Twitter Launches its version of Notes and Subscriptions

X Corp is trying to reinvent Twitter into a "Super App"

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

Something is very wrong in the world if we are comparing a News aggregator like artifact with Twitter or hoping Substack Notes will go mainstream. As far the as the Creator Economy is concerned, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter never really prioritized them (Creator monetization) giving YouTube, TikTok and even niche places like Pinterest and Snap the upper hand.

One of the reasons Elon Musk is pissed off is that Substack stole the names “Notes”. The original Twitter Notes were just long-form Tweets and now that has launched. Substack Notes has a higher percentage of writers than readers, never a good sign and reminds me of the toxic Medium echo chamber.

So Twitter at a loss for words, as dropped the Notes reference and has changed Super-followers to “Subscriptions”. I cannot embed the Elon Musk Tweets, but they are worth reading. Nothing quite as wonderful as a TikTok Series though.

Mastodon is as much a Twitter descendent as Artifact is the “TikTok of Text”. The TikTok of text is literally “Jinri Toutiao”, sadly it seems platformer is more of a Silicon Valley sort of guy. All of this begs the question, social media keeps splintering and fragmenting.

Substack Notes for its part has a mostly chronological feed with subscription recommendations that seem entirely un-targeted, basically the opposite of the incredible personalization that Artifact has going for it now with reader comments. Substack is low-budget and seems to think reincarnating the ideology of Medium under the guise and exclusive stubborn emphasis of paid subscriptions is the answer for Creators. Well it is if you are the top 100 of Substack’s biggest earners. For the other 16,900 paid writers, not so much.

The Twitter clones isn’t doing so well because well, Twitter isn’t doing so well and we no longer consume social media like we did ten or fifteen years ago.

Twitter Announces Long-form Text and Video

CEO Elon Musk on Thursday invited users to “apply to offer your followers subscriptions of any material, from longform text to hours long video!”

Musk said that, for the next year, Twitter will “keep none of the money” from the program and promised users “will receive whatever money we receive,” which is a varying percentage of the subscription cost, depending on whether it is mobile or web. Considering App stores take 30% it’s not looking like a very good deal.

• You need a Twitter blue account to “make money” off of your following on Twitter.

• With Subscriptions, you can charge users so they can get access to things like exclusive tweets, subscriber-only Spaces, and special subscriber badges.

• Now where did I put my Best Sellers badge on Substack, I know it’s here somewhere.

The fact that new traffic from Notes is entirely random really puzzles me. But it does mirror comments on Newsletter into notes and give some helpful reader advocating impact of your readers actually restack your work to Notes.

I didn’t realize this, but they got a push-notification with your first post on Notes. Something that wasn’t made clear in advance, if you weren’t a tester.

The boost I got from Notes in the first three days of very high activity wasn’t really very much, compared to what I was seeing from others, perhaps my Notes were just not very self-promotional.

Twitter’s Rebrand Going after Subscriptions

Twitter is rebranding its “Super Follows” feature, which lets you subscribe to individual users to get access to some exclusive content, to just “Subscriptions.” Here is an article about what Twiter Notes was supposed to be. So why did Substack steal their name?

It’s all rather puzzling considering Substack Notes is either mainly for self-promotion to gain a trickle more subscribers (that are even lower quality than readers obtained from recommendations). It’s yet another feature by Substack that seems to stack the benefits in the favor of big publications.

While Elon Musk tries to lie to tell us Twitter is near break-even, which cannot be possible considering he isn’t even paying most of his bills; if Twitter goes bankrupt the big beneficiary is actually LinkedIn where many serious journalists go and have been going (not Mastodon).

The decline of Silicon Valley is not going well on social media and from trolls on Reddit to fake hype on Twitter it’s all a bit disturbing. On Substack Notes, at least in theory you are communicating with either other writers (mostly) or potentially reaching some of your readers (the few of whom have downloaded or use the app).

Super Follows were first announced way back in February 2021, and it’s not apparent if Subscriptions are going to clone them or actually improve the product.

• At launch, Subscription is only for Creators in the U.S., with potential audiences in a handful of western countries like: US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

Kind of disappointing. Substack probably has a bias of audience to the U.S. as well at around 60% of the readers, my best guess estimate.