Elon Musk is now charging users who want access to TweetDeck

But many users were surprised on Tuesday when they went to sign in to TweetDeck and were directed to sign up for X Premium, which, among other things, gives a blue checkmark to users who pay an $8 per month fee.

Well, Elon just delisted my tweets, wrote Kevin Grote, a marketer in Victoria, British Columbia. “That might be the nail in the coffin for this site for me. Why did he have to come in and destroy something that had been an integral communications tool for me for nearly 15 years?”

TweetDeck provided users with the ability to follow multiple feeds and lists at once and to easily rotate a real-time news feed based on topics or geographic regions. It also allowed users to easily switch between accounts, post across multiple handles and schedule posts.

Some of this functionality is built into X’s core website. Users can now scroll between listings on the app’s homepage, for example, but posts within list feeds are sorted algorithmically, rather than chronologically, making it difficult to follow news in real time. on the original X application.

Andrew Dyer, military and veterans affairs correspondent for KPBS News in San Diego, said he relies on TweetDeck daily to do his work. It is the only platform that allows him to simultaneously monitor breaking news topics and hyper-specialized lists with information on his areas of coverage. “It is absolutely invaluable,” he said, “and there is nothing to replace it.” “Gives you real-time situational awareness of the news.”

But he said he was unlikely to sign up for X Premium. Dyer said he feels Musk’s change is calculated to keep journalists off the platform.

Dyer said: “From the moment he took office he was always kind of hostile to hostile reports, and it seemed all he did was cut the legs off [under] Press and journalists.

Social media analyst and consultant Matt Navarra warned TweetDeck’s sudden shutdown is “bad news for social media managers, journalists, and power users” — the designation given to people whose businesses or interests require heavy computer use for extended periods of time.

The disappearance of free access to TweetDeck is Musk’s latest move to try to generate revenue from users rather than ads, which has plummeted in the 10 months since Musk bought the site for $44 billion, laid off three-quarters of its staff and offered their services. A series of changes in the way the site is run have angered civil rights groups, advertisers, and others.

Judd Legum, freelance journalist and founder of The Newsletter Popular informationHe said “As far as Elon Musk goes, he fits a pattern that makes the service worse. He keeps taking things instead of adding things. TweetDeck is another example of something that has been very valuable to people who have been left out.”

Legum said he doesn’t plan to pay for X Premium but might change his mind because there are few alternatives to TweetDeck.

He said, “What TweetDeck allows you to do as a journalist is control the information you get, namely really dig deeper into a topic before it goes off the charts.” He said alternatives are limited because Musk also has restricted access to the X API, or Application Programming Interface, which is the software that allows third-party apps to tap into X data.

“Things that work outside of the Twitter API, all of those broke too,” he said. “So, I have to figure out some strategies.”

Twitter acquired TweetDeck for $40 million in 2011, but hasn’t done much to develop it in recent years. While Twitter has integrated more multimedia formats into its core product, such as live audio and video, TweetDeck has remained primarily a text-based tool. Twitter briefly tested a new version of the product in 2021, prior to Musk’s acquisition, but it was not publicly released, and the company closed Tweetdeck mac version.

Meanwhile, Musk has been trying to get more users to pay a monthly subscription fee to use X. He has rolled out the ability to purchase a blue verification check, which has led to an increase in spam in comment replies and a lot of confusion among users as impersonation becomes rampant. Musk also introduced the ability to post longer text and video posts as part of the app’s premium offering. But since Twitter is now a private company, the results of these moves are no longer required to be published, and it’s not clear how many users are now paying for the service.