Are you hopelessly addicted to Twitter but want to devote even more energy to constantly checking the likes on middling puns you’ve made, following “controversies” that are inscrutable to 90-plus percent of the population, and trying to convince yourself that the genuine positives of the site outweigh the downsides of your compulsion?
Well, Twitter’s got a deal for you.
The company announced its new subscription service, Twitter Blue, on Thursday. It’s Twitter’s first crack at a subscription product — a step some have been urging the company to take for a long time.
Those who simply want to doomscroll endlessly into the night will still be able to do so for free. The $2.99-per-month subscription service will be catered to, as CNBC puts it, “power users,” who will be able to unlock special features for their money. The Verge has a rundown of what your money will get you:
A new undo send feature gives you the option of retracting your tweets before they actually go live, and you can set a timer for undoing your tweets that can last up to 30 seconds. A Bookmark Folders feature lets you group saved tweets to make them easier to find later. “Reader Mode” lets you keep up with threads by “turning them into easy-to-read text” and mashing together tweets into one page. Other Twitter Blue features are purely aesthetic: it adds new color theme options as well as the ability to change the color of Twitter’s app icon.
Subscribers will also get enhanced and expedited customer service, which could come in handy for the unfortunately common site issues of user harassment.
Whether these ancillary features are enough to lure many tweeters into paying will be of great interest to Twitter and its investors, who have watched the company struggle to translate its strengths into being the kind of profit-making machine Silicon Valley venerates — though revenues have jumped recently. It currently makes a large majority of its money on advertising.
The new service will be rolling out in Canada and Australia on Thursday; Twitter has not yet announced when it’s coming to the U.S.
