How to fix Twitter: Twitcoin and “free speech”. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc./LMMiami.com

• Is Twitter the new Yahoo?
• Perception is reality in Northern California’s cutthroat ecosystem.
• Nothing is more toxic in Silicon Valley than being regarded as a has-been.
• Unfair as it may sound, Twitter’s stock price is stalled, its user base growth has plateaued and advertisers show less and less interest in sending their marketing dollars the little bird’s way.
• Market and media analysts seem perplexed and unable to explain why this is happening: the self-defined “microblogging platform” is the megaphone of choice of an inordinate amount of journalists, scientists, artists and, last but not least, the new occupant of the White House.
• Still, eyeballs seem to be increasingly wandering elsewhere.
• One of its Achilles’ heels appears to be its inability to properly position itself in the “video messaging” and “livestreaming” landscapes, where rivals Instagram and SnapChat beat it to the punch.
• Twitter’s users don’t seem to be quite partial to seeing their faces on camera.
• Maybe they are ugly, maybe they are old, maybe they are both.
• Vine, a Twitter subsidiary dedicated to radiating microform videos, was launched with pomp and circumstance a few years back but, for some reason, was euthanized two years ago.
• THE big problem that might be scaring users away: Twitter is one of the most notorious open air landfills of modern culture.
• Fake news, widespread poisonous snark, harassment, hostility, hatred, impropriety, vulgarity, filth and multitudes of anonymous or bogus accounts singlehandedly dedicated to trolling fulltime are the everyday currency in the 280 character realm.
• One needs a thick skin to navigate de snark and vitriol of the Twittersphere.
• Twitter is not particularly a safe space for the younger generations of hypersensitive, easily offended souls.
• Twitter has another problem: the quintessential Silicon Valley catch 22.
• The unicorn conundrum.
• The big glitch in its business model based solely on advertising revenue: freeloading and leverage.
• Silicon Valley companies are essentially a Ponzi schemes caught in a nerve-racking mode of fake-it-till-you-make-it mad dash.
• A game of perceptions. Smoke, mirrors and growth at any price.
• Gasping for financial air from funding round to funding round.
• Twitter had it first ever profitable quarter in late 2017, its eleventh year of operations.
• Exhibit 2: Uber, the ride sharing app, lost a whopping $1.5 billion in Q4 2017.**
• Taking advantage of the fact that Twitter has a mature base of loyal adult users, it should move from an advertising-based model to a subscription-based one.
• Yup: a paywall.
• Such a move would be plenty risky for platforms that cater mostly to teens (SnapChat & to some extent Instagram) but Twitter’s graying user base should be game.
• The plan would be as follows:
• Every user will need to enter a valid credit card to obtain a handle.
• Want to withhold your identity?
• Sure, but anonymous handles pay extra.
• No credit card no service.
• Users pay 1 cent per month for every user they follow.
• Conversely, users get paid 1 dollar per month for every 100 users who follow them.
• If user wants to tweet, he or she needs to buy “tweeting packages” with one-year contracts, to wit:
• -a $60 annual plan buys a user 120 tweets per month. By the unit. Use them or lose them. No carryover. Unit price includes spontaneous non-sequitur standalone tweets, individual tweets belonging to a thread of tweets as well as tweets responding to other users (or “tweeting at other users” to use Twitter parlance).
• -user pays 1/5 of a cent for every tweet he or she retweets or quotes
• -user pays 1/10 of a cent for every fav he/she emits
• -user gets paid 1/10 of a cent for every retweet he/she gets
• -user gets paid 1/20 of a cent for every fav he/she gets
• The premise is simple.
• So you love free speech, huh?
• Free as in free of charge or free as in speaking truth to power and making you voice heard no matter what?
• Well this is your chance to put your money where your mouth is, buster.
• A principle is only a principle when it costs you money.
• Quality content will be rewarded.
• Trolling will be penalized.
• And here comes the second part of the idea.
• Twitter will have its own “token”.
• Yup: its own cryptocurrency.
• Which we can christen Twitcoin or somesuch.
• This monopoly money will be good for all transactions inside the Twitter ecosystem.
• And users will be able to redeem a certain amount in exchange of fiat money once every quarter.
• (Fiat is econobabble for actual greenbacks).

**Source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/11/ubers-crisis-deepens-with-record-quarterly-loss/