A new social network. A new competitor in the risk of anti-Twitter. It was born a few weeks ago but it showed up with what it takes to carve out a space for itself in the new geography of social networks. It’s called Post.news (or Post). It was founded by the former CEO of Waze, Noam Bardin51 years old, who led the app to move through traffic between 2009 and 2021. A long-time entrepreneur in the panorama of the global digital economy.
Post.news is currently a site. Better yet, it’s a waiting list to download a beta app that’s currently seen by a few tens of thousands of people. But what has attracted the attention of the US media is that as the first lender has Andreessen Horowitz. One of the largest venture capital funds in Silicon Valley. To be clear, it is the first fund to have invested in Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Slack and Coinbase. The impression is that when Andreessen Horowitz (o A16z) moves, something is about to happen. And the (secret) investment in Post.news tickles the imaginations of industry experts.
A hastily launched app: focus on media and micropayments
According to Techcrunch, Post.news was rushed into beta in mid-November. Anyone who has seen how it works describes it as a platform similar to Twitter – and therefore to Mastodon, its main alter ego at the moment: there are likes, retweets, you can follow the accounts that you consider most interesting. It wouldn’t have features like direct messages, or the ability to insert images into posts. But it is still a beta version.
But what makes the difference between Post, Twitter, Mastodon, or Hive, is that this social network (it’s not even entirely sure it’s actually a social network, but for now it can be defined as such) is closely linked to the world of news , media and premium content offered by newspapers.
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Post.news was born as a platform to “access premium journalistic content, without subscriptions or advertising”. Those who access it will then be able to buy individual items instead of subscriptions. To then discuss them, comment on them, interact with whoever wrote the article or with the publication that published it. An alternative to the subscription. A way to access content that is considered interesting, without being tied to the magazine with monthly or annual subscriptions. An old challenge in world publishing, so far explored with some difficulty.
Discordant opinions, between enthusiasm and skepticism
Not many people have used the app. Those who have done so are divided between enthusiasm and skepticism, as often happens in these cases. At the moment, to register, you have to put yourself on the waiting list (200 thousand requests, at the moment, about 400,000 subscribers according to what is reported by the American media). Enthusiasts say it’s a beautiful product that goes beyond the very idea of an app. Skeptics argue that it is the old idea of applying micropayments to the publishing world, a project that has already been tried and failed several times.
On the Post.news site there is a message from its founder. Bardin writes: “I believe that the newspaper of the future is a feed. I want it to be easy for users to access. And lucrative for publishers”.
Then, what looks like a manifesto of his social network: “Post will be a civil place to discuss ideas, learn from experts, journalists, individual creators and from each other, converse freely and have fun. Many of today’s ad-driven platforms are all about grabbing attention at any cost, wreaking havoc in our society, amplifying the extremes and silencing the moderates. Post was designed to give a voice to the marginalized majority; there are enough platforms for the extremists, and we cannot give them the city square”. Which sounds like a bid to really be an anti-Twitter. Or, more generally, an anti social.
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Attention should no longer be captured at all costs
Social media as we know it was built to get attention. Keep users on the platform as long as possible, make them interact, glue them to the screen if possible. It is an old accusation against their algorithms, summarized in the famous “Ten reasons to immediately delete your social accounts” by Jaron Lanier. Social media has been like this since day one.
And I’m like this even in the era of TikTok, whose greatest merit is that of having created a perfect recommendation algorithm (the engine that suggests what to watch, and what to watch after what you’ve watched). Superior to all those held so far by the giants of social media.
It’s rather premature to judge Post. We will have to wait for the development part of the app to be finished. And then see her in action. But the project deserves attention. First of all for whoever created it, who is a long-time entrepreneur of the global digital economy. But also for those who financed it.
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A16z, Andreessen Horowitz, is also the financier of Elon Musk’s Twitter operation (400 million put up by the fund). Venture capital of his caliber can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Globally. The interest in social networks and their future (their evolution) has always been a trademark of Andreessen Horowitz. They invested in Facebook when nobody believed it.
The last in order of time is the investment in the Clubhouse. Which may turn out to be the most daring of all in the sector, but in any case he was able to identify an evolution of social networks, which were starting to open up to the voice, to podcasts, to the sharing of voice messages. The future of information is one of the guidelines for the development of platforms. This is what Elon Musk is already doing with his Twitter 2.0. And that’s what Post.news will do. Whatever the effect will be in the short term, chart a path in the medium and long term.