Twitter May Shutter Two Features Made For Creators
Under Elon Musk's mercurial control, things are moving at light speed inside Twitter's offices. The focus is on product development, with Twitter Blue and Vine's revival taking priority. Amidst all the chaos with a massive layoff looming overhead, a handful of Twitter products are also on the chopping block, and a few have been put on indefinite hold.
In the latest edition of his Platformer newsletter, tech journalist Casey Newton writes that Twitter's own newsletter feature called Revue is shutting down later this year. Twitter acquired the newsletter service back in January 2021 at the height of the newsletter buzz heralded by Substack. It's a rather confusing decision, as Musk has chirped a lot recently about helping creators earn a living and paying them by milking verified users of a Twitter Blue subscription fee.
The biggest advantage of Revue was that Twitter only took a 5% cut of the creator's net subscription earnings, while Substack was taking a 10% cut back then. Twitter eventually allowed writers to put their newsletter links right in their Twitter profiles. A few weeks later, Twitter also added a subscribe button to tweets sharing a Revue newsletter article, allowing viewers to directly subscribe without any email sign-up hassles.
Content is king, but only if it's video
The next product casualty under the regime of Twitter's new CEO is Notes. In June 2022, Twitter launched a Note feature that allowed users to publish long-form articles of up to 2,500 words without having to worry about the character count or going through the ordeal of writing threads. A dedicated Write option to the left pane was added, which opened a basic word processing system.
Users could add images and embed tweets in their articles, and format the whole thing with a headline and details about their Twitter profile, just like a regular news article. Each note had its own unique URL that would allow a person to read it without being redirected into Twitter's ecosystem. Tweets sent out with a Note link popped up a preview of the article and could be interacted with in the same way as a regular tweet on the social media timeline.
So far, the Note feature has been limited to testing to a small circle of users, but Twitter had plans for expanding it to more interested parties. As per Musk's direction, the Notes feature has reportedly been put on an "indefinite" hiatus. Irrespective of how promising and convenient it seems, it appears that Musk's focus is on videos with features such as paywalled clips and bringing back Vine to compete with TikTok.