Is the blue tick worth the cost? Image / Getty Creative
OPINION
Priority rankings, changing tweets after you’ve posted them, special privileges like 10,000 character posts, skipping ads, charging your followers to see selected tweets - the paid Twitter Blue service promises a bunch of perks beyond the now much-maligned verification tick.
I’ve been road-testing it. We’ll get to my definitive Yeah/Nah ratings, shortly.
First, I noticed something when looking for MPs’ reactions to Budget 2023 on Twitter: none of our politicians have blue verification ticks anymore.
To work out if a Judith Collins account was the real deal, I had to go to the MP’s site, then click through to her Twitter account from there.
Our pollies aren’t alone. Many sports stars, entertainment celebs, media hacks and organisations have let their Blue Ticks lapse.
Twitter used to give a blue tick to a person or organisation after it had verified their identity.
New owner Elon Musk deemed this arrangement “elitist”. He sought to “demoractise” it, in his works, by giving a verification tick to anyone who paid US$8 a month for a Twitter Blue account (or NZ$19 per month for me as a Kiwi paying for it via Apple’s App Store). Anyone who wouldn’t pay, lost their tick (well, most; some like basketball star LeBron James and author Stephen King had their Twitter Blue account personally paid for by Musk after they refused to pay themselves, out of principle).
At the same time, Musk introduced a US$ 1,000-a-month verification subscription for organisations (initially in the US only). Again, many shunned it.
A New York Times article said Twitter’s blue checkmark had moved from being a coveted status symbol to some users calling it “uncool”, “the dreaded mark” or “the stinking badge”, whose holders now looked “desperate for validation”.
For some, a tick is now meaningless in terms of confirming your actual identity, but does brand you as a Musk supporter as he crashes on with his efforts to wind up liberals and generate cash.
Me, I’ve paid to keep my blue tick, for now (Herald accounting department, my expenses claim is pending). Partly out of a lame sense of nostalgia for the time my Twitter-awarded verification actually meant something, and stroked my ego (you couldn’t even apply for it, let alone pay for it). And partly so I could rate the other Twitter Blue features beyond the tick. On that score, here are some of the key other features. On that score, here we go:
This one sounds pretty useful: Priority rankings in conversations and search. But the official blurb is vague about what sort of boost you actually receive: “Tweets that you interact with will receive a small boost in their ranking. Additionally, your replies will receive a boost that ranks them closer to the top.” My Twitter engagement and view ratings (according to Twitter’s in-house measurements at anaytics.twitter.com) have been flat to down since April. VERDICT: Nah
I barely saw any ads on Musk’s platform before Twitter Blue, particularly compared to my Facebook and Instagram feeds. I still see barely any. VERDICT: Nah
Gauling to pay for given Facebook and other platforms let you edit posts for free. At times, there’s been a glitch that’s meant my followers have seen the edited version of a tweet as a new post, with the old, unedited version also in their feed. The feature also doesn’t work at all through clients like the Twitter-owned Tweetdeck, or the likes of your smartphone’s photo app, if you add text when you post a pic. VERDICT: Nah
One of the great things about Twitter was its 140-character limit forced people to get to the point - or at least snappily organise their thoughts if they were posting a multi-tweet thread. Musk gave everybody 280 characters. Twitter Blue users - and I swear I’m not making this up - are allowed to unleash a 10,000 character tweet. I tried it out, punishing my followers with a tweet containing a chunk of the infamous 4000-word final sentence of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It worked. Call it the Anti-Twitter. VERDICT: Nah
Posting a big chunk of Ulysses’ 4000-word final sentence to test the Twitter Blue feature that lets you punish your followers with a (and I swear I’m not making this up) post of up to 10,000 characters.
— Chris Keall (@ChrisKeall) May 23, 2023
… with a bit of toast so long as I didnt do it on the knife for bad luck or…
Regular folk can tweet a video of up to two minutes. Twitter Blue began by offering 10 minutes. You could make the case that’s useful for social media professionals - or maybe not, in the rapid-fire world of mobile social media. Earlier this month, Musk bumped that to two hours. Most will opt for free YouTube - with more features and maybe even a little ad-sharing action - for clips of that duration. Meanwhile, the livestreaming video option that Twitter used to have, once upon a time, pre-Musk, remains absent. That could have been a useful one for streaming events, though I’m not sure anyone would pay, given Facebook and others offer livestreaming for free. VERDICT: Nah
Sweet screaming monkeys https://t.co/Ij9yg1uu4u
— Chris Keall (@ChrisKeall) May 19, 2023
Musk recently eliminated the two-factor authentication for regular Twitter users - an optional security feature that saw a confirmation text sent to your cellphone if someone tried to log on to your account from another device). The CEO complained that phone companies were charging him tens of millions per year to operate this service, dubbing that level of billing a “scam”. Twitter Blue users get to keep 2FA, but there’s also a free option, for all Twitter users, to use a verification app for the same purpose - and security experts say it’s actually more secure than a text. VERDICT: Nah.
One of the best things Musk has done to Twitter is unearthing the Bookmark icon (which lets you favourite a post without the author or your followers being aware. (The feature was previously hidden away). Allcomers can bookmark. Twitter Blue users can arrange Bookmarks into folders. VERDICT: Yeah
Lets you edit the standard Twitter icons to zap default useless features, such as Spaces (Twitter’s much-ignored audio feature) and add the features you actually use most often. VERDICT: Yeah
Fun if you’re a bored 8-year-old. A feature that’s free with most apps. VERDICT: Nah
Reveals the news articles most shared by your followers. Useful curation. VERDICT: Yeah
Twitter Blue subs can bold or italicise a word - if only from the desktop version of the app. This hasn’t really blown my socks off. It’s not much of a step up from an asterisk - which is arguably cuter in the social media format - and it’s a bit rubbish to pay for it when most apps offer basic formatting for free. Worse, when someone quote tweets your post, it loses the formatting. It loses it with embeds too, like the one below (although if you click through to the actual tweet, you’ll see the bold and italic words in all their glory). Poor software engineering, Elon. VERDICT: Nah
Testing the Twitter Blue feature that lets you make a word bold or italic. Are you impressed
— Chris Keall (@ChrisKeall) May 23, 2023
This one is a cheat. It just introduces an artificial 30-second pause before a tweet goes live, giving you time to change your mind about calling your boss a moron, or fix a typo. It’s no different from taking a deep breath and taking half a minute before posting yourself. VERDICT: Nah
While I’m now shovelling Elon $19 per month, I’ve also unlocked the ability to recruit my own Twitter subscribers who, all going to plan, would pay me per month to see selected contact.
Twitter has four eligibility criteria for joining its Substack-ish programme: You have to be verified (that is, you are who-the-heck-knows but you’re willing to pay that $19 per month;) you have to have at least 500 followers (down from the initial 10,000), you have to have used Twitter in the past 30 days (achievable) and you have to be over 18 (not an issue, since Twitter simply takes your word for whatever age you decide to be; you just type a date into an online form with no verification requested. That is, it’s the same level of non-policing of ID as any major social media platform these days).
The sign-up process included a helpful slider, which said I could earn $8540 per month if 10 per cent of my subscribers were willing to pay $4.99. I suspect that’s a fanciful conversion metric. But if you want to see more copied-and-pasted Ulysses, by all means, subscribe.
For an unspecified amount of time, Twitter does not take a cut, and Musk has not said how big a slice of the pie the social network will eventually take. Still, it’s been enough to get me and Tucker Carlson onboard. (Like me, Tucker hasn’t been able to think of anything to put behind his paywall yet, I might suggest we get together and brainstorm. At his point, I’m the only one at risk of being fired.) VERDICT: Yeah (As soon as I get my first cheque)
Oh, come on. VERDICT: Nah
So, all up, Twitter Blue is just not worth its salt.
It feels like you’re paying for the privilege of beta testing half-finished features that might make it to Twitter proper.
I’m only sticking with it for research purposes (and the vain hope that someone, somewhere, is still impressed by my blue tick).
The council has also been served with judicial review proceedings.