Some insider details as someone who knew some of the Revue team - based mostly in the Netherlands.
The majority of the team was cut in the first wave of Twitter layoffs on 4 November (wrote about this [1]) - when 50% of people were let go. By this time, most of them were working on Twitter's long form tweets, which feature was being tested with customers.
So this decision was indirectly made on the first week of the Twitter takeover. In the end, it was perhaps two people left from the old Revue team. Today, there's only the founder of Revue, who wrote this article, everyone else let go AFAIK.
What was very, very surprising to me is how, a month and a half later, Elon Musk replied to a question on how he's open to the idea of acquiring Substack [2]. But he just shut down Revue, which was exactly "Twitter's Substack" version with all the same features: newsletters, support for paid, plus first-class integration into Twitter that Substack does not have.
I suspect the value of something like that isn't the tech but the established writers+audiences. Substack is the best current example of independent journalism and columnists managing and monetizing their loyal readership without the brand umbrella of a major publication.
Short-sighted decision? Revue was basically DOA and Twitter did zero customer development since its acquisition. Shutting down Revue is probably the best decision he's made so far.
It's interesting how people's experiences differ - it feels to me like every third link on HN's front page is from Substack.
Have you ever read an article where you scroll down and it fades in a dialog asking you to subscribe to their newsletter, and then you have to click "Let me read it first" to keep going? The platform that site is running on is Substack.
I'm sure I seen it, just don't recall. usually if I click a link and its a blog, I'm gone. If its a block with something I have to click to read further, I definitely just close it.
I just don't like the blogging experience, I never did. I'd much rather consume my information in video content. I feel like the ways they can convey the information is much more dynamic, and its painfully obvious if they are just trying to fluff the video for time. With some blogs, they add so much fluff writing and reading isn't something I particularly enjoy.
The video experience is getting worse, with in video sponsors. personally, content creators should be forced to tag the video sections that are for sponsorship and the player should be able to automatically skip them.
Twitter likely has more than a few Indian engineers. And Twitter’s many tech customers likely have more than a few Indians as well. Really not an edge case at all.
You would have to be a complete idiot to try and build your revenue on something owned by Twitter. They will shut you down at any time, for any reason, with no recourse.
I mean that’s not wrong, it just speaks poorly of these tech giants in general. For example dark sky was recently shut down, after being acquired by Apple.
It's like saying "Thanks to the work of (nonprofit) there will be at least a 5% increase in the number of comfortable affordable housing units in New Orleans by the end of the year" before Hurricane Katrina.
> Twitter could absolutely become a paid service and move away from ads as its business model. ... Imagine paying $1-3 per month for FB or Twitter. We'd no longer be the product — our data not for sale — and the companies would make more money!
or
> It's almost a running joke, up there with Daft Punk playing at the trash fence, that Twitter just won't release an edit button. With a move towards paying subscribers, maybe Twitter will listen to its real customers -- content writers -- rather than advertisers.
"You would have to be a complete idiot to try and build your revenue on something owned by Twitter. They will shut you down at any time, for any reason, with no recourse."
Probably fired everyone who worked there without realising. ‘Oh crap, there’s no-one left. Quick, write something and stick it on the homepage.’
It’s telling that the sign in with twitter functionality was broken for a few days after the initial announcement. Was seriously worried I wouldn’t be able to download my subscriber list and content.
" it is your responsibility to adhere to any (...) regulations in connection with your subscriber list (...)and Twitter, Inc. has not obtained permission for you to use subscriber information for any purpose. "
What does that mean exactly?
> "Twitter hasn't obtained permission for you"?
It's poorly worded, but I think they're saying, "this link will let you download your list of subscribers. We're giving this to you with no warranties, don't use it to spam people or otherwise break the law."
Honestly, I don't think that's a particularly strong legal defense, but IANAL.
I do appreciate the revue team for letting users port their subscribers to other services. This is basic decency, but with Twitter banning links to other social media, I don't know what to expect from them anymore.
Putting aside product strategy and Howard Hughes for a minute, it's worth paying respect to the Revue team. A little group of good humans in the Netherlands, creating a slick and well designed product in an otherwise competitive space. It's a testament to a lot of good work and the kind of energy that makes this industry such a joy at times.
It's also one of endless examples of the downsides of acquisition for users (if not the founder/team with equity, who know the game they're playing). I often think of the analogy of rich kids from dysfunctional families who buy a lot of cool stuff and don't really do much with it after their social signal moment. Been on both side of this to some degree in the industry and it's never fun to see the users let down at the end of it.
While this is part of what keeps the industry going, it would be nice to see more open source outcomes for such well designed products. But to end on a positive... well done team, hope you all go on to make awesome things again.
Surprising they couldn't make this work. It seems like every substack author promotes their work on twitter. Maybe it's just hard to avoid tossing a few babies out with the bath water when reducing headcount by 75%.
I don't think there was an actual attempt to make it work. They've acquired it, slapped it below the profile, and when Musk took over Twitter it was immediately obvious it's going to die.
I tried to double click into this but I think there's an impedance mismatch. When you have the bandwidth, can you ping me back with some extra color on how this phrase fits in with synergistic corporate jargon?
I subscribe to some writers that have switched from Substack to Ghost (https://ghost.org/). It's open source, seems like a good company from what I know, and the experience as a subscriber is basically the same as Substack.
Maybe superficial but it seemed "tacked on" in terms of UI/UX. I don't think most people go to Twitter to read newsletters, and the way it was implemented just felt weird.
It's pretty clear that the service was a failure. The company was formed in 2015, two years before Substack. They were acquired by Twitter in Jan 2021. Two years later they pretty much have nothing to show for it, while Substack has become the dominant blogging/newsletter platform.
Is Substack a success? A piddling $9m revenue after a $650m valuation?
> According to the Times, Substack separately told investors that it saw revenue of just $9 million last year. (It told the Times directly in a story last month that it has hundreds of thousands of paid newsletters now on the platform.)
Just curious, why would it be the technical part of the userbase that raises money to acquire it? After all "raising money to buy a company" is typically more of an MBA activity than something done by the dev team.
His interest in Substack is more likely centred around controlling the public conversation in a more direct way than on Twitter.
On Twitter, Musk gets dunked on daily, as do his $8/month boosters, all of whom are at the top of the replies (hence creating a larger dunk attack vector).
Substack is more 'buttoned-down', everybody there is trying to be a "thought leader", so it already skews more "rich guys know better", even without considering all the conservative op-ed writers that have paid gigs there.
He probably looked at the codebase and decided it wasn’t worth it. Not saying that is a good decision, or a bad codebase. In fact, nowadays, I’d say the opposite. Lol
You think he printed out the code and read it on his private plane? No, I think this is a much more utilitarian decision: Revue wasn't making money, it got cut.
> "In the meantime, you will be able to download your subscriber list"
...
> "Twitter, Inc. has not obtained permission for you to use subscriber information for any purpose."
Twitter thinks it has permission to provide account owners with their subscriber lists but explicitly says that those same account owners have no permissions of their own for the data.
I do not think this is how how most countries' data privacy laws work.
This is a very murky situation and Twitter seem to be writing it all off with a wink and a nod.
According to Revue's platform privacy policy[0], Revue processes subscriber emails as a data processor. Each newsletter publisher owns the email addresses of their respective audiences. Revue would have a legal obligation to make those email addresses available to the newsletter publishers until the shutdown date.
Their privacy policy very strongly suggests that they are the data processor only when the account owner (Publisher) provides the email address, which they call indirect subscription.
Direct subscribers are users who subscribed themselves via the Revue service. and the privacy policy says nothing about providing direct subscribers' private data to the Publisher.
Their closure announcement does not distinguish between the types of subscriber.
So either the Publisher is only getting the indirect subscribers' info (and isn't being told they are losing the direct subscribers) or the Publisher is getting direct subscriber info which the direct subscriber never agreed to allowing (unless that is a separate agreement from the privacy policy, in which case presumably some permission was indeed obtained).
The majority of the team was cut in the first wave of Twitter layoffs on 4 November (wrote about this [1]) - when 50% of people were let go. By this time, most of them were working on Twitter's long form tweets, which feature was being tested with customers.
So this decision was indirectly made on the first week of the Twitter takeover. In the end, it was perhaps two people left from the old Revue team. Today, there's only the founder of Revue, who wrote this article, everyone else let go AFAIK.
What was very, very surprising to me is how, a month and a half later, Elon Musk replied to a question on how he's open to the idea of acquiring Substack [2]. But he just shut down Revue, which was exactly "Twitter's Substack" version with all the same features: newsletters, support for paid, plus first-class integration into Twitter that Substack does not have.
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/cruel-changes-at-twitter
[2] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1607936197602562050