- cross-posted to:
- technology
- cross-posted to:
- technology
Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on the subscription model when detailing its $15 million Series A back in October. Now, mockups teasing the upcoming Bluesky subscription, along with a list of possible features, have been published to Bluesky’s GitHub.
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Honestly, this doesn’t bother me at all. The list of features they will provide to premium users sound like good premium features for content creators and companies, and doesn’t affect the lives of simple content consumers. I think it’s great they are trying to find revenue streams to stay alive.
Asking users for money isn’t entshitification. Running a website isn’t free. But if they are already asking for venture capital, now that’s scary. Losing control of your vision to investors, that’s what causes entshitification.
As long as their posts don’t get artificially higher visibility
Yea this seems like the best way to support the site tbh. Let people who can afford it pay for running costs in exchange for benefits that don’t negatively affect free users. Much better than being beholden to people who have no interest in you providing a good service.
Very reasonable take, I approve
That’s why I initially thought twitter charging for blue checks was a good idea, because I thought they’d still be validating people’s identities.
Let the enshittification begin.
Asking users for money is not entshitification.
Then you do not know what enshittification means.
You should probably read that yourself. Monetization and premium features by themselves are not entshitification.
That didnt take long to 💩
Isn’t it the opposite of getting shitty? Sell something of value?
The problem is that in the process of monetizing something, the tendency is to handicap the service that made you popular to begin with by either moving some features into the paid tier or degrading the service in order to steer users into a paid tier. If demand existed for a brand new, guaranteed to never enshittify, Twitter clone that costs $10/month, then we would have one.
The fact is that social networks have to give away access to their systems because the real product is community and engagement, and you cannot have that without significant user volume. Once the users have freely given the company the product, then the company can start monetizing their means of transport, and the only way they can do that is by paywalling quality of life features. Thus, enshittification begins.
The current status quo is also not sustainable, so they have to try some solutions. There’s an opportunity to go from actual federation to paid subscriptions and none of those will solve everything.
