Elon Musk attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte ... [+]
Twitter’s Tweetdeck has been a much loved feature for years, allowing users to customize the experience of reading the social media site with multiple columns. But Tweetdeck won’t be free for long. In fact, Twitter announced on Monday that Tweetdeck will only be available to subscribers of Twitter Blue starting 30 days from now.
“We have just launched a new, improved version of TweetDeck. All users can continue to access their saved searches & workflows via tweetdeck.twitter.com by selecting ‘Try the new TweetDeck’ in the bottom left menu,” Twitter Support tweeted on Monday.
But you have to scroll to the bottom of the tweet to get to the catch. Tweetdeck will become a subscription-only feature soon, something that was met with criticism on the platform almost immediately.
“In 30 days, users must be Verified to access TweetDeck,” Twitter Support tweeted.
It should be noted, of course, that Twitter no longer verifies the identity of anyone who pays $8 per month for their blue check mark. When Elon Musk bought the platform he decided to monetize the program, stripping “legacy” blue check marks and charging for the blue badge.
“omg a paywall for TWEETDECK?!” Washington Post journalist Gene Park tweeted in response to the news.
Others pointed out that it seemed like a weird business decision to paywall various features that used to be free.
“Forcing people to pay for features that were previously free. People don’t want to pay for Blue unless you create value. Paywalling previously free features isn’t adding value, it will just drive people off the platform,” open source researcher Oliver Alexander tweeted.
Twitter has struggled in recent months after a number of decisions that seemed to be made on the fly by its billionaire owner. And even just in recent days there have been some very odd decisions. For example, people without a Twitter account are no longer able to see tweets unless they create an account—a decision that will decrease the visibility of tweets that may be shared outside of the Twitter ecosystem.
Twitter also decided to “temporarily” limit the number of tweets anyone can read on a given day. That move was done in an effort to fight what Musk called “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation.” The limit on the number of tweets was originally just 600 for unverified users on Saturday, but has been expanded to an unknown number as of Monday. Either Musk was stretching the truth about the need to fight data scraping or he magically solved the problem in just two days.
Tweetdeck briefly worked as a way to circumvent Twitter’s new limits over the weekend, but that loophole was closed relatively quickly. And the new rule seems to have inspired a lot of people to flee Twitter for competitors like Bluesky, which was founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. In fact, Bluesky had to temporarily pause sign-ups over the weekend because it had too much interest.
Meta is even reportedly launching its own Twitter competitor, known as Threads, sometime around mid-July. And the timing couldn’t be better for Facebook’s parent company, as Twitter seems to be suffering from countless unforced errors.
Musk hired NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino to take over as CEO of Twitter in early June but she’s been remarkably quiet over the weekend during what’s arguably the worst crisis at the social media company in years. It’s hard to imagine something worse for a social media platform than restricting the ability of users to actually use the site, but that’s exactly what happened, yet Yaccarino has been silent.
The Atlantic ran an article titled “Elon Musk Really Broke Twitter” on Monday comparing the decision to limit the number of tweets people can read to Costco creating a 12-item or less rule, or a 24-hour diner closing at 7 p.m.
Twitter responded to questions on Monday with a poop emoji, an automated response set up by Musk not long after he bought the site. Musk is a 52-year-old man.
