• From 15th April, only Twitter Blue subscribers will be promoted in the For You tab.
• Furthermore, only Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to vote in polls.
• This decision has been criticised by Twitter users, even those who are generally in support of Musk.

Rather than adding new features to Twitter Blue like say, removing half of the advertising, Twitter is culling previously freely accessible features and locking them behind a paywall. Case in point, polls.

Yes, silly little polls that don’t mean much given Twitter’s rather small populous when compared to the wider world, are now exclusively the realm of Twitter Blue subscribers, or rather voting on polls is.

Per a tweet from the chief twit himself, as of 15th April, there are massive changes coming to the social network.

Aside from voting in polls, the For You tab will now exclusively promote “verified accounts” which is Musk’s way of saying Twitter Blue subscribers.

“This is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle,” wrote Musk.

This is very strange only because before taking ownership of Twitter, the billionaire talked about making it a global town square. With the town square now seemingly carrying an entrance fee, we suspect that users would rather leave than cough up more than Netflix costs every month to get access to longer tweets, uploading longer, higher quality video and erm… promotion on the For You page?

This announcement has been rather divisive with even some of Musk’s regular supporters criticising this decision about the For You page and polls. The popular opinion is that this will not only cut the potential ad revenue generated by the For You page but it will also push users away from the platform entirely.

Two hours after making this announcement, Musk added that “…it’s ok to have verified bot accounts if they follow terms of service & don’t impersonate a human.”

So bots are fine as long as they pay but if a bot creator doesn’t pay, that’s automatically a bad bot. Make it make sense, please.

We suspect Musk is doing anything he can to make Twitter a better purchase. Just this week it was reported that per an internal memo, Twitter was valued at $20 billion, less than half of what Musk paid for it a few months ago.

We suspect that Mastodon is about to have another wave of new users leaving as Twitter offers them less and less value.