Post News

» see post.news as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

post news opened a waitlist in november 2022, three weeks after elon musk closed the twitter deal and started the layoffs. the pitch was a calmer twitter for journalists and readers, with the twist that you could pay a few cents to read one article from one of the partner publishers instead of subscribing to ten different ones. noam bardin, who had sold waze to google in 2013 for over a billion dollars, was the founder. andreessen horowitz led the seed round. scott galloway put money in. the press write-up landed as one of maybe twelve "twitter killer" stories that month.

by early 2023 post had 1.4 million signups, which sounded good in a press release and looked thin once you opened the app at 11pm on a tuesday. the article-marketplace idea never really clicked with publishers or readers. people who left twitter mostly went to bluesky or threads or just stayed on twitter and complained. on 19 april 2024 bardin posted that the service was not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform. the actual switch-off came on 31 may 2024.

by the time i would have signed up for post news, i was already not really posting anywhere. i had a twitter account from somewhere around 2009 that had drifted into read-only years before musk bought it. the post-musk migration wave was a real thing for english-language journalists in new york and washington, but in turkish-language tech twitter it was barely a tremor. you watched the americans pick between five new platforms and ended up on whichever one your specific friend group landed on, or you stopped checking.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

the founding bet was reasonable in a vacuum. bardin had run waze, knew how to build a network product, and had picked a moment when a large group of professional users were openly looking for somewhere else to go. the journalist watercooler was the most valuable single slice of twitter and it was the most upset slice in late 2022. if you could grab that group you might get the readers who follow journalists, which is most of the readers worth having for a news-adjacent product.

the per-article payment was the differentiator. instead of a paywall per outlet you would tip a few cents to read one piece, and the publisher would get most of it. on paper this fixed the news-monetization problem. in practice readers do not enjoy paying for individual articles even when the friction is low, and most of the publishers who matter were busy trying to lock readers into their own subscriptions, not slice the money up across a third party.

~ the cracks ~

bluesky opened invites the same season and started taking the journalists. threads launched in july 2023 with instagram's existing graph attached and pulled in tens of millions in a week. mastodon kept its share of the migration. post was the fourth-place option in a four-platform race and nobody who left twitter wanted to maintain four accounts. the network effect cuts both ways: when nobody is on the platform you came for, the platform itself stops being worth opening.

the april 2024 shutdown post was unusually honest. bardin wrote that he did not see a path where post became the platform he had hoped it would become, and that running it without growth would be a slow waste of investor money. it is rare for a venture-backed founder to publish that sentence in plain language. most of these die behind a one-line tweet and a redirect to a parked domain.

~ the actual end ~

users had six weeks to download their content. the partner-publisher article-purchase ledger settled. the apps were pulled, the domain went read-only, then dark. there was no acquirer, no asset sale, no graceful merger into one of the surviving twitter alternatives. the venture money was returned in whatever form it could be returned. bardin moved on to his next thing.

the post-musk twitter-alternative wave produced one durable survivor (bluesky), one mega-corp absorption (threads), one ideological diehard (mastodon), and a long list of well-funded attempts that got to a million signups and then to zero. post news was on the well-funded-attempts side of that ledger. its obituary is short because the run was short and the ending was clean.

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