Should services charge “super users”?
Om Malik says that Twitter should charge super users like me and come up with a business model. — Dare Obasanjo, in a separate, but similar post comes to the conclusion that Twitter's problems are due to super users like me. — Interesting that both of these guys are wrong.
Context & Ripple Effects
In May 2008, Om Malik argued Twitter needed a business model built on charging its heaviest users, while Dare Obasanjo blamed those same super users for the service's reliability problems — a debate Scobleizer, himself a named super user, dismissed as wrong on both counts. The question of who pays for social infrastructure has echoed since: Jason Calacanis later offered $500k to be placed in Twitter's Suggested Users list, treating distribution itself as paid inventory.
First-order effects
- Twitter faces an immediate strategic fork: monetize its most intensive users directly through fees, or keep them free as the content engine that makes the free tier valuable — Malik and Obasanjo each push one side of that fork.
- Heavy users like Scobleizer become a named constituency whose treatment — subsidized or charged — signals how the platform values the people generating most of its content.
Second-order effects
- If charging super users works, it validates premium-tier pricing for power users across consumer software — a path later proven by Superhuman's $30/month email service, which showed small, paying, high-intensity user bases can sustain real valuations.
- Free platforms that refuse to charge their power users must instead find indirect monetization, pushing them toward advertising and distribution auctions like the Suggested Users marketplace.
Third-order effects
- The long arc runs from 'should we charge super users?' to platforms building subscription products outright: Twitter's Super Follows and the wave of creator-focused fees at Meta, Twitter, and Snapchat are the institutionalized answer to the 2008 debate.
- Structurally, social networks may split into two economies — a free attention layer for casual users and a paid productivity/creator layer for professionals — with pricing pressure concentrated on whoever extracts the most value from the network.
The trend: Social platforms are steadily migrating from ad-subsidized free access toward layered subscriptions that charge the users who extract the most value, turning the 2008 super-user debate into standard product strategy.