“This is a slap in the face to me!”
Daddy Issues
Despite the fact that Twitter Blue — Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s monthly subscription plan that offers customers pay-to-play blue verification checkmarks — states that algorithmic priority for subscribers is still “Coming Soon,” it looks like a lot of Twitter Blue-ers are disappointed that their genius tweets aren’t going viral.
“It actually didn’t even occur to me that people paying for Twitter Blue may have thought they were also paying to get more retweets,” tweeted writer and podcast host Ryan Broderick. “Incredible.”
The frustration, which ranged from rage to confusion and disappointment, is palpable. Some folks on the app really do appear to have missed the whole “coming soon” thing, and are expecting Musk to magically make their tweets go viral.
“I’m paying $8 a month now. How about removing the algorithms that hide my original tweets?” tweeted one particularly perturbed subscriber in a since-deleted tweet. “I have good content, but I get NO Retweets on my original tweets. This is a slap in the face to me!”
“Do you only respond to followers with super high followers?” another wrote. “I say some good shit man!”
It actually didn’t even occur to me that people paying for Twitter Blue may have thought they were also paying to get more retweets. Incredible. https://t.co/a8b8UjvBzB
— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) March 9, 2023
Chief Twit
To these subscribers’ credit, we too would probably hope for a bit of an algorithmic boost if we decided to pay monthly for a free app.
But unfortunately for them, we’re not holding our breath for Musk to make good on his promises. While the company has promised that Twitter Blue will one day “rocket” its subscribers to “the top of replies, mentions and search,” there are a lot of things wrong with the platform right now, suggesting that boosting paying subscribers isn’t exactly top of mind.
The company’s staff is woefully thin, especially in light of the most recent round of mass layoffs, and the site’s infrastructure has seen its fair share of downtime as of late.
Unless one of Musk’s favorite mutuals starts complaining about the same thing, we’d be pretty surprised if this particular grievance is attended to anytime soon.
And besides, as we all know, there’s only one person that gets any real algorithmically-engineered favoritism — and that’s Chief Twit himself.