Twitter Analyst Day Shows Work on Super Follows, Micro-communities

Twitter on Thursday announced a number of new features the company is experimenting with, including Super Follow subscriptions, which will allow users to pay to see tweets from their favorite accounts.

Twitter showed off the new features at its annual Analyst Day. The company kicked off the event by announcing new goals to grow its user base to 315 million monetizable daily active users, or mDAU, by the end of 2023 and reach $ 7.5 billion in revenue. in 2023, double the $ 3.72 billion in revenues reported by the company. 2020.

The previewed features are aimed at helping the company meet its user and revenue goals for 2023.

Here are the most notable features:

Super suit

The company said it would explore the idea of ​​Super Follows, which will allow users to pay for subscriptions to their favorite Twitter accounts. A screenshot of the feature shows that Super Follows could provide subscribers with exclusive content, such as newsletters, as well as unique supporter badges, among other benefits.

Twitter said it is also exploring the idea of ​​allowing users to tip their favorite accounts. The company did not say when these features will be rolled out or provide clear details on how they will work.

We “believe that an audience-funded model where subscribers can directly fund the content they value most is a sustainable incentive model that aligns the interests of creators and consumers,” said Dantley Davis, Manager of design and research on Twitter.

Microcommunities

Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter product manager, announced that the company is working on a new feature that will allow users to create, discover and join micro-communities, such as communities of social justice-conscious users or plant parents.

Users who run micro-communities could also set and enforce social standards that go beyond Twitter’s standard terms of service, Beykpour said.

The company will begin to publicly experiment with this feature later this year, Beykpour said. This feature is part of the company’s efforts to drive user growth by more easily connecting users with topics and interests that matter to them.

“We need to improve ourselves to allow people to have more focused conversations about the relevant communities or geographies that interest them,” Beykpour said.

Security mode

Twitter executives stressed that maintaining a healthy environment free from abuse and harassment is key to growing the company’s user base.

“We don’t think Twitter alone can or should be a police officer for all conversations,” Beykpour said. “Not just because it’s hard to scale, but because there are many circumstances in which we think it’s important for Twitter users to create and enforce their own social norms and their own label. “

As part of this effort, the company briefly showed off a feature that appears to be referred to as “safe mode”.

This feature automatically detects when a user begins to receive a flurry of negative interactions from others. A screenshot of the features seems to indicate that users could enable security mode to limit the engagement of accounts that act abusively or spam them.

“Automatically block accounts that appear to be breaking Twitter rules and disable accounts that might use slurs, slurs, strong language or hateful remarks,” reads a screenshot of the feature.

Bird watching

Birdwatch could fight the spread of disinformation on the social network through user contributions, Twitter said.

“While our work on labeling misleading information began with a Twitter-led effort to label tweets, Birdwatch is a more scalable, Wikipedia-like model in which an open community of contributors can collectively determine when the context needs to be. be added to a tweet and what is that context. should say, “Beykpour said.

An example of the feature shows a tweet that states that the whales are not really tagged with notes from Twitter users who qualify the tweet as “uninformed or potentially misleading.” One of the notes says, “Marine mammals are actually real.”