Post News, The Little Social Media Site That Couldn't, Calls It Quits
The kinder, gentler Twitter competitor never caught on.
Hey! Just a heads up that, as my birthday is coming up this week, I’ve decided to make all new paid subscriptions 25% off for the rest of the month. If you’ve been thinking of upgrading, now’s as good a time as any. Thanks!
With a dash of Silicon Valley ambition and a sprinkle of media discontent, Post News emerged on the scene in November 2022 as the next big thing — a promised haven for civil discourse in the wake of Elon Musk's tumultuous takeover of Twitter. Noam Bardin, the brains behind this venture and a former Waze CEO, envisioned Post News as a platform that would prioritize quality over quantity, promoting thoughtful discussions rather than echo chambers.
But the digital streets of Silicon Valley are littered with the skeletons of platforms that couldn't grow fast enough, and sadly, Post News has joined that graveyard. Bardin announced Friday that Post is shutting down, citing insufficient growth to "become a real business or a significant platform." This is a stark admission from a platform that, despite the backing of heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz, couldn't capture or sustain the necessary audience and momentum.
“Post” (Post, Noam Bardin, 4/19/24)
It is with a heavy heart that I share this sad news with you. Despite how much we’ve accomplished together, we will be shutting down Post News within the next few weeks.
We have done many great things together. We built a toxicity-free community, a platform where Publishers engage, and an app that validated many theories around Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles. We even managed to cultivate a phenomenal tipping ecosystem for creators and commenters.
But, at the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform. A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen.
In the next few weeks, we will be exploring a few long-shot options but we wanted to give you a heads up.
The platform's ambitious goal was to create a new paradigm in social networking—one where dialogue and depth trumped trolls and tweets. But the real world is often less forgiving than the idealistic sketches on venture capitalists' whiteboards. Launched in a closed beta with an aura of exclusivity, it promised a refuge from the chaos that Twitter had become. Yet, this very exclusivity may have hampered its growth, limiting user engagement at a time when scale is often the make-or-break factor for social platforms.
As we've seen time and again, not every platform with a noble aim and a robust backing is destined for success. The digital realm is ruthless, often more reflective of harsh market realities than the utopian visions of its creators. In the case of Post News, it seems there was a misjudgment not only of the market's capacity for another social media giant but also of the audience's readiness to jump ship from established platforms. The shuttering of Post News is a sobering example of how difficult it can be to overcome these network effects.
In other social media-related news, Meta has now integrated its Meta AI assistant into Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The assistant uses Meta’s Llama 3 large language model, and best of all worst of all, it cannot be disabled. Yes, you read that correctly. It cannot be disabled. That means that whether you want it or not, you now have a big chunk of real estate at the top of your Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp pages taken up by this sometimes (?) handy new assistant.
I don’t mean for TPA to be a non-stop rag on AI products (see: last week’s post about Google’s awful new generative AI search results), but I do wonder how much utility there really is to be had for a chatbot built into your Instagram.
If you do want to try it out, the Washington Post has a good guide for using (and hiding, to the extent that you’re able to) this feature.
“How to use Meta’s new AI chatbot that you can’t avoid” (The Washington Post, Heather Kelly, 4/20/24)
Despite over a year of artificial intelligence being everywhere, this could be many people’s first interaction with the technology. Meta has billions of users across its apps, and anyone who has managed to avoid the bots so far will find this one nearly impossible to escape.
And finally, in some very “WTF AI” news from last week, Futurism reported that Netflix seemingly used AI-generated images of murder victim Jennifer Pan in a recent true crime documentary.
“Netflix Uses Seemingly AI-Manipulated Images in True Crime Doc” (Futurism, Victor Tangermann, 4/14/24)
The streaming service used the photos to illustrate her "bubbly, happy, confident, and very genuine" personality, as high school friend Nam Nguyen described her.
The images that appear around the 28-minute mark of Netflix's "What Jennifer Did," have all the hallmarks of an AI-generated photo, down to mangled hands and fingers, misshapen facial features, morphed objects in the background, and a far-too-long front tooth.
On Friday, the producer responded to the allegations in an interview with the Toronto Star, though, as Futurism reported, he still somewhat sidestepped the direct question.
I wanted to include this story in today’s round-up because 404 Media had a report out around the same time on the ethical questions surrounding use of AI in documentary filmmaking, which will certainly be a controversial topic in years to come.
“Netflix Doc ‘What Jennifer Did’ Uses AI Images to Create False Historical Record” (404 Media, Emanuel Maiberg, 4/18/24)
On Tuesday, Jennifer Petrucelli, Stephanie Jenkins, and Rachel Antell presented documentary filmmakers at the International Documentary Association’s “Getting Real” conference with a draft of guidelines for how they could thoughtfully and ethically use generative AI in their work.
A primary concern for Petrucelli, Jenkins, and Antell, longtime documentary filmmakers and co-founders of the Archival Producers Alliance (APA), is to avoid a situation in which AI-generated images make their way into documentaries without proper disclosure, creating a false historical record.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this Sunday edition of The Present Age. Thank you!
This is the first time I've ever heard of Post News so I think their "exclusivity" worked rather too well...
I think Bluesky beat them to it, honestly.