Noam Bardin:
It’s with a heavy coronary heart that I share this unhappy information with you.
Regardless of how a lot we’ve achieved collectively, we can be shutting
down Submit Information throughout the subsequent few weeks.We have now carried out many nice issues collectively. We constructed a toxicity-free
group, a platform the place Publishers interact, and an app that
validated many theories round Micropayments and shoppers’
willingness to buy particular person articles. We even managed to
domesticate an outstanding tipping ecosystem for creators and
commenters.However, on the finish of the day, our service will not be rising quick sufficient
to develop into an actual enterprise or a major platform. A shopper
enterprise, at its core, wants to indicate speedy shopper adoption and
now we have not managed to seek out the suitable product mixture to make
it occur.
Submit Information was a longshot from the beginning, going up towards (a) the entrenched chief within the house, Twitter/X; (b) the open various of Mastodon; (c) Meta-backed and Instagram-derived Threads; and (d) the Jack-Dorsey-funded Bluesky. I’m undecided there’s room for all 4 of these, not to mention a fifth.
However I feel Submit shot itself within the foot proper out of the gate going web-only. They ultimately bought round to placing an “app” within the App Retailer nevertheless it’s only a skinny wrapper round their web site — so skinny that you would be able to drag-and-drop the tab controller buttons and see exactly which PWA framework they used from the custom URLs shown in the drag proxy. Folks don’t need to use PWAs; they need actual apps. Native iOS apps are so necessary to social networking that Threads launched app-only for its first two months earlier than launching its net model.