Twitter Announces Paid Super Follows To Let You Charge For Tweets

Twitter announced a pair of big upcoming features today: the ability for users to charge their followers for access to additional content, and the ability to create and join groups based around specific interests. From a report: They're two of the more substantial changes to Twitter in a while, but they also fit snugly into models that have been popular and successful on other social platforms. The payment feature, called Super Follows, will allow Twitter users to charge followers and give them access to extra content. That could be bonus tweets, access to a community group, subscription to a newsletter, or a badge indicating your support. In a mockup screenshot, Twitter showed an example where a user charges $4.99 per month to receive a series of perks. Twitter sees it as a way to let creators and publishers get paid directly by their fans.

Twitter also announced a new feature called Communities, which appear to be its take on something like Facebook Groups. People can create and join groups around specific interests -- like cats or plants, Twitter suggests -- allowing them to see more tweets focused on those topics. Groups have been a huge success for Facebook (and a huge moderation problem, too), and they could be a particularly helpful tool on Twitter, since the service's open-ended nature can make it difficult for new users to get started on the platform.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.