How Post News is building a social platform for quality journalism – interview with CEO Noam Bardin

As Twitter, now known as X, is slowly declining, Post has emerged as a new player in the social media field. As we’ve already reported, Post is attempting to carve out its own niche in news sharing and consumption within the social media space, offering features common to social media such as writing posts, engaging with content through comments, likes, and shares, and the ability to repost content. However, a distinctive aspect of Post is its micropayment system, which allows users to buy articles from various premium news providers, offering a range of perspectives without needing multiple subscriptions.

This micropayment approach also includes a tipping option, enabling users to financially support content creators directly. This system coincides with the introduction of Post’s app, aimed at increasing the platform’s accessibility and user base. The monetisation strategy of Post therefore presents a different model compared to subscription-based platforms like Substack, potentially appealing to users who favor a pay-per-article approach.

While Post introduces these features, it remains to be seen how they will impact the broader landscape of digital news consumption and social media interaction, especially in comparison to established platforms.

In our conversation with the founder Noam Bardin, we delve into Post’s strategies in monetisation, content moderation, community building, and enhancing user experience, and what all of this means for the future of digital journalism and content creation.

Post’s position in the social media landscape

When any social media platform gets created, the first very obvious question everyone asks is: why another social media? Again, it is easy to wonder how Post is different from other places on the web we can communicate on. Bardin starts from the numbers: as it stands today, there are over 550,000 registered users on the platform, a figure growing 30% month-over-month. As the platform is built specifically for news, and as there has been a recent exodus from news by social media companies, struggling publishers are more and more in search for new monetisation opportunities. Post is collaborating with over 100 premium publishers, including TIME, Fortune, Gannett, Dotdash Meredith, Conde Nast and The Independent, to name a few. News publishers continue to join Post every week and more are anticipated to follow.

“Today’s degradation of publishers’ relationships with social platforms is not by coincidence. Links to news sites take users away from platforms, where social media sites cannot advertise. Factor in the abysmally small proportion of Americans who subscribe to any news source, along with a recent report indicating that redirects from X and Meta have plummeted to historic lows, the business models of news organizations critically need to be reexamined. Post offers these struggling publishers, content creators, and journalists a platform that encourages sound, quality journalism, as other platforms leave them in the dust.” This is actually Post’s core mission, Bardin says: “As a platform specifically created for news, we do not actively shun publishers as others have in the past. At the core of Post’s mission is to uplift quality, sound journalism. By employing a micropayment model, we do not measure success by the amount of time a user spends on the platform, endlessly scrolling through content, and generating ad revenue. If a user comes to our platform, reads a single article, and feels informed afterwards, we view that as success”. 

Post’s payment model

In an environment where Post warmly welcomes journalists and publishers without the barriers of ads or paywalls, its financial model naturally piques curiosity. Indeed, several prominent publishers like Fortune, The Independent, LA Times, Reuters, MIT Technology Review, USA Today, and Wired have experimented with the micropayment model (which has historically been notoriously hard to pull off). First of all, when users sign up, they receive 50 points for free to spend as they wish, accessing content or tipping. Users can purchase more points to consume more content and tip more creators and publishers as they see fit. Bardin notes the similarity of this system to video game streaming services like Twitch: “When a user purchases points on Post, we receive a share of the purchase. We do not get in the way of users or publishers. The only revenue generated occurs when a user purchases ‘points,’ so our interests are aligned with those of publishers and users.” 

Despite Post not having a feature that shows what users are paying for like on Twitch, the platform’s use of micropayments acts as a gauge for content that attracts some interest. This system enables publishers and journalists to discern which stories allure paying customers.

A challenging topic for publishers, despite Post’s growing numbers, is media coverage. We asked Bardin how Post enhanced their media strategy and if it had specific features for journalists that also helped them in their daily needs. Generally speaking, publishers and content creators have the ability to automatically ingest their content, or program it manually on Post. Bardin says that “once this content is ingested into the platform, publishers have free reign to determine the best way to monetize, and can set pricing and business models themselves. Publishers receive 100% of the micropayments users make to access content and send tips: at no point does Post stand in the way between publishers and users”. Recently, the platform has enhanced its offerings with the introduction of a Creator Tools suite.

At the same time, the search function of the platform prioritises recent posts over relevant content, making it potentially more difficult for slower publishers to get noticed by users interested in particular topics.

Post’s content moderation strategy

“To date, social platforms have been inherently toxic. Left to their own devices, as we have seen recently with X, these platforms can become hotbeds of misinformation, harassment and bot accounts. This is because these platforms are fundamentally incentivized–through the ad-based model–to get users angry and riled up in order to keep their attention,” Bardin says.

Post’s team insists their model is different, as they are giving people “the news they want directly in their feed, without the intrusion of ads”. In this ecosystem, Post wins when great content wins. As a consequence, though, content moderation is a core mission. Bardin tells us they started with the goal of creating a community for real news, which includes civil conversations. However, “there’s no way a centralized call center of employees could have the context needed to make the right moderation decision in every situation around the world. We have to build a community of people who can trust one another, just as we did with Waze [satellite navigation service now owned by Google, which Bardin led prior to founding Post], in which people mark incidents on the road to help one another”, the founder says.

Community rules have been set to achieve this goal: any sort of attacks on individuals or specific groups are not allowed.  “…we do not allow the dissemination of false or misleading information and strictly prohibit impersonation and deceptive practices. Bot and automated-feed accounts are not allowed on the platform. Accounts following more profiles than a real life human could, or posting excessively, are flagged as suspect and disabled. We are very transparent and forthcoming about our policies, and you can read them in full on the dedicated page.” 

In this context, an interesting idea arises: over time, Bardin tells us they plan to introduce a reputation score, which will affect how a creator or publisher’s content is distributed: “That’s because all voices are not created equal. For example, if you are an expert on a topic, your posts should have more weight, and greater distribution, than mine, if all I did was Google the topic. As people build up trust in the form of posting over time in accordance with our rules, and generating tips and positive user feedback, their content will be given more weight than newer users, who don’t yet have that trust (this is similar to how Reddit and Ebay reward good actors on their platforms). Similarly, if a user with a high reputation score flags content, that action will have more weight than a user with a low reputation score flagging content.”

The introduction of these features on the platform is both fascinating and challenging, particularly considering the documented risk of fostering echo chambers in news consumption. Moreover, the platform faces the complex issue of ensuring equitable representation of diverse voices, especially from minority groups who traditionally have fewer opportunities and less visibility in the media landscape. These considerations bring forward critical questions about the equality of experts and the mechanisms to ensure all voices, particularly those of minorities, are adequately heard and represented. Despite these concerns, the evolution of this model offers a compelling subject for observation and analysis, especially since this concept of community-driven content valuation is not novel, having been previously explored in academic research concerning question-answering websites, online rated forums, and employee feedback systems.

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