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Twitter Super Followers Brings Calls of “RIP Twitter”

By Laura Tucker
Twitter Super Followers Featured

It’s not unusual at all for a company to change up its business model to one it hopes will bring in more revenue. But when it’s a company with millions of customers who use the product for free, there’s going to be some backlash. That’s what Twitter found when it announced its new “Super Followers” feature that brought cries of “RIP Twitter” from its users.

Twitter Announces “Super Followers”

Twitter went through quite a metamorphosis in the past four years or so. It became a medium used in politics, with some terrible things being tweeted, leaving the social network in quite a quandary.

With a little breathing room, it appears Twitter has decided it needs to go in a new direction. it’s now trying to monetize the site, or rather, monetize to a greater degree.

Twitter Super Followers Account

Twitter’s plan is to double its annual revenue by 2023. Doubling the money you’re making in just two years is quite a lofty goal. At the front of this plan is to allow users to make money as well. Users can designate themselves as “Super Followers” to monetize their tweets, similarly to YouTube.

Twitter executives laid out this plan on Thursday. When explaining Super Followers, the execs said, “We’re rethinking incentives and exploring solutions to provide monetary incentive models for Creators and Publishers to be directly supported by their audience.”

But Twitter has far more in its plan. A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission spelled out that the goal is to “double development velocity by the end of 2023, which means doubling the number of features shipped per employee that directly drive either mDAU (monetizable daily active usage or users) or revenue.”

Twitter Super Followers Tweet

The social network has more than just a goal to double the revenue. It is also aiming to reach at least 315 million in Q4 2023. This would be around a 20 percent compound annual growth rate from the Q4 2019 growth base of 152 million mDAU.

“A healthy Twitter is critical to growth,” said the executives on Thursday. “That means making sure conversations are safe from abuse and harassment and that we do everything we can to reduce spam and misleading information.” It seems Twitter wants to absolve itself from the political quagmire it was caught in.

With a new “Safety Mode,” Twitter plans to delete user accounts “that might be acting abusive or spammy” and will limit the engagement of those accounts. There will also be a new “auto block and mute” button. If accounts break the rules, they can be automatically blocked or muted.

“RIP Twitter”

But the plan to provide a Safety Mode and limit accounts that are abusive and spammy isn’t what users noticed. They noticed the Super Follower feature.

Twitter Super Followers Users

Immediately after Twitter’s announcement on Thursday, “RIP Twitter” began trending on the social network. Included in the belief that Super Followers would be the death of Twitter was the comment, “All we wanted was an edit button.”

This shows that Twitter and its users are far apart, and the radical changes it will be making are not bringing them any closer. Twitter executives want more green, and they think users want some peace. But all users want is a simple edit button.

Read on to learn about a recent change Twitter already made, one that makes it just like other social media sites, to allow “disappearing tweets.”

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Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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