Post: What It Is and How to Join It

Post, aka Post.news, launched in late 2022 as a social media news aggregate focused on sharing news and opinion, and aims to foster intelligent discussion. This article examines how Post works, how to sign up for it, and how it compares to X.

What Is Post?

Post is a social networking platform that aims to bring intelligent conversation back to social media. Post describes itself as "a place for people to discover, read, watch, discuss and share premium news content ... discover, follow, share, and support diverse voices on topics you care about and join smart conversations without the toxicity."

While Post is open to all users, its primary focus is the posting and discussion of news, with those posts often originating from journalists or publications. In this way, Post is attempting to replicate the aspect of X in which journalists post their work, do research, and participate in discussions about the issues of the day.

Post positions itself as a moderate or centrist platform, with founder and CEO Noam Bardin saying "there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them.”

How Does Post work?

In its first impression, Post seems almost identical to X.

The interface, with a timeline of posts and a few tools, is very much like X's old interface. The basic features are also similar to that, in that you can post messages, repost, and comment on other users' messages, follow users, and more.

While Post lacks some key features like direct messages and native smartphone apps, we assume both are coming later. Post messages have no character count.

How Do I join Post? 

You can sign up for Post for free by going to directly to Post's site. You can create an account using an email address, and then add a password and a profile (which features a bio, a photo, and a profile page header image).

What Does Post Cost?

For basic uses—posting messages, responding to other users—Post is free. However, Post's focus on journalism means that there is some content that you can only access by paying.

Post encourages journalists and media organizations to post articles that are behind paywalls. But, rather than asking users to subscribe to those organizations to read, Post provides a pay-to-read model that allows users to pay for each article they want to check out. (Users can also tip content creators via Post for content they like.)

While many linked articles are free, each pay-to-read article is clearly labeled with the number of "points" it costs to read. As of this writing, most articles cost 1-3 points. Post says the average cost will eventually be around 10 points, but that doesn't seem to be the case now. Users get free points when signing up and then have the ability to buy more. When writing this article, the cost was US$14 for 1000 points. With articles generally costing around 2 points, you can read ~500 articles for that $14.

Journalists and media organizations get a share of the money from pay-to-read articles, though Post doesn't say how much. As of this writing, the only media organizations that seem to have Post partnerships for paid articles are Democracy Docket, Reuters, and USA Today.

How Does Post Compare to X?

Conclusion

Post is a social network that could be able to pose a challenge to X. X's major advantage was that it had such a huge user base and large number of people—journalists, celebrities, artists, and more—posting compelling content.

For Post to get traction, it will need to attract those key content creators. That might be easier now that X has made so many changes that make it more difficult for content creators to post.