Trying Twitter Blue
Twitter Blue is Twitter’s first subscription-based service, serving as a foray into making money beyond advertising. With a suite of features ranging from “That seems pretty handy” to “How on Earth is that not just available by default?”, I decided to check it out for $3 USD per month.
Note: Basically everything I’m writing about below will be from the perspective of the web app and iOS app. Features seem to lag behind on Android, so check out what’s supported where from Twitter’s documentation if that’s relevant to you.
The Cosmetic
Cosmetic features seem fairly insane to pay for, but I guess they make a little more sense if they’re thrown in on top of other features. On the whole, though, most of these seem like things that should just be baked in by default. For example. Twitter Blue gives you the ability to set different themes in the mobile app, just like anyone can already do for free today from the web app. The color options are even the exact same:
Twitter Blue also offers the option to change the app icon between several colors. Like the themes, most are stagnant, though some seasonal choices occasionally appear for a limited time. This is the kind of thing I can only assume people would look at once when first subscribing to Twitter Blue and then never even think about again.
The Functional
Functionality changes have a bit more teeth to them, in my opinion, when it comes to justifying a price tag. I think Twitter is on the right track here, though I’d like to see a little more differentiation. First up, you get the option to customize your navigation in the mobile app. You can select which navigation items appear along the bottom of the screen, with anything else existing in the full flyout menu to the left:
This is actually pretty handy since it gives me quicker access to the things I’m frequently using in Twitter rather than cluttering up my screen with things I’ll only ever pick my accident. On the other hand, it’s also something a lot of 3rd party Twitter apps have supported forever. If, like me, you’ve long ago accepted Twitter’s neutering of the 3rd party app ecosystem and remanded yourself to the official apps, though, it’s a nice little addition.
Similar to many email clients, Twitter Blue also offers an “Undo” feature when posting new tweets. Hitting the tweet button won’t actually post your tweet immediately; instead, it’ll hang out at the top of your timeline for 30 seconds with an option for you to hit “Undo” and re-edit the content before it goes live:
While I commonly find this to be a handy feature with email where I hit send and immediately realize that I forgot to mention something important, I’ve not seen much value in it for Twitter. Tweets tend to be too short and succinct to miss thoughts, and I typically scan my tweets for typos prior to submitting them. I know many people seem to be upset at this feature because they were really wanting an ability to edit tweets after they’ve been posted. I’m personally part of the cadre which believes that can quickly cause just as many problems as it solves if it’s not done very carefully, so I’m not upset that it wasn’t offered as a feature with Twitter Blue. I think you would almost need a history of edits to be readily available on every tweet, but that’s another topic for another time.
The final big functionality addition with Twitter Blue is the ability to view tweet threads in a reader view. I personally dislike tweet threads, where someone posts a string of multiple tweets together to express more longform thoughts than what Twitter would allow for in a single tweet. 2 or 3 tweets isn’t really a big deal, but when you get threads that are 10+ tweets it seems like a blog post would be more fitting to me. Regardless, a lot of people seem to do it so I guess making it more consumable is a benefit if it’s something that will continue to happen on the platform… though I do worry this feature will encourage it more. Multiple tweets strung together by the same author will cause a button to appear in the Twitter UI which says:
View thread in Reader
Clicking that will strip out all of the UI and just show the content in a block, with tiny delimiters marking where one tweet stops and the next begins:
As you can probably see, this isn’t necessarily a big deal for 3 short tweets like in this screenshot, but it becomes surprisingly handy for larger threads where each tweet is butting against the maximum post length.
The News
I would probably consider the extra features Twitter Blue offers to make Twitter function better as a news aggregator to be the most prominent when considering if it’s worth your money each month. Twitter Blue offers up a publisher network where reading content from those publishers — if you click on the link to their article from Twitter — is ad-free. Twitter maintains a list of publishers in the network so you can follow the relevant ones easily. You know you’re reading an article from a publisher in the network since typically the tweet will note that you can read the content ad-free. When opening the page, you also see a small Twitter Blue icon toward the bottom-right corner:
Additionally, a portion of your Twitter Blue subscription fee goes toward funding these publishers based on how much of their content you read. Twitter gives you an estimated breakdown of this amount:
I’ve got some questions regarding this breakdown, however. I personally subscribed to Twitter Blue initially on my phone, meaning that the subscription is through Apple rather than directly through Twitter. Presumably Apple is taking some cut of that $3 per month. On top of that, Twitter has to want to make some kind of profit off of this. However, if I add up my estimated contributions to various sites we get:
0.99 + 0.92 + 0.73 + 0.35 + 0.24 + 0.22 + 0.05 = $3.50
This leads me to believe the estimate is pretty wildly inaccurate. I’d like to see this cleaned up a bit so I can actually understand how much is going to each publisher since I doubt Twitter is giving $0.50 more than my subscription fee to publishers… and that’s even before considering Apple’s cut.
It’s also worth mentioning that the Twitter publisher network does not bypass paywalled content. Articles requiring a subscription still require a subscription, publishers that only allow you to read a certain number of articles free each month will still only allow you to read a certain number of articles free each month, etc. There have been more than a few times that I’ve found myself backing out of Twitter to open an article in a private browser to get around limitations.
There are a couple of additional features which help Twitter to serve as a hub for news. The flame icon you may have noticed in my custom navigation screenshot above is for the new Top Articles section. This aggregates the top, most shared articles within my network over the past 24 hours, helping to ensure that I don’t miss popular stories. The other, which isn’t directly related to news, is that you can organize bookmarked tweets into folders now. I’ve found that this facilitates bookmarking news stories since I can create an “Articles” folder that I essentially treat the same as Pocket, where previously news stories I may have bookmarked would frequently get lost in the jumble of everything else.
I’ve found myself heavily using this feature. I have traditionally always followed a large number of news sources on Twitter, and I frequently see interesting articles on Twitter when I didn’t have time to read them. Historically I’d throw those articles into Pocket, though now I simply add them into my “Articles” bookmark folder. My only real complaint here is that I wished I could change how the tweets are sorted within each folder. For example in both Pocket and Feedly I sort by showing the oldest content first and knocking it out before moving on to newer content. Obviously I can just scroll to the bottom of my bookmarks to accomplish the same with Twitter, but that can be a little cumbersome if I’ve added a lot of content over a span of a week without consuming any; it would be nicer for the next thing I want to read to simply always be at the top of the folder.
The end result of all this is that, after a month of using Twitter Blue, Twitter has become my main source of news. While I’ll occasionally still open up Apple News, I’m getting most of my news from Twitter since I can very easily tailor it to the sources I really want to see.
The Conclusion
Is Twitter Blue worth the price of admission? Ultimately I think it depends on your use case for Twitter. If you just really care about doomscrolling memes and shitposting, then things like custom themes and app icons probably don’t make it worthwhile. If you already use Twitter for news, though, and want some extra features to facilitate that then I think the relatively low cost is fairly reasonable when you consider the other features added on top. The package will only be more enticing if Twitter continues to add publishers to their network, and if they can strike deals to get past some paywalls then it would be an undeniable value.
