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Elon Musk’s impact on Twitter after acquiring the social media platform was swift and seismic.
There were layoffs, shifts in focus, features added, features slashed, re-hires, lots and lots of nothing burgers, and constant claims that Twitter Blue will somehow be worth the money.
The newest Twitter feature from Elon Musk just went live. Subscribers to Twitter Blue now have the ability to send tweets longer than 280 characters. They can now send tweets up to 4,000 characters long.
These new long tweets appear in the Twitter feed as normal tweets until users click the ‘Show more’ option to expand a long tweet. This new feature puts a huge dent in the usefulness of Threads on Twitter and it’s not being very well received by the Twitter public, yet.
need more than 280 characters to express yourself?
we know that lots of you do… and while we love a good thread, sometimes you just want to Tweet everything all at once. we get that.
so we're introducing longer Tweets! you're gonna want to check this out. tap this 👉…
— Premium (@premium) February 8, 2023
Long Tweets: New Twitter Feature Just Went With 4,000 Character Tweets
There is certainly an audience for 4,000-character tweets. If there wasn’t they wouldn’t have launched the feature.
But I can tell you from first-hand experience in publishing that Internet users rarely, if ever, want to see a full wall of text without it broken up in a meaningful way.
The top reply to the new Twitter feature announcement is a question. They wanted to know what was happening with Elon Musk’s big announcement last week when. The user wrote “so what happened to the ad revenue sharing thing that was supposed to launch last week?”
The jokes started rolling in:
what in the cvs receipt is this
— Stein (@steinekin) February 8, 2023
It’s only a matter of time:
When will we get the full rebrand to Facebook?
— WOLF (@WOLF_Financial) February 8, 2023
In all seriousness, Twitter is going to have a problem on their hands if people start tweeting out full novels and the author’s aren’t receiving credit for it:
Great — can’t wait for the novels.
— David Gokhshtein (@davidgokhshtein) February 8, 2023
Personally, if I click ‘read more’ and there’s 4,000 characters in a tweet I’m muting/blocking that person immediately. Nobody has time for that:
Me reading people’s quirky long Tweets pic.twitter.com/kLHQA2843O
— Sir Doge of the Coin ⚔️ (@dogeofficialceo) February 8, 2023
It was initially reported that Elon Musk’s Twitter would roll out 26,927 characters per tweet. It remains to be seen if 4,000 is just a starting point, if they plan to expand that limit, or if they couldn’t deliver beyond 4K characters.