You’ve likely run across “@threader compile” tweets below long threads on Twitter but that app is being shut down next month.

The good news is that Threader, the company behind the bot, has been acquired by Twitter. The bad news is that the feature is being rolled into Twitter’s subscription service – Twitter Blue.

“As part of this acquisition, we’ll be shutting Threader down on December 15, 2021. But we’re not leaving you empty handed. We’ve recently built a similar reading experience at Twitter, which is now available as part of Twitter Blue,” the Threader co-founders wrote in a blog.

While this is great for the creators of Threader – which will be known as the Reader feature in Twitter Blue – it’s less great for the millions of users around the world who used this application.

That’s because Twitter Blue is currently only available in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand with the final two countries on that list only having been recently added.

Now, we’re aware that Twitter Blue is being rolled out slowly but as it stands, the social media firm is effectively taking a free bot off of its platform and putting it behind a paywall which only certain users can access.

This just has the makings of a bad idea, not that bad ideas have stopped Twitter in the past.

As The Verge pointed out at the weekend, Twitter Blue is looking more and more like an excuse to lock long requested features behind a paywall.

The ability to read a thread easily shouldn’t require you pay a $2.99 subscription, especially when that functionality exists right now for free.

There are of course alternatives such as Thread Reader but whether these will be allowed to exist on Twitter after the 15th December is unclear at this stage.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]