![]() The thing is, I’m not really sure that Twitter ever realized that this is the problem they solved, that this is where their core value lies. The internet is a big place, and it is shockingly hard to otherwise find people whose thoughts you want to read more of, whether those thoughts are tweets, articles, or research papers. Gorcenski, a technologist and writer based in Germany, touched on this hilarious paradox in her recent essay about her decision to leave Twitter: Meanwhile, Twitter is a poorly-incentivized battle royal for rich people, artists, and furries that only works because the barrier of entry for logging on and threatening to kill a columnist you don’t like is low enough that you can do it while still enraged from something you read while on the toilet.Įmily F. #Garbage day game archiveTumblr is essentially the greatest archive of possible copyright infringement ever created, which has led to an inscrutable and dense remix culture that conversely also drives a lot of what’s cool online. Twitter and Tumblr are both fantastic examples of this bizarre tension, with user bases that are valuable in vastly different ways, but drawn to the apps because of features that make them unmonetizeable. But many more platforms are still stuck in a perpetual state of being terrible and, thus, good. Some became massive ones, by doing one, or all, of the five things things WhatsApp didn’t want Facebook to do. The majority of the major social apps we’ve been using for a decade were not designed to be good businesses. #Garbage day game softwareAnd a few days ago, Musk shared a tweet to a Fortune piece reporting that he plans to have the company focus on “hardcore software engineering, design, infosec, and server hardware.” Sure, cool. The New York Times has a hilarious list of Musk’s plans, which includes utterly ridiculous proclamations such as, “quintuple revenue” and increase subscribers for some kind of project Musk has dubbed “X,” which is apparently expected to magically grow to 104 million users in the next 16 years. The WhatsApp list is also an interesting inverse of sorts of what Elon Musk is reportedly planning for Twitter if he successfully buys it. Which, as I wrote in the headline above, means that WhatsApp worked because it was designed to subvert something else. ![]() It was largely meant for families living in different countries to keep in touch with each other and bypass annoying and expensive international texting rates. Which was in line with what the app’s original team created it for. And, in the beginning, WhatsApp did have a very small paywall - $1 for a download. What’s so funny about these five things is that these are basically the only ways you can make money online without paywalls. ![]() ![]() One of the most interesting parts of Arora’s thread is about the five demands that WhatsApp had going into the sale. “But it’s a shadow of the product we poured our hearts into, and wanted to build for the world.” ![]() “Today, WhatsApp is Facebook’s second largest platform (even bigger than Instagram or FB Messenger),” Arora wrote. Last week, Neeraj Arora, WhatsApp’s former chief business officer, wrote a long thread about why he regrets negotiating the $22 billion sale of the messaging app to Facebook. ![]()
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