Post News, the a16z-funded Twitter alternative, is shutting down

Post News, a microblogging site that emerged in the days after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is shutting down just a year and a half after launching in beta.

Founder Noam Bardin, previously CEO of Waze, broke the news in a post on Friday.

“At the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform,” Bardin said. “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.”

Post was backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and tech commentator, but the platform never disclosed how much it raised. Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher was an adviser to the company.

Post News, a Twitter alternative, gets funding from a16z

Post’s strategy was to harness Twitter’s reputation as a virtual watercooler for journalists, then build on that further by creating a new way for publishers and writers to monetize. Instead of subscribing to various different publications, Post users could purchase individual articles from certain partner outlets.

Despite Post’s closure, Bardin said he thinks that the company proved something about the different ways in which digital news outlets can monetize. He wrote that Post “validated many theories around micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles.” The platform also allowed users to tip writers for their work.

Bardin is right that the media landscape is changing. There are more independent and worker-owned publications than ever, hosted on tech platforms like Substack, Beehiiv and Ghost. But perhaps it was too soon to try to capture this nascent movement in a social platform.

Around the same time that Post sprung up, a number of other Twitter alternatives threw their hat into the ring to capture the population of users who would be dissatisfied with Musk’s ownership decisions. Post managed to hang in there for more than a year after launch, but it’s not the only new microblogging site that’s folded. Pebble, also known as T2, shut down in October.

As we knew all along, social media is a tough business — and even if users flock to your site for a fleeting moment, that doesn’t mean they’ll stick around.

Airchat, the buzzy new social app, could be great — or, it could succumb to the same fate as Clubhouse