After buying the twitter platform, Elon Musk have made many changes to it. The biggest of them all was rebranding it to X. Also have started offering the blue tick, verified accounts in return of a monthly/yearly fee for a quite some time now. In a latest move to make twitter or X profitable, Elon Musk have placed the TweetDeck behind a paywall.
TweetDeck is a twitter feature where in different columns different hashtags, users and other twitter feeds can be added, so that all of these columns are updating side by side. So this enables a user to monitor the feeds of more than one trending hashtags or user etc.
But now TweetDeck is not available to normal free users. After the latest move, the TweetDeck is only available to the paid premium users. The users who pay $8 monthly premium fee. By the way, for those who do not know, TweetDeck was accessible to all at URL: tweetdeck.twitter.com, however now it is only for paid users. If a normal user tries to access it, they are asked to upgrade to the paid premium plan first, in order to access the TweetDeck.
After taking the Twitter private, Elon Musk tried lots of things to make the platform more profitable. These included introducing the paid plan with more features, limiting the number of tweets which normal user can see, limiting the reach of tweets by free accounts and enhancing the same for paid accounts. Introducing the monetization feature for twitter users, which is only available to premium users.
Now Putting the TweetDeck behind the paywall is again another step to make the platform profitable. The users who used to utilize the TweetDeck to see different trends at a time, actually love the product due to its usability. Now after making it part of premium features, X, formerly twitter, hopes to encourage more users to buy the Premium plan.
Also for those who do not know, once upon a time TweetDeck used to be a third party App. It was a desktop software, which used the the twitter API to interact with twitter and show different feeds in columns to users. It was so useful and popular that the twitter platform actually bought it. Later they made it part of twitter website by integrating on a subdomain on twitter website which is tweetdeck.twitter.com
Elon Musk is very actively taking steps to rebrand the twitter to X. Also he is making many changes to the platform to make it more profitable for him. However, he will need to be careful here, so that he do not push things too far. Sometimes when things are pushed too far, they become counterproductive, like in the case of facebook where organic reach of posts is almost zero, even if pages have tens of thousands or millions of likes/followers. To get your post across, people have boost it, for this reason many people are losing interest in facebook. Elon Musk will have to learn from this story.