I wrote the following as a Twitter thread first but I think this idea could work for Reddit/Tildes/Mastadon and would love to know what you folks think of it.

Here is how I would monetize a social network that could work for Twitter.

First of all, don’t charge your most valuable users - the power users that create the content for you. Instead focus on the users that get more value from your system - the consumers of the content.

The idea is simple - introduce a small time delay before content gets seen from the time it is published. For example, on Twitter it could be 1 minute. On Reddit it could be 10 minutes.

Paid subscribers would have no delay. Importantly - lift the delay for the users that generate a lot of views.

You can do revenue share with your content creators in proportion to how much time paid subscribers spent on their content.

And you can also identify your most valuable audience - the paid subscribers. This will help prioritize content moderation decisions, identify abuse, and prioritize appeals.

The delay would allow you to prioritize which content needs to be indexed instantly (ie from creators that paid subscribers are following) and which you can process on a best effort basis - saving on production costs.

You can gift subscriptions to your friends and family.

As with many Twitter users, I'm finally at the point where I want to leave and join Mastodon. About a year ago I set up an account after seeing some people on Tildes talk about it, but I found it confusing and ultimately closed the account. I want to give it another go, but I'm a bit confused about all the different instance options, what the practical differences are, and more. Are there any comprehensive getting started guides? Does it matter which instance I join? How did you choose for yourself?

I don’t know how many of you watch “nerd” movie channels, or ever did. But for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about stuff like ScreenJunkies, Collider and all their auxiliaries like SchmoesKnow.

These are the people that were made fun of by RedLetterMedia in their NerdCrew videos which funnily enough they don’t do anymore.

They were pillars of the YouTube film community. In fact, back when I was first getting into movies in the early 2010s, they were the majority of content. Until the video essay boom came into fruition circa 2015, and of which is now the primary style of video.

They would make dozens upon dozens of videos and podcasts talking about the latest trailer for a Marvel movie. They would speculate about what would happen in the next Star Wars movie. They would react to trailers and over-exaggerate. They would fully embrace all things that Funko Pop nerds embraced.

2019 was the height of all of this. The MCU’s Infinity Saga came to a close with Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home, and the Star Wars Sequel trilogy wrapped up later in the year with The Rise of Skywalker. The hype for these movies were unbelievable, even if one of them disappointed and left everyone with a bitter after-taste.

Then the pandemic happened and all nerd movie news stopped. There was nothing to react to, there was nothing to hype. Wonder Woman 1984 came out, but nobody liked it.

The following year was a little bit better thanks to the hype machine surrounding Spider-Man: No Way Home. But still, the views that these nerd channels were getting dropped significantly. Check out the difference between the reviews on Fandom Entertainment's channel for Endgame and Spider-Man: No Way Home. The drop in audience is remarkable. And that’s for the big reviews. The day-to-day content that these channels posted are down significantly, and in the case of Fandom Entertainment (of ScreenJunkies), they have stopped producing daily videos. It’s a YouTube channel on life support.

Collider is an empty shell of itself, they canceled all of their nerd panels and only do generic press junket videos.

It’s simple really. These things ended. Interest in the MCU has dipped since Endgame (with the exception of Spider-Man). Star Wars has stopped making movies, and the TV shows have been of mixed quality. People moved on. These channels aren't needed anymore.

The era of the 2010s movie nerd YouTube channel is over. The only ones staying alive are ones that relied more on personality rather than farming content. I’m talking about JeremyJahns, Chris Stuckmann, and Mr. Sunday Movies. Their audience stayed around because their audience liked their personality.

A few years ago when I was new to tildes a typed tildes.com directly in the URL bar. I realized I'd forgotten the correct domain extension and did a web search for "tildes community" or something similar.

One of the results was for tilde town . At the time I glanced over it and thought about joining but I never got around to it. Last July I somehow stumbled over it again and this time I applied to join.

It's a pretty cool place.

The idea is that it's a Linux server that each user gets an account on. You then ssh into it - and that's where the community lives!

They have a chat system, a forum system, microblogging that's private to that community, command line games (some of which are multi-player) and a bunch of other really neat features. Each user even gets a folder in their home directory that let's them serve up public web pages.

Technically they have about 2,000 registered users, but the number of actual active users seems to be similar to our community here.

The vibe reminds me a lot of what we have here except that tilde town is casual "slice of life" only and doesn't do news articals at all. Some of their forum posts are similar to our own, with posts for what people are reading and watching and what projects they are working on.

Ive enjoyed my time there so far and I'd encourage any one who's interested to check it out. My username over there is grendel84, stop by and say hi!