Why Is It So Damn Hard to Kill Twitter?

Noam Bardin would like his critics to chill out. “We're building something new,” he said, “and new things are difficult to understand.”

A year ago, Bardin, the former CEO of Waze, launched Post, a slick new social media app. With his background, Bardin seemed well positioned to prosper from the tumult around Elon Musk and X — and the internet’s growing distaste for both. Post quickly attracted a high-profile backer, Andreessen Horowitz, a leading venture capital firm, and brought on the celebrity journalist Kara Swisher as a vocal advisor. 

Since, Bardin has found it tough to fully capitalize on the opportunity — amid declining interest in X and anything resembling it. “Most apps have challenges in terms of growth and moving forward, and we do as well,” he said, expressing an unusual amount of CEO candor. 

Even with those challenges, Bardin is vowing to keep Post’s core business model unchanged and willing to accept that Post may never achieve the same size as X, the app formerly known as Twitter. “There’s one Twitter, and Twitter's a very unique thing that was created at a unique time. There isn't going to be another Twitter,” he said.

Sitting down for a recent conversation with The Messenger, Bardin spoke about Musk, fake news — and how to convince people to pay for the news. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The Messenger: What’s this past year been like?

Noam Bardin: As everything in social, things move up and down very fast, and we've been iterating in public. 

One of our big theses was that there can be different business models for news publishers besides ads and subscriptions. We believe there has to be a third model: micropayments. That has been extremely successful. 

There was a lot of push back before we launched by publishers against experimenting and joining something like this. Since, we've really been extremely fortunate with an influx of publishers, and we have about 100 today. And we're seeing consumers pay for their content.

Post’s launch had a lot of buzz, but that has died out. What’s going on? 

We're definitely growing, but we're not at the growth rates that we would like to be at. But I would also argue that none of the other Twitter alternatives are. That’s a space that has dropped down in terms of public perception. 

And it does seem like a dismal time for the entire news business. 

The news industry is a $130 billion industry. It's not going away. It will need to change and morph into something else. 

I think the model of a destination site that's only one news provider with one monthly subscription will go away. When I get news, I want to get multiple sources and follow different people, including journalists, creators and experts, and I think other people want that, too.

If you look at the unique content from each publisher, it's a very, very small number of pieces that are really unique — that don't appear on any other any other platform. I think that's another thing that has to change.

Have you considered adding ads to Post?

No, we haven't. Our focus is on micropayments, and we believe that's important. The internet has a myopic view of ads and subscriptions. Those are the only two business models that exist on the internet today, but we believe that the world is more complex than those two models. 

With the way the internet is built today, you can be successful if you've got hundreds of millions of users or if you've got extremely high-quality, super unique content that a small niche is willing to subscribe for to read.

Who knows what'll happen in the future? After all, Amazon has basically become an advertising company.

You’re not the first to try micropayments, and they’ve mostly failed. Why do you think you’ll succeed?

First of all, we have the experience of the last year that shows that it's working. People are paying, and publishers are providing content for the platform. The whole ecosystem is working. Secondly, I think we're in a different stage of the internet. If you didn't have paywalls, you couldn't do micropayments because everything is free and ad supported, and it's extremely difficult to convince people to pay something for content. People are also much more comfortable paying online today than they were 10 years ago.

How do you think about content moderation — a major pressure point on Elon Musk and X’s finances?

On Post, you’ll get a warning, then you’ll get a second warning, then you’ll be thrown off the platform. We don’t label content yet. I think the biggest difference between us and other platforms is that we’re not afraid to throw people off. We would rather have a smaller community that's safe and factual and where people can come and engage in real discussions than the largest community with a cesspool of content. A lot of the biggest voices on X are not people we would want on our platform.

Talk about what’s happened at X. 

If you look at who has gained reach and who has lost reach since Musk took over, the people who have been less factual and the conspiracy theorists are the ones who have gotten the most reach.

And if you look at the traffic that publishers have gotten from Twitter, it's basically dropped off since Elon took over. Have these publications become less factual? No. He just doesn't like them. 

Even though your approach with Post seems thoughtful, you’ll inevitably have people questioning why they should pay for something that’s free someplace else. What’s your answer?

Everything used to be free on the internet. What we're seeing today is if you provide a good quality service and high quality content, people will pay: not everyone — but a good percentage will. Netflix and Spotify have shown us how this works.

When I think about how news is set up, there's the everyday news that covers what happened yesterday. That news, I think, has very, very low value and probably should be ad-supported. And then you've got those unique pieces written by a journalist who's been investigating something for a long time and has the breaking news that only they have — that is worth a lot and people are probably willing to pay something for it.