My LEO Premium Subscription After One Month

Yesterday I renewed my LEO Premium subscription for another month after it expired. After a few hiccups and some waiting time, everything was in order. For me, it wasn't important, since I am used to how the LEO team operates and their rapid development cycle with less testing time before releasing into production, but for newer people who join and might subscribe to premium, hopefully, next month the process is smoother because it involves payments.

That being said, I want to take a look at the premium features I used so far and the reason why I renewed my subscription.

1. Building Permanent Liquidity for a Hive Bridge

While this benefit of LEO Premium is not included in the list of features we receive as premium users, I believe this is the most important, and it is for everyone on INLEO and on Hive, in general, whether they pay for premium or not.

But since this is not a feature, it wasn't included there. And since the benefit is not Premium-specific, but rather for the entire ecosystem, including it in the list of Premium benefits may not make sense, directly.

However, I recognize that building Hive bridges should be one of, if not our top priority, maybe even before smart contracts, although they are a top priority as well.

The bHIVE-bLEO pool on BSC to which liquidity is being added permanently using the FULL premium subscription funds (no cut kept for the Leo team) will deepen, but slowly in time, as more subscriptions are paid. At the same time, LEO and HIVE are being purchased and wrapped on BSC to be added to the pool.

Before we have a more decentralized option at our disposal, I'm happy to contribute to strengthening the bridges we have and know.

Now, let's move on to the actual features...

2. Orange Checkmark Next to Your Username

"Orange" sounds strange to me, because mine is green since I have a different theme. But the checkmark is something every premium gets by default.

It is something visible on both Threads and Articles, so I am glad it works for long-form content too. Unlike Threads, on long-form, the checkmark isn't shown when you see a full post, but only on the list of articles. #feedback

3. Priority in "For You" Feeds

On Threads, Premium users' messages have a higher chance of being listed higher on the "For You" feeds. I'm not sure how much the algorithm favors premium members, but it looks to be quite heavy. My "For You" shows mainly premium users, apart from non-premium replies to premium users.

But if you don't use Threads a lot, that's a feature that doesn't help you a lot... yet. I believe a "For You" will come for articles too at some point.

4. Edit Threads after You Post Them

I haven't used it. For long threads (another Premium feature), editing them makes sense. For short threads, deleting it and rewriting it is not much different (although at the technical level, edit = one operation; delete + repost = two operations).

5. Add Bold, Italic, and Other "Markdown Styling" to Your Threads

It can be useful. I needed bold once or twice to emphasize something. It makes even more sense with the possibility of writing longer threads by premium users.

6. Publish Longer Threads

This is powerful! I made use of this advantage, even if I write on Threads every once in a while. Yesterday, after I briefly dropped out of premium, I missed it when I tried to write something, and the 240 char limit kicked in.

7. Pinned Threads

I don't think this is available yet. I am interested in it. I am interested in the same thing for the long-form content for our personal blog (not as a feature of communities).

8. Favorites Menu

I'm not exactly sure what this refers to. But I don't think I've seen it around yet. Does anyone know more?

9. Themes

They are available for non-premium users too (from More -> Settings). Premium users have a few extra ones though.

10. NFT Profile Picture (PFP)

I'm pretty sure this hasn't been implemented/released yet.

11. Auto-AI Summarize Your Long-Form Posts into Threadstorms

Not working yet. I'm anxiously waiting for this one. Highly powerful for long-form content creators and probably would add another level of activity to Threads, too. For example, I would use it to create threadstorms for some of my posts, but at the same, I engage with people who engage with my content in a meaningful way, and that means I would engage both with comments on my post and with threads on the threadstorm.

Bonus: Lists

The team probably forgot to include Lists in the Premium features listed above. At first, I thought maybe they unlocked them for everyone, but after reading a bit of their presentation article, it seems they are still for Premium only.

For regular Threads users, Lists are very powerful.

I haven't used Lists as much but I tried them out for a bit. I will probably use them more in the future, but I would find them even more useful for my own case if they were extended from Threads to the entire platform, including articles, or other types of notifications (like mentions from lists of users, notifications of new posts from the list). #feedback

Conclusion

Building the liquidity of a Hive bridge is in itself very powerful. Hopefully, the Leo Bridge now works without the issues from the past. But at a feature-by-feature analysis, it looks like I took advantage of the majority of the Premium features that are currently released, and I am interested in what should come next. It's true, I should use the Threads-specific features more often.

So, renewing the Premium subscription was a decision I took easily and with some time ago.

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Posted Using InLeo Alpha