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 view 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 increase its user base to 315 million monetizable daily active users, or mDAUs, by the end of 2023 and achieve annual revenue of $ 7.5 billion in 2023, double the revenue of $ 3.72 billion that the company reported in 2020.

The resources presented are intended to help the company achieve its 2023 revenue and user targets.

These are the most notable features:

Super Follows

The company said it will explore the idea of ​​Super Follows, which will allow users to pay for the subscription 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 exclusive supporter badges, among other benefits.

Twitter said it is also exploring the idea of ​​allowing users to give tips on their favorite accounts. The company did not say when these features would be released or provided any clear details on how they would work.

We “think that a publicly funded model where subscribers can directly finance the content they value most is a durable incentive model that aligns the interests of creators and consumers,” said Dantley Davis, head of design and research at Twitter .

Microcommunities

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 communities of users who care about social justice or parents of plants.

Users who run micro-communities can also set and enforce social norms 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. The feature is part of the company’s efforts to drive user growth by connecting them more easily to topics and interests that interest them.

“We must improve by allowing people to have more targeted conversations with the relevant communities or geographies in which they are interested,” said Beykpour.

Safety mode

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

“We don’t believe that Twitter alone can or should be a police officer for all conversations,” said Beykpour. “Not just because it is difficult to scale, but because there are many circumstances in which we believe it is important for people on Twitter to create and apply their own social norms and etiquette.”

As part of that effort, the company briefly showed a feature that appears to be called “security mode”.

This feature automatically detects when a user begins to receive a flood of negative interactions from others. A screenshot of the features appears to indicate that users can enable safe mode to limit the involvement of accounts that are acting abusively or sending spam.

“Automatically block accounts that appear to violate Twitter rules and silence accounts that may be using insults, name calling, strong language or hateful comments,” says a screenshot of the feature.

Birdwatch

Birdwatch can combat the spread of misinformation on the social network with the help of user contributions, Twitter said.

“While our job of labeling misleading information started with an Twitter-led effort to tag tweets, Birdwatch is a more scalable model, similar to Wikipedia, where an open community of contributors can collectively determine when context should be added to a tweet and in what context it should say, “said Beykpour.

An example of the feature shows a tweet that states that whales are not real, marked with notes from Twitter users who call the tweet “misinformed or potentially misleading”. One of the notes says “Marine mammals are indeed real.”