In the years before Elon Musk bought Twitter, fired much of the staff, and rebranded the platform as X, it was already one of strangest social media platforms.

It had engagement and social relevancy for newsmakers unlike any other. It had thriving sub-communities for all different hobbies, across the globe. Best of all, it had a high number of whales — the mega users addicted to using it. And yet, it also had a relatively small userbase, which was biased towards an aggressive style, and the company could neither effectively sell advertisements against the feed, nor get its biggest users to pay for premium features.

In response… the old guard at Twitter (RIP) did almost nothing. Feature updates were rare and insignificant — a font change here, an update to TweetDeck there  — and when they introduced the inexpensive Twitter Blue premium feature, it didn’t allow you to do much.

You could change the icon of the app, and edit tweets for a short while after posting, as well as get access to new beta features like “Twitter Articles,” their internal Substack competitor.

Their best idea was Bird Notes, the fact-checking system which rolled out in beta, before going sitewide under Musk, rebranded as Community Notes. 

The promise that Mr. Musk made when buying Twitter was that he would change it into a lean, aggressive platform, rolling out more and more features as it pushed towards becoming a Chinese-esque “superapp,” and fund it with user subscriptions.

A year and a half later, and the platform has somehow gotten even worse; and the strangest aspect is that its paid version, X Premium — intended to pave the road to success through subscriptions — remains utterly pointless, at any tier.

Prices vary based on subscribing through the web, or in app, but Premium comes in three forms: Basic at $3 a month, Premium at $8 a month, or Premium Plus at $16.

Basic makes the most sense, and is essentially an updated version of the original Twitter Blue. For this, you get the ability to edit posts, write enormous “long posts,” upload longer videos, format text in tweets, sort your bookmarks into folders, and change the app icon. Is that worth $3? If you use any of these on a regular basis, then perhaps. But because reply and post ranking is now so heavily determined by having a paid checkmark, which “Basic” doesn’t provide, then this is an upgrade package that still downranks your work, somewhat undoing the entire point.

To make your replies visible — among bots and attention farmers — then you have to jump up to Premium, at $8. For the price of Disney+, you supposedly get fewer ads, and can apply for ad revenue sharing if you have a large enough following. But the ad sharing is extremely opaque and seems to be highly rigged in favor of select large accounts, like that of Mr. Beast, and scammers and bot accounts are so common on the site that the marginal reduction of advertising is irrelevant.

The main advantage of the Premium tier is the checkmark, which gives you better feed and reply ranking. However, because so many scammers and attention-farming accounts also pay for this prioritized ranking, even this benefit isn’t as useful as it might sound.

Finally, the worst value comes with the Premium+ mode for $16, giving you access to the formerly free Tweetdeck, totally removes ads from the timeline, gives you access to largely unused X Articles feature, and gives you the largest reply prioritization of all tiers. You should only pay for this is if you are a media professional who uses Tweetdeck; but even then, this seems far too expensive for the limited benefit, particularly given the relatively low importance of Twitter as a platform.

Musk’s X is fundamentally broken. He has dramatically worsened the platforms finances — through his public statements to advertisers and the interest on his acquisitional debt — and therefore made it all the more reliant on selling subscriptions to those who love the platform and can effectively monetize it. However, by enabling bots, attention farming, and other undesirable behaviour, he has also made the platform significantly less pleasant and financially valuable to use, significantly reducing the incentive to buy a premium package.

If you regularly post to X, the $3 gives you a few neat improvements; but the long and short of it is that no X Premium package is that good for either the users or the platform.