Twitter Blue’s Tick: Yay or Nay?

Elon Musk’s Twitter has been refashioning itself in the last few weeks and Twitter Blue is the latest to cause a roar. Twitter Blue was launched in 2021 in select countries and after a few updates, it was relaunched in November 2022. Twitter Blue is an opt-in, paid subscription that gives users access to genuine content – free of humbug! Content from impostor accounts and spammers gets filtered out, providing paid users with authentic content from credible organizations and celebrities. However, in the last few days, users have reported that this feature has been removed from the social media site. Additionally, many users and organizations have been complaining of billions of dollars of loss due to the discontinuation. Musk commented saying that the fresh launch was proceeding well, though it needed some “tweaks''. Many paid subscribers of Twitter Blue post the latest launch were found to be impersonation accounts of big names and labels. This puts the latest Blue’s verification process under scrutiny. What is Twitter Blue? How can you sign up for it and what advantage does it have over the regular Twitter? Here’s what you need to know before you sign up for all the premium features that you can get with Twitter Blue.

Dear Twitter Advertisers pic.twitter.com/GMwHmInPAS

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022

About Twitter Blue

Ever since Twitter launched in 2008, we’ve heard users make numerous recommendations on how the site can be improved. Twitter Blue is a response to some of those widespread requests. The idea behind Twitter Blue is to uphold the quality of communication on the 180-word social media platform. Earlier versions of Twitter Blue launched in 2021 charged each user $3 and $5 for exclusive services. The Elon Musk version is going at $8 and provides the same features, and also provides the option to upload longer videos. Once subscribed to Twitter Blue, users would get a blue checkmark against their profile which acted as an additional layer of verification and genuinity to the account. It was designed for people who spent a lot of time on the site and needed authenticity in their interactions. While all this was done to reduce Twitter scams, after the recent launch, it was found that anyone who shelled out $8 dollars would get a blue tick, making the verification label a vestige. 

In addition, there are features like ‘undo’ tweets, read the news ads-free, reader mode, and bookmark options that give users a little more control over their public posts. The undo-tweet option gives users a short window of time within which they can retract a tweet. This time period could be set by the user giving them anywhere between 5 to 60 seconds to change their mind. Though it didn’t allow editing an original post, one could return to the compose page and begin afresh. However, in the earlier version, there were a lot of inconsistencies with this feature, the big one being that this option didn’t work the same way on the dot com as it did on the app: on twitter.com, a few posts could be undone whereas quotes and threads didn’t receive this advantage as the app. Before we could check the latest release, Twitter Blue had been discontinued. 

The ‘top articles’ feature is still a favorite for most Tweeters: this feature display feeds of articles shared by people within your network in the last 24 hours. If people in your network are reading and talking about a particular topic, you would get to know from this tab. In exchange for the subscription amount, users could also read the feed ads-free.

Twitter threads are long and can have many distractions while scrolling through. With reader mode on, Twitter Blue converts long threads into simpler and easy-for-the-eyes text, even allowing you to customize text size to your preference. Smaller details like user name and picture are invisible in this mode making it easier to get to the core of a tweet. And if along the way you wanted to save a tweet for later, the bookmark option would allow you to pin the page and even create a separate folder for categorization. 

Twitter vs Twitter Blue

The free twitter we all know is not going away and will still be available for all of us. What changes with Twitter Blue is the way we use the site for our own needs. In the future, Twitter Blue users will have early-bird access to the site's experimental features before it is released to the public free version and also be the first to receive any in-app updates. 

Would You pay to be verified on Twitter? Let us know in the comments.

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