “tweet” before it would actually be sent), and “Reader mode” for long threads.
None of which power users really wanted. What they actually wanted—and were getting—was a Twitter free of adverts, and with a better interface than the clunky, noise website or native app; which they could get by using third-party apps. As so often happens in creating features, Twitter’s engineers looked in the wrong place for affirmation. It was the classic case of strengthening the wrong parts of the plane: the people they wanted to reach weren’t listening to them, and vice-versa.
Thus when the verification wipeout happened (except for those with more than a million followers, who were re-verified after a week or so), the scale of the Twitter Blue failure became apparent. At the end of April, there were about 620,000 Twitter Blue subscribers, who would be generating about $5m per month, or $60m per year. Which ain’t so hot, either in the context of wanting to generate something near to the billions of dollars in advertising that the site used to, or other networks:
To compare, Snapchat, a competing social networking platform, launched a premium paid subscription service last June [2022] and reached 1 million paying subscribers in just two months. Musk's version of Twitter Blue launched in November. As of mid-April, Snapchat shared that its Snapchat+ premium service now has more than 3 million paying subscribers.
I’d argue that Twitter Blue offers precisely the wrong things. It will
• boost the position of your replies to tweets
• boost your tweets’ position in the “For You” tab
• edit your tweets
• see fewer ads (but not zero ads; only about half as many, in the For You and Following tabs)
and so on. Personally, none of those appeal to me, and it’s clear that few of them appeal to former Verified users (of whom there were about 420,000 worldwide): only about 20,000 signed up for Blue to keep their checkmark.
Once more, it’s a question of what you’re offering. I’d happily pay $8 per month to have Tweetbot back again as my method of accessing Twitter: its interface was cleaner (none of the annoying notifications to tell you someone Liked one of your tweets—who cares?) and there were better options for muting (for a period, rather than permanently). Plus, of course, no ads.
The problem of knowing what people are willing to pay for is crucial. For social networks, it never used to be a question; first, venture capital money and then advertising meant they didn’t have to charge anything. But with the dispersion of attention, there’s been a shift towards freemium. Even Tumblr has got into the act, offering “two useless blue checkmarks for $8”, and other evanescent things to put on your profile just to decorate it. In their way, they’re a sort of NFT, inasmuch as an NFT has any utility at all.
There’s a problem of course: I’d like to pick and choose the things I’ll pay for on Twitter, or Instagram (might pay to have fewer ads.. or not, since I don’t spend that much time there). The networks tell you. For the rest you have to tolerate it.
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone came along and offered you some money to stay off the networks? You’d get more time, you’d have money. Can’t wait, honestly.
Meanwhile, Casey’s still puzzling over what to do. I’ll guess $3 per month, or $30 per year, and no lifetime unlock. Best of luck to him.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here.)
• There’s now an official ChatGPT app in the iOS App Store. Let the games begin. (No news on when the Android version will land.)
• The photographer Charlie Engman plays around with MidJourney, and the effects are, as you’d expect, very strange.
• Travel site Skift has trained a chatbot on all its previous articles. So you can ask it questions such as “What is the biggest emerging outbound tourism market?” and it’ll cough up the answer, which should be robust given the small corpus of data.
• The AI-generated Lord Of The Rings as directed by Wes Anderson. As with the real LOTR, the trailer is enough. (Nice casting though.)
• Honestly though there’s so much now it’s impossible to keep up. When they’re talking about it down at the tennis club, and they’re worried that it’s going to eat their jobs, then you know that the AI chatbot phenomenon has infused the national conversation. Maybe that plumbing course might look more attractive to your kids.
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.
• I’m the proposed Class Representative for a lawsuit against Google in the UK on behalf of publishers. If you sold open display ads in the UK after 2014, you might be a member of the class. Read more at Googleadclaim.co.uk. (Or see the press release.)
• Back next week! Or leave a comment here, or in the Substack chat, or Substack Notes, or write it in a letter and put it in a bottle so that The Police write a song about it after it falls through a wormhole and goes back in time.
A call sheet is the list of names and numbers of everyone due on a film set for any particular day, so every day of filming has a slightly different call sheet. As a name for an app I think it’s clever, but a little bit too insider-y. He was going to call it FLookup, for Film Lookup, but that was judged to be too much of a mouthful. Maybe the search metadata will sort out the puzzlement of the name.
For what it's worth, I finally deleted my Twitter account. It was easy, perhaps because I was only a casual user, and had no link to organization nor business model.
Still, no regrets. No sudden awakenings in the night.
In the end it is easier to embrace impermanence.
Nothing lasts forever.