Jack Dorsey, CEO and co-founder of Twitter, will address students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) on November 12, 2018 in New Delhi, India.
Amal KS | Hindustan Times | Getty Images
Twitter on Thursday announced a number of new features the company is experimenting with, including Super Follow plans, which allow users to pay to see tweets from their favorite accounts.
Twitter showed the new features during the annual analyst day. The company kicked off the event by announcing new goals to grow its user base to 315 million daily active users, or mDAUs, by the end of 2023 and reach annual revenue of $ 7.5 billion by 2023, doubling its $ 3.72 billion in revenue the company reported in 2020.
The previewed features are designed to help the company meet its user and revenue goals for 2023.
These are the most notable features:
Super follows
The company said it will explore the idea of Super Follows, which allows users to pay for subscriptions to their favorite Twitter accounts. A screenshot of the feature shows that Super Follows can 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 has not said when these features will be rolled out or clear details about how they will work.
We believe that a publicly funded model that allows subscribers to directly fund the content they value most is a sustainable incentive model that aligns the interests of creators and consumers, said Dantley Davis, chief of design and research at Twitter .
Later, in a question and answer session, Twitter product leader Kayvon Beykpour said the company plans to release Super Follows this year, explaining that the price will be adjustable.
Micro communities
Twitter product leader Kayvon Beykpour announced that the company is working on a new feature that will allow users to create, discover and join micro-communities, such as user communities who care about social justice or who are plant parents.
Users running the micro communities would also be able to set and enforce social standards that go beyond Twitter’s standard terms of service, Beykpour said.
The company will begin publicly experimenting with this feature later this year, Beykpour said. The feature is part of the company’s efforts to drive user growth by more easily connecting users with topics and interests they care about.
“We need to get people to have conversations that are more focused on the relevant communities or regions they are interested in,” Beykpour said.
Security mode
Twitter executives stressed that maintaining a healthy environment free from abuse and harassment is key to increasing the company’s user base.
“We don’t believe Twitter can or should be a police officer alone for all conversations,” Beykpour said. “Not only because this is difficult to scale, but because there are many circumstances in which we believe it is important that people on Twitter create and enforce their own social norms and etiquette.”
As part of this effort, the company briefly showed off a feature that appears to be called “security mode”.
This feature automatically detects when a user begins to receive a wave of negative interactions from others. A screenshot of the features appears to indicate that users can activate safety mode to limit the involvement of accounts that act offensive or spam.
“Automatically block accounts that appear to be in violation of Twitter rules and mute accounts that may use insults, profanities, bad language or snide comments,” reads a screenshot of the feature.
Birdwatch
Birdwatch could combat the spread of disinformation on the social network with the help of user contributions, Twitter said.
While our work in tagging misleading information began with a Twitter-led attempt to tag tweets, Birdwatch is a more scalable, Wikipedia-like model where an open community of contributors can collectively determine when to add context to a tweet and what context should say, ‘said Beykpour.
An example of the feature shows a tweet stating that whales are not actually tagged with comments from Twitter users calling the tweet “misinformed or potentially misleading.” One of the notes reads, “Marine mammals are, in fact, real.”