Twitter alternative Post News is shutting down

Image: Post News

Post News, a Twitter alternate that emerged successful the aftermath of Elon Musk’s takeover, is shutting down. Noam Bardin, the platform’s laminitis and erstwhile CEO of Waze, writes that Post News “is not increasing accelerated capable to go a existent concern oregon a important platform.”

The Andreessen Horowitz-backed level launched successful a closed beta successful November 2022, but present it’s acceptable to shutter “within the adjacent fewer weeks.” It serves arsenic a societal level that besides offers users ad-free entree to paywalled contented from publishers specified arsenic Fortune, Business Insider, Wired, The Boston Globe, and others. All users person to bash is wage a “few cents” per nonfiction alternatively of signing up for a subscription to each publication.

Screenshot by Emma Roth / The Verge

After lifting its waitlist successful aboriginal 2023, Bardin told TechCrunch that astir 430,000 radical signed up. The level yet rolled retired a mobile app and aboriginal launched a real-time notification system, with plans for much features successful the future. However, the outgo of keeping the level moving seems to person outweighed idiosyncratic activity.

“We built a toxicity-free community, a level wherever Publishers engage, and an app that validated galore theories astir Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to acquisition idiosyncratic articles,” Bardin writes. “A user business, astatine its core, needs to amusement accelerated user adoption and we person not managed to find the close merchandise operation to marque it happen.”

Post News volition fto users download their posts connected the level starting adjacent week. Users tin besides retreat the currency equilibrium utilized for nonfiction payments and creator tips until May 31st. Post News isn’t the lone Twitter alternate that struggled to find an audience, arsenic different imaginable rival, Pebble, unopen down successful November 2023.

But respective Twitter alternatives are inactive lasting — and each of them are part of the fediverse, which means they’re unfastened to sharing their contented with different societal platforms. The decentralized platforms Mastodon and Bluesky are inactive going strong, portion Meta’s Threads launched its fediverse beta successful March and added Taylor Swift to its idiosyncratic base.