The thing is: Am I paying as a content generator, or as a content consumer? I can't think a good feature for the second option, but I can think for the first one.

As a content generator, I'd pay for stuff like: 1. My tweets appear on my followers timeline always (or with priority, if they don't use Latest tweets). 2. I have better analytics, as: How many of my followers logged in on the last week, last month, etc? 3. My tweets re-appear automatically in different timezones when the other half of my public is waking up*

* This is because my main public is UK and USA. Tweeting something on UK morning is missed by USA, specially west coast. Waiting for it, it would make it useless for the UK people.

I would hate to know that my feed is now prioritized by those with the biggest wallets.

It already is.

Almost exactly like Facebook, I'd think. Would you like to boost your comment to reach another 5,000 viewers for only $50?

You are right.

I think no ads is a great option for consumers.

Even if a few million people signed up for that (which is a stretch IMO), it amounts to chump change that probably doesn't cover the cost of their content moderation team alone. You can't build a business on $12/year.

The trick is to charge Twitter business account $399/mo for something... like a business verified badge or the ability to edit and curate their own posts and replies.

> You can't build a business on $12/year.

And yet they appear to have done that on $0 of user-contributed revenue. Can you help me understand why it's better to leave that money on the table?

Imagine that $12 is to remove ads. That on its own would destroy most of the ad revenue because the people likely to put their hand in their pocket are exactly the ones advertisers want to target.

>content moderation team

Twitter has one? Could have fooled me.

Just 2 days ago the content moderation was in the news including a very controversial hn thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23912455

And before that?

Italics are generally not used for Japanese text and maybe for other languages like Chinese. Bold looks like more general

Just googled the replacement hacks using unicode. If Twitter offered styles for a fee, people would probably use those workarounds, e.g. to get italics 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔.

Although these are probably not searchable.. Edit: hmm Ctrl-F actually finds "string"!

> Although these are probably not searchable.. Edit: hmm Ctrl-F actually finds "string"!

Depends on the search engine. And Ctrl-F is already unusable on Twitter Web anyway, because it only works on tweets in the viewport (or close to it)

Is it browser's limitation?

I had issues, when tried to search in a very long <textarea> with scrollbar. Firefox was able to find only currently visible occurrences. That was not a viewport issue, of course, but looks very similar. Would love to know more about all this.

No, it's because Twitter Web removes elements from the DOM when they are far from the viewport.

There are two ways you can see it:

1. Open a DOM debugger, select an element in a tweet, scroll down. Eventually the element disappears.

2. In Firefox, scroll down, right click, "Take a screenshot", "Complete page". You'll see tweet far from the viewport, as well as header and sidebars are invisible.

The motivation is probably to make it faster, but it's unclear to me why removing (and later re-adding) elements in Javascript would be more efficient than the browser internally dealing with it.

Could you elaborate on what's meant by viewport in this context as, like this, it's new to me. TIA

What's currently displayed in the browser window [0]

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Viewport

The big problem with these hacks is that they completely break on screen readers. IIUC the software either skips them entirely or reads each letter out like "bold script t, bold script h, hold script e..."

Subscribe to our italics button?

Ya. L#l. N# thanks. I'm saving #p s# I can b#y a subscriptio# t# #se the last tw# v#wels. N# m#ney f#r italics ATM.