Post News, a Twitter alternative that emerged in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover, is shutting down. Noam Bardin, the platform’s founder and former CEO of Waze, writes that Post News “is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform.”
The Andreessen Horowitz-backed platform launched in a closed beta in November 2022, but now it’s set to shutter “within the next few weeks.” It serves as a social platform that also offers users ad-free access to paywalled content from publishers such as Fortune, Business Insider, Wired, The Boston Globe, and others. All users have to do is pay a “few cents” per article instead of signing up for a subscription to each publication.
What it should have been is exclude the social media crap, create a browser extension that charges users and allows them to get through the paywalls, then it pays the journals.
Using a separate app makes the whole thing more of a hindrance than convenience. I want to be able to click on an article posted anywhere, load it in my mobile browser, and seamlessly get charged a couple cents to read the article.