Paying for Twitter was, is, and probably always will be ridiculous

Well, the day is here. The oft-promised and somewhat delayed move to take away Twitter’s “legacy” blue check marks (i.e., those doled out before Elon Musk acquired the app and began offering verification badges starting at $8 per month) is at our feet. Musk previously promised that April 20 would be the last day of legacy checks (presumably because that’s the weed number. Ha ha.) and those who wanted to keep them need to subscribe to Twitter Blue.

The rollout of Twitter Blue has already been chaotic, with users immediately impersonating public figures. While that has mostly been quelled with new policies, it bears repeating: subscribing to Twitter Blue is still a waste of money.

Basically, what you’re paying for with Twitter Blue is the perceived prestige of having a coveted few pixels next to your name, a sort of fast pass that bumps your tweets up higher on the For You page and in replies, and some other customization features. What you gain, though, is paltry compared to what you give, and likely have been giving to Twitter already.

When you use Twitter—or any social media app—you are not the customer, but the product. If you’re like this writer, you’ve already been providing Twitter with free content for over a decade, offering up text and media for nothing more than the sweet, sweet dopamine rush of a notification. This is already kind of dumb (hey, it’s addictive) but to pay to do that is ridiculous. Frankly, Twitter should be paying its top users for generating the content that keeps people coming back.

While most don’t, some users have been able to make a living via other apps like TikTok (directly from the app) or Instagram (through sponsorships). But it’s next to impossible to effectively monetize a Twitter account. You could use it to promote another venture that actually pays you, or, if you’re lucky, can hock sex toys and ring lights under a viral tweet for (anecdotally) about $25. Twitter has started to roll out a tips feature, where you can send your favorite accounts money, but the prospect of earning a significant amount from the feature seems dubious at best. Mostly, you’re sending little jokes into the void, earning nothing yourself but helping one of the world’s richest men keep his increasingly glitchy app afloat. Now, you can also pay to do that.

Even if many of us muted Musk long ago, the “chief twit” has recently been spending his days spreading anti-trans rhetoric on his account and going on Tucker Carlson to share his urge to get people pregnant. This is where your money is going, but tweeters and journalists have been calling out Musk’s increasingly far-right views even before he took control of the app. Knowing this, it’s hard to continue using the app at all in good conscience. But if you do, please, for the love of God, don’t pay for it.