I would have paid for Twitter years ago if I didn’t have to see ads or recommendations, or anything else other than what I chose to follow. I swear, I’ve always wanted to see the stuff I was interested in and not all the other garbage.
These days, I only land on Twitter when I follow a link about an interesting topic. I scroll a bit and I start seeing politics, memes, posts, images, tweets, messages and all sorts of stuff that have nothing to do with the original topic I clicked on. Twitter would be pretty cool if this didn’t happen.
I currently pay for Twitter Blue; I would pay double for no ads. Hopefully that possibility is considered alongside “assigning an engineer to obfuscate the CSS”.
The point is to make a monthly donation to show your allegiance to the world’s second-richest man. It’s like a cult membership fee. You get a little graphical badge to show you’ve paid, like a virtual lapel pin.
It was already used as an insult in many parts of the Internet, long before Elon Musk's buyout. It's just the blue check people from that era don't really realize how many people despise them.
I do recall seeing some sort of promise of less ads. I think it said 50% less ads at some point in the process. (Personally I am paying for it for the same reason I pay for YouTube Premium and OpenAI Plus; I like the principle of paying for products I use - as much as possible, I want to avoid incentivizing companies turning my eyeballs into their real product.)
These days, I only land on Twitter when I follow a link about an interesting topic. I scroll a bit and I start seeing politics, memes, posts, images, tweets, messages and all sorts of stuff that have nothing to do with the original topic I clicked on. Twitter would be pretty cool if this didn’t happen.