Matt Gemmell has started including shorter posts on his blog. Today he writes about Twitter’s decision to not show ads to some popular users:
"There are problems with that approach, the main one being the tacit admission that their ads are detrimental. If you’re rewarding people by reducing the hostility of their experience, maybe just fix the experience for everyone, and find something positive to charge for instead."
Ads are the worst. I don’t know if it’s possible to build a large-scale social network like Twitter or Facebook without being mostly ad-supported, but I’d like to believe it is. WordPress.com — which has elements of a social network, even though we don’t consider it one — might be the closest successful attempt.