With Twitter fully controlled by a single, petulant, vindictive individual with poor impulse control, poor judgement, and with a significant percentage of his wealth controlled by the Chinese government, many, including myself, are actively looking for alternatives.
I am interested in the following features:
Text-centric and constrained
Subscription-based
Verified users
User content moderation
Governing board
The rest of this post goes into a little detail on each of these topics.
Text-centric and constrained
With Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, there are plenty of image & video-centric sites. Twitter is a text-centric site with a strong constraint on the length of a message.
The text-centric approach makes the experience more conversational. The constraint of 280 characters forces people to be concise. Long, rambling posts or replies quickly bog down other text-centric sites.
Text is also a lot less expensive for the platform to ingest, store, analyze, and transmit than video is. This means a primarily text-centric site is less expensive to operate, which leads to the next point.
Subscription-based
There is a saying,
If you are not paying for it, you are the product.
In advertisement-driven sites like Twitter, Facebook, and much of the rest of the web, you are not the customer. Advertisers are the customer, and the advertisers do not have your best interest in mind. The advertisers' goal is to modify your behavior to suit their needs. This behavior modification could be anything from buying a certain product, switching brands, voting a certain way, to actively intimidating others.
Furthermore, the advertising model has run up against a limit. As Scott Galloway points out in his post “Elephants in the Room”, the advertising market is a zero-sum game; the market has not grown relative to the GDP in a century. The only way for a new advertising-driven service to grow its revenue is to take marketshare from another incumbent, and there are now a lot of entrenched incumbents in the digital space.
In a subscription model, you are the customer. The platform is focused on making you a satisfied customer. Making the experience great for its users is how the platform grows its business.
Subscriptions also reduces the number of fake accounts, especially if the platform limits the number of accounts that can be tied to a given credit card.
Verified users
Paid subscriptions tied to verified credit cards provide a rudimentary level of verification that individuals posting content are not fake accounts, but for high-profile individuals and organizations (entities that many might want to impersonate) an additional level of manual verification is needed. This can potentially be expensive for the platform, but it is an important service to offer to all users of the platform. This isn’t just about protecting the person or organization being verified, but it is about guaranteeing to the platform's other users - the paying subscribers - that when they follow the writer Hugh Howey or the celebrity Oprah Winfrey, they really are following the person they think they are following.
User content moderation
The worst part of the social network experience for many people are the attacks they receive from other users. Some of the hate speech and attacks are from fake accounts, but as we have learned over the last decade and particularly the last 6 years, there are a lot of hateful real people out there. No one wants to pay for the opportunity to be attacked, intimidated, or threatened.
The platform needs to govern its site.
This is not an easy task or an inexpensive operation. Facebook spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year to do this.
One helpful approach would be to build better automated tools for individuals to control what they see or who can respond to them or post on their threads. Perhaps users could like or strongly dislike certain content or people (an initially manual process by the user), and over time the platform essentially learns to block posts or people for you, even if you haven’t explicitly blocked them yourself. For example, if the platform determines a particular person who you have not encountered before behaves very similarly to 30 other people you have explicitly blocked, the platform could prevent the user from sending you messages, replying directly to you in any thread, and could not post at all on a thread you have created.
Governing board
Along with content moderation, the platform needs a governing board made up of a diverse set of stakeholders who help shape what is considered acceptable behavior and content on the platform. These decisions should not be made by a single mercurial individual or a group of very similar people (e.g., white men in their 20s). The product of this governing board is a Community Standards document like that produced by Meta.
https://transparency.fb.com/policies/community-standards/