What the Hell Is Twitter Blue and What Makes It Worth $AU7 per Month?

What the Hell Is Twitter Blue and What Makes It Worth $AU7 per Month?

In a world of seemingly endless monthly subscription services — Hello Fresh’s meal kits, Patreon’s content creator support, and BarkBox’s dog toys, for example — Twitter has also been getting in on the fun with “Twitter Blue,” a monthly subscription service with extra features that just jacked up its price.

Twitter is a great example of fixing something that’s broken, but in all the wrong ways — take Twitter Blue, for example. Twitter Blue is the social media platform’s answer to a monthly subscription service that gives Twitter users all the features they never wanted for a price. Twitter Blue itself is sort of old news at this point as the subscription service was first rumoured in Spring 2021, and was formally announced in June 2021, but Twitter Blue’s monthly fee is now going up from $AU3.99 to $AU6.99.

Twitter Blue, per its namesake’s website, is “a monthly subscription that gives the most engaged people on Twitter exclusive access to premium features,” which is a hilariously vague description. One of these features that Twitter has loved to tout in the marketing for Twitter Blue is the “Undo Tweet,” which feels like a spiritual precursor to the fabled edit button, where users have 60 seconds to edit a tweet after it’s been published. While this may be useful for larger accounts that see engagement immediately after a tweet has been published, for us little guys, the “Delete” button will work just fine.

Other features include “Reader Mode” for long tweet threads, ad-free articles from major news outlets, and custom app icons for your phone’s home screen. To put it bluntly, these features are lame, and paying a monthly fee to use them is a ripoff — realistically, who is going to pay a monthly fee for a new Twitter app icon and to read threads a little more conveniently?

Social media platforms are missing the mark these days in a constant effort to one-up each other from Instagram pushing Reels, to YouTube becoming TikTok, to Facebook being Facebook, and it would seem that Twitter too is not immune to the lunacy of a rudderless social media market.


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