#269

drafts/Twitter Blue Review.md

@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-# Blue on Twitter Blue
+# David Blue on Twitter Blue
 
 ![Twitter Blue Bevel](https://i.snap.as/XR4mJRCG.png)
 
@@ -152,13 +152,22 @@ In contrast, from a full-time team of two - both of whom suffered through bad CO
 
 https://open.spotify.com/episode/0ImyC2Twm5qyx9lxmcKmkP
 
-## All Users are Power Users
+## All Users ~~are~~ Should Be Powerusers
 
 The episode of *End User* embedded above is one of the only podcast episodes I’ve ever made which I actually find *too painful* to listen back to[^2], but I still think it’s valuable. There’s a specific bit of the conversation between [@alisonbuki](https://twitter.com/alisonbuki) and I in which the term “Poweruser” is actually thrown around regarding my own use of Twitter Lists, Tweetbot, and a few other *Hax* to consume content *deliberately*. I think I failed somewhere in my portrayal of this curation and miscommunicated the nature of what I was trying to get at by “making use of the tools available to you.” Regarding the actual manhours involved in the configuration I was trying to evangelize, I think I’ve spent more time trying to describe the effort than I have actually configuring my own content intake. 
 
-Long before I was [follow-limited](https://bit.ly/dbfollow) in 2017, I lived entirely in my [Twitter Lists]()https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/lists), the largest of which I built up “organically” over time, by adding appropriate accounts one by one as I came across them. Thanks to Tweetbot, my equivalent of the native apps’s Home timeline is a private List of ~200 accounts whose users represent the actual entirety of my adult social life, past to present.
+Long before I was [follow-limited](https://bit.ly/dbfollow) in 2017, I lived entirely in my [Twitter Lists]()https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/lists), the largest of which I built up “organically” over time, by adding appropriate accounts one by one as I came across them. Thanks to Tweetbot, my equivalent of the native apps’s Home timeline is a private List of ~200 accounts whose users represent the actual entirety of my adult social life, past to present. Then, there’s [The New](https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/lists/the-new), which - I must admit - has grown beyond its original scope and sortof become my follow list, with enough exceptions that I consider it worthwhile to keep public. Then, there’s the newest - [my Meta-Media List](https://twitter.com/i/lists/768458273141907456) - and the very oldest: my dear, weathered [Rolodex of Automotive Twitter](https://twitter.com/i/lists/43457439). I keep Tweetbot in my dock and the native app on my device just for notifications, Spaces, and now Communities. That’s it! Yet, using this configuration, I *never* see content that seriously disturbs, shames, triggers, or otherwise upsets me beyond reason or expectation[^5], but am regularly exposed to a relatively diverse palette of perspectives, and just generally find my consumption/engagement time on the service meaningfully spent. 
+
+The particular amalgamation of truly half-assed user experience features offered in Twitter Blue lend toward a narrative about this company which we collectively have continued to fall for literally *dozens* of times - often in immediate succession - throughout the fewer years of its history: that it *finally* has a morsel of what *might just become* a cohesive vision. Clearly, I am as susceptible to this as anyone considering how quickly I jumped to celebrating the fact that *finally*, Twitter had seen the humongous value to be imparted to its userbase by simply adding basic configurables like custom navigation and especially refining the essential curatorial tool that is Lists. 
+
+Were I still a person who wastes my energy speculating on the real happenings within Twitter, Inc, though, an entirely different, much more realistic sounding theory arises after the analysis we’ve trudged through together in this post: every single item on Twitter Blue’s feature list represents the absolute bare minimum resource investment possible. If I had any money, I’d go on to bet that [Shihab Mehboob](https://twitter.com/jpeguin) could have built from scratch every single developmental “addition” to the iOS app Twitter Blue includes in a matter of hours, though from experience, I seriously doubt he’d ever allow such lackluster work to reach even beta tester’s fingers. As far as Ad-Free Articles go, Twitter hasn’t even bothered to swap out all the Scroll branding. The fact that *I* had to surface the concept of Delete and Re-Draft to Twitter Employee brains for what all appearances indicate was the first time in that “FeedbackFriday” Twitter Space represents a truly sickening lack of effort. No, the story that aligns much more succinctly in the grander context is that Twitter Blue just happened to be the first disjointed, scatterbrained subscription service pitch to finally fall out the rectum of this miraculously bunk organization, but all you motherfuckers can talk about is Japple Notes Dorsey walking out, and *what it could mean*.
+
+Since I have no actually been personally and expicitly invited to share feedback regarding Twitter Blue, I suppose I’ll make some effort to send them this hyperlink. In that vein, I think I’ll end with some advice addressed directly to Twitter, Incoporated:
+
+Hey Twitter! If you ever find yourself genuinely interested in selling a subscription product long term, as a mutual value exchange with your users, make all of Twitter Blue’s features available to all users, and ditch Scroll entirely. Instead of placing the bet on local newspapers like *The Kansas City Star*, it should be on *you* to **take the ad-free risk yourself, and offer, simply, a completely ad-free Twitter experience**. That might just be worth $2.99 a month.
 
 [1] Despite the fact that Tweeting via SMS has [since been disabled](https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/4/20849865/twitter-disables-sms-text-message-tweeting-jack-dorsey-ceo-hack).
-[2] I was just… rude. Very rude. “Necessary” is not a term I’d apply to this rudeness, but… Just give me this once, is all I’d ask.
+[2] I was just… rude. Very rude. “Necessary” is not a term I’d apply to this rudeness, but… Just give me this once, please.
 [3] In the process of trying to capture a good image of this thing, I noticed that all the assets are still being loaded from static.scroll.com. Nice.
-[4] See for yourself via [this thread](https://t.me/extratone/8767) on my Telegram channel.
+[4] See for yourself via [this thread](https://t.me/extratone/8767) on my Telegram channel.
+[5] An obligatory note that I am of the most privileged sort of human there ever has been, or that one can be.