We knew it was coming, but that doesn’t make it sting any less.
The one tool that largely kept me using the website formerly known as Twitter (despite all the other nonsense going on) is getting paywalled. Yup, TweetDeck, now called XPro, appears to be locked to paying X users only. If you don’t have an X Blue subscription and try to open TweetDeck, you’ll likely be redirected to the regular X site with a pop-up asking for your money.
The change seems pretty widespread, though there are some people who haven’t hit the paywall yet. At this point though, it’s likely just a matter of time.
X revealed plans to paywall TweetDeck back in July after it broke the service with the weird rate limits Elon Musk supposedly implemented to fight data scrapers. At the time, X gave a timeline of 30 days, which the company just missed.
The Blue subscription prompt appeared after opening TweetDeck this morning.
Unfortunately for me and people like me, TweetDeck was by far the best way to access Twitter/X. For example, I used it primarily for work as it let me monitor news updates from various publications, journalists, and sources in real time. Aside from real-time access, TweetDeck also allowed users to view multiple feeds simultaneously and control multiple accounts from one interface. These features combined made TweetDeck invaluable to anyone who used Twitter as part of their job, be it journalists, social media managers, marketers, or anything else really.
The change arguably makes sense — TweetDeck is, after all, a tool that most regular users don’t need, and it offers an experience that’s more professional. But that doesn’t make it any better, especially after TweetDeck was available for free for years. And that’s not even getting into the other issues, like the continued decline of X’s stability under Musk, or how the site is flooded with hate and nazis, or the fact that Musk’s revenue share scheme paid out to right-wing extremists first, all of which discourages me from paying for X to keep using TweetDeck.
Header image credit: Shutterstock
Via: The Verge
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