Post News, a Twitter alternative that emerged in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover, is shutting down. Noam Bardin, the platform’s founder and former CEO of Waze, writes that Post News “is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform.”
The Andreessen Horowitz-backed platform launched in a closed beta in November 2022, but now it’s set to shutter “within the next few weeks.” It serves as a social platform that also offers users ad-free access to paywalled content from publishers such as Fortune, Business Insider, Wired, The Boston Globe, and others. All users have to do is pay a “few cents” per article instead of signing up for a subscription to each publication.
Who?
Exactly… 🤣… Been looking for Social media alternatives for years and never heard of this one before…
I’ve never used post and I haven’t heard anyone talk about them in a long time but they were pushed as a big deal after Musk bought Twitter. Kara Swisher and a lot of rich tech bros were trying to convince everyone they were the Next Big Thing around the time of the big wave of migrations to Mastodon.
Kara Swisher was on their board. She’s not a journalist.
And it wasn’t announced until pretty late that she was. She was teasing it on her podcast like ‘stay tuned, I know serious people with money who are ready to launch something big’
AFAIU, it was an attempt to be purely dedicated to the sorta mainstream centrist political and news and journalism parts of Twitter, which seems to me to make the egotistical mistake of thinking that they’re the ones that made Twitter when it was likely the other way around and they were the ones getting in on the “party” after it “started”.
Never even heard of them
TIL of Post News.
Never heard of it
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Andreessen Horowitz-backed platform launched in a closed beta in November 2022, but now it’s set to shutter “within the next few weeks.” It serves as a social platform that also offers users ad-free access to paywalled content from publishers such as Fortune, Business Insider, Wired, The Boston Globe, and others.
The platform eventually rolled out a mobile app and later launched a real-time notification system, with plans for more features in the future.
“We built a toxicity-free community, a platform where Publishers engage, and an app that validated many theories around Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles,” Bardin writes.
Post News isn’t the only Twitter alternative that struggled to find an audience, as another potential rival, Pebble, shut down in November 2023.
But several Twitter alternatives are still standing — and all of them are part of the fediverse, which means they’re open to sharing their content with other social platforms.
The decentralized platforms Mastodon and Bluesky are still going strong, while Meta’s Threads launched its fediverse beta in March and added Taylor Swift to its user base.
The original article contains 336 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 46%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Funny because I only know this company through a LinkedIn posting they had up last month. It explains why they never contacted me I guess.
I tried it, and can’t remember why I removed it. I think it wasn’t straight forward to read articles, and it wasn’t really clear how the user can control the micropayments.
Journalists won’t accept this but it was also a test of the degree to which they’re the center of the conversation in this media space.
What it should have been is exclude the social media crap, create a browser extension that charges users and allows them to get through the paywalls, then it pays the journals.
Using a separate app makes the whole thing more of a hindrance than convenience. I want to be able to click on an article posted anywhere, load it in my mobile browser, and seamlessly get charged a couple cents to read the article.
Sounds like Cohost is circling the bowl, too. And what happened to that social network started by two teenage girls? There were so many of these damn things I couldn’t keep track of it all. It was like the web search industry before the Google meteor struck.
According to this (rather lengthy) page, Cohost’s financial situation isn’t the best and was always on pretty shaky ground - https://d-shoot.net/cohostfinance.html
