Post.News is being hailed as the saner Twitter for news folks but has no resources to run it properly

The news social network was founded by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin shortly after he left the company in early 2021. The startup is being thrusted to the surface and forced itself to launch far earlier than expected thanks to Twitter’s dismantling from within, so it’s reasonable to expect many things not working, not available, or looked patched up.

NYU Professor and podcasting celebrity Scott Galloway is an investor on the site and has managed to get his podcasting partner Kara Swisher and plenty other Twitter big names to not only join but also promote the site.

However, there are concerns over the fundamentals of the site, which may or may not change in the future, but may alarm people regardless. The Washington Post’s Engineering Lead for Privacy and Security Compliance Aram Zucker-Scharff ran up quite a thread of the ones he’s come across.

Post.News makes publishers syndicate their stories to the site or publish directly there for them to be able to receive payments for articles. This means they don’t (yet?) actually act as a paywall partner with publishers and don’t direct traffic to the original site. 

I’m on the fence about creating placeholder accounts for the actual news publishers but it’s incredible that you currently have to pay to read your own article that you publish there and they’re charging for wire stories that are freely accessible on the publisher’s website. 

Aram said Post.News gives him similar vibes to Medium. There are several differences, though. Medium started with the blogging angle and charges a monthly subscription fee while Post started with the Twitter angle and charges fees per article.

Veteran tech journalist Dan Gillmor isn’t vibing with Post.News. He said, 

Major Twitter influencers are pushing a supposed replacement called Post. It may be great (I’m not allowed to use it so far) but it’s yet another proprietary, closed (in terms of interoperability), centralized social network. 

 Great for the A list and vCs. Not great for me.

If I leave Twitter, which is plainly feeling the effects of too little engineering and too much right-wing poison, it will be for something like Mastodon (I’m http://mastodon.social/@dangillmor there).  It will NOT be yet another centralized place where, someday, a sociopath CEO rules.