It had a nominal $1 per year fee, but in most of the world (like here in India, where it's now practically a utility), they never charged anything because even a trivial sum like that would have caused a ton of friction. That's why it became so popular.
I have a blue tick on Twitter but there is no way in hell I'm paying $20 per month for it. I live in India and $240 per year is a fair chunk of money for people in many parts of Asia. It costs more than my software subscriptions. Only rich celebs will keep it. I guess Musk just doesn't care about the lower income countries out there.
Is what a priority? Keeping our blue ticks? Well, the purpose of the blue tick was originally to show that the person was someone of note and not a random anon user or impersonator, and to authenticate that. They had specific criteria to meet.
Journalists from lower income countries, for instance, are still journalists, but they don't usually make enough money to pay $240 per year to justify keeping that badge. You may not think it necessary. That's fine.
Is Twitter Blue priced according to region currently? Perhaps the $20 is just the USD price and not the worldwide price? Though then I guess you leave it more open to fraud if it's cheaper elsewhere and you can get the blue tick by signing up cheap on a VPN.
As far as I know, Twitter Blue is not available in my region. The page says "We’ve launched Twitter Blue in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand."
Clicking the "Try Twitter Blue" link on their site just redirects me to my home page.
Journalists, especially political ones, gets impersonators. Usually with intention to harm you and your reputation. That is why, so that impersonator does not have blue check.
I tried to set up an account on the ImprovMX service the article recommend. Their verification email never reached my GMail account. Nothing in spam either. That's a non-starter straight away.
Oh god no. My keyboard doesn't have autocorrect and therefore doesn't fuck up my messages where I'm correcting the damn phone's keyboard mistakes 25% of the time, especially when you're multilingual and have to slip in local language words into a largely English conversation (common situation here in India).
I've been using PC keyboards for 30+ years so it's just faster for me. I use Whatsapp (like most of my country) and prefer to have the desktop client open on my PC so I can type much faster and see everything on a larger screen.
Weird, I use three languages on my phone for typing messages and the autocorrect manages that quite well (to my surprise, at first).
Even mixing languages works quite well in my experience. I use "Gboard" which I think is the default keyboard app? simply with all three languages enabled, and I don't switch keyboard (using always the same disposition, the one of my native language which isn't the language I type most on my phone).
Unfortunately, Gboard doesn't seem to support multiple languages enabled at the same time if they use different scripts - you still have to switch languages.
I can kind of understand why, but I don't think it would be impossible to design a way for it to work.
Can you elaborate on this? I have three languages enabled on Android GBoard and it'll offer up completions and suggestions across all three languages even though I'm usually on English.
I'm talking about languages using different scripts/alphabet, e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, Greek etc. The feature you are describing ("Multilingual typing") is not supported in that case.
So for example, you can enable it for English and Spanish, but not for English and Russian. In fact, it doesn't even seem to be supported for different languages that use Cyrillic.
