
Some celebrities are ditching Twitter for Community - altacc
https://www.fastcompany.com/90439032/why-your-favorite-celebs-are-ditching-twitter-for-an-app-youve-never-heard-of
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cyberferret
Am I incorrectly remembering that Twitter (Twtr) v1 was primarily to share
tweets via SMS text messages? Hence the limit of 140 characters (+20 for the
username to be added to the message)?

Is this just the wheel gone full circle?

~~~
dannyw
Platforms limit reach of participants with large audiences, in order to
encourage them to buy ads.

Participants move away and build their own platform.

Advertising ruins every platform. Just look at Google even, a darling of the
early 2000s.

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m3kw9
Whoever uses it now must have shares.

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CerealFounder
This company is a huge VC darling. Take it with a grain of salt. Once your
texts become a noisy comms channel itll get rough.

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ggm
We're only being told to increase shareholder value.

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rolltiide
Eh PR bs

I’ve had stuff published on fast company, even ghost wrote some myself

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webpaymentsguy
I always thought it was funny seeing articles of unlikely-to-succeed VC funded
startups and random corporate comms

[https://www.fastcompany.com/company/wework](https://www.fastcompany.com/company/wework)

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3057415/adam-
neumanns-16-billion...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3057415/adam-
neumanns-16-billion-neo-utopian-play-to-turn-wework-into-wewo)

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wdb
Are they planning to give them numbers for every country inn the world for all
the phones? International texts can get expensive really quickly

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tinus_hn
If you send them at scale it’s almost free. What you as a consumer pay for
sending text messages has no relation to the cost whatsoever.

Remember that you can send and download enormous files from all over the world
for free, and these are just less than 140 byte packets.

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georgebarnett
What I find fascinating about this is how easy (and simultaneously difficult)
it’s going to be for FB and Twitter to copy this.

This channel will remove my only remaining use of these platforms.

~~~
altacc
One of the reasons for moving away from fb is that those with followers end up
having to pay to get their posts shown to followers. When you follow someone
on fb you expect to to see all their posts, but in reality fb has skewered the
algorithm so only a tiny percentage will see the updates. It's probably easier
for a band/celeb to pay a flat fee to use something like community instead.

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iandanforth
It's a fan club. Over SMS.

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sonar_un
I am not sure I understand. The whole point of social media is that you don’t
have to talk to people one-on-one and waste time. I literally have no clue
what “community” is trying to solve. There is no way that people with a large
community will have any meaningful interaction with their followers.

~~~
prawn
Maybe I'm just a cynic but I don't think a celebrity would actually want
meaningful interaction with followers, unless it was with minimal extra
effort, just to have their fans think that.

I've been surprised for some time that celebrities just default to the major
platforms rather than band together and build platforms that work for them -
purpose built to engage with fans efficiently, monetise (Patreon-style member
posts, subscriptions, sales, paid downloads and so on).

I know Instagram and co have special modes for those with large audiences, but
I'm talking about something built from the ground up to serve the creator or
celebrity. Sounds like hell to me, but there are loads of fans who would lap
it up.

~~~
bawolff
I think part of the appeal is the fiction that you are in some sense "friends"
with the celeb. Sure its obviously not true; In many cases celeb probably
doesn't even operate the account. But if they moved to a custom site, it takes
away all pretense of you being a celeb's "friend".

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rajangdavis
Someone should do this for indie bands...

~~~
puffyredchair
How would this be any different then Community.com? Do you imagine a group
chat with the band members or something else?

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evan_
You could have a themed page with a music player, fans could post their own
profiles and friend each other, pick their top 8 friends, one of them is Tom,

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egypturnash
We could call it BandSpace...

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nathias
why not signal?

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monadic2
Do people really join twitter to follow celebrities? It’s the commentary by
the “unwashed masses” that makes it worth it to me.

~~~
thrower123
Twitter contains multitudes. It reminds me of nothing so much as high school,
except expanded out a thousandfold, with innumerable cliques and circles that
swarm and combine. And some serendipitous incongruities when the streams cross
and the mutuals encounter one another, sometimes.

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puffyredchair
What is the monetization method of Community? Do they charge the celebrities
who are using it?

They say in their faq they aren't data mining, using ads, or charging the
fans.

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puffyredchair
Yeah that's it on the blog it explains. The celebrities pay to use it. It's a
cool model

~~~
echelon
(In case this gets deleted)

Grandparent post:

> What is the monetization method of Community? Do they charge the celebrities
> who are using it? They say in their faq they aren't data mining, using ads,
> or charging the fans.

Parent post:

> Yeah that's it on the blog it explains. The celebrities pay to use it. It's
> a cool model

Both posts made by the same (brand new) account.

This is some of the laziest astroturfing on HN I've ever seen. You didn't
think we'd see though this?

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bawolff
My fave bit is the "its a cool model" as if charging your customers money to
use your product is a new and unique bussiness model.

