Indian startup founders like Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Unacademy’s Gaurav Munjal have tweeted their takes on Elon Musk’s decision to charge $8 per month for users to get a blue tick account on Twitter.
While Sharma suggested a two-tier subscription plan for Twitter, Munjal replied with feature recommendations like zero ads and the ability to customise the feed even more. Both founders of unicorn companies are verified blue tick account holders and command a Twitter following of 573,9000 and 98,3000 respectively. Over the years, Twitter has become an important tool for entrepreneurs to share company updates and develop a direct relationship with their customers.
“$8 for blue and $24 for purple with extras like ad free linked content / DM(direct message) to anyone / extra options for sorting home feed / more nuanced blocking, muting options than generic user/ ability to pin more than one tweet/ colorful hashtags. @sriramk(Sriram Krishnan) ProUser Vs PowerUser,” tweeted Sharma, Founder and CEO, Paytm.
He added that the PowerUser should also be given the option to have zero tweets in their timeline and stop replies from accounts they don’t follow. Sharma was responding to Elon Musk’s tweet stating that the social media company needs to pay the bills somehow and it cannot rely entirely on advertisers.
Similarly, responding to Musk’s tweet announcing $8/month fee for blue tick and its benefits, Unacademy’s cofounder and CEO, Munjal said, “How about no ads and ability to customise the feed even more?” In the announcement tweet, Musk said “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.” He added that for this charge, users will get priority in replies, mentions, and search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam, ability to post long video & audio and half as many ads.
Munjal also wrote a twitter thread on how can Twitter go 10x from here. His recommendations included things like bring back Vine (short form video-hosting service) as a separate App to compete with TikTok, let users highlight their most iconic followers, ability to highlight more than one tweet, dedicated app for creators, and make search more not intuitive,
He added that users should have the ability to read one tweet per page, TikTok-like scroll up UX for tweets, a dedicated video tab or maybe a separate app, add a recruitment platform allowing people to add more details to their profiles, and companies to post jobs on Twitter.
