Twitter has made a lot of changes in the past few months since Elon Musk took over as CEO late last year.
These changes include things like the end of third-party Twitter apps like Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Echofon, Fenix, and others, and how the verification system works on the social network, as well as the price of Twitter Blue itself.
When Twitter Blue launched in 2021, it cost just $2.99 a month and came with a few features that added more to the service for those that were subscribed to it. Those features were an ad-free news articles on it and to redo published tweets, as well as a couple of other features.
Now the service costs $8.99 a month and has the following features; Blue check mark verification, editing tweets, half the amount of ads, longer tweets, text format, bookmark folders, NFT profile pictures, themes, custom navigation, Spaces tab, top articles, a reader view, undo tweet, and others.
As for my reason not subscribing to it now (after briefly being subscribed to the new version of it last year), which I did for a short time last year, is due to the fact that while it has many more updates and improvements than the original version, it still has nothing to bring me in.
Sure, being verified would be nice but it does not mean as much if you simply pay for it each month. I’d rather be verified by earning it through the articles I publish here or by people thinking of me as some prominent figure on Twitter than simply buying it.
When it comes to the other aspects of Twitter Blue, if I’m paying $8.99 a month, I don’t want to pay to only see “half” of the ads on it. When Tweetbot and third-party apps were still a thing, I paid $14.99 a year and my Twitter experience was ad-free, my tweets were in chronological order, and the app design was a lot better.
To this day, Twitter has yet to improve its app in any significant way that would give it a better look and experience for users.
The other features could be nice for some users but certainly not for me. I do think Twitter Blue, more so for celebrities, could be useful since it is important they keep their proper verification status. Then again, I do think Twitter has to rethink its strategy for verification overall.
I think the idea of longer tweets is asinine because Twitter is made to simply be to the point. The change from 140 to 280 characters per tweet was a nice, substantial upgrade to Twitter that was necessary. But longer tweets that are similar with Mastodon’s standard and it just seems like a “we can do it too but you have to pay for it” type of deal on Twitter’s end.
At the end of the day, Twitter Blue does not have enough important or useful features for my everyday life that would make me want to subscribe to it. I still miss apps like Tweetbot and that will take me a long time to get over, especially since it was a perfect (almost) all-in-one third-party Twitter for me.
