The need to increase the number of Twitter Blue customers is about to pervert everything that the social network was based on: short messages. Will Elon Musk come out on top? Well, today Twitter launched a longer tweet feature that offers Blue subscribers in the US the ability to post up to 4,000 characters in a single message.
To avoid filling your timeline with extremely long tweets, Twitter will put the classic “Show more” after a few lines. Currently, the feature has some limitations. For starters, it’s a paid feature that’s only available to Twitter Blue subscribers. Also, if your tweet exceeds the standard 280 characters, you can’t save it as a draft or schedule it for later.
However, most of the other features should work as usual, such as adding hashtags or images, and non-Twitter Blue subscribers will still be able to interact with the posts as usual. Twitter Blue subscribers will also have the ability to quote, retweet, and reply with 4,000 characters.
This takes us from microblogging, the origin of the social network, to macroblogging. Elon Musk has been promising longer tweets for some time, saying that the company is also working on the introduction of the ability to format posts, such as putting words in bold or changing the font size.
Twitter cost Elon Musk a whopping $44 billion just five months ago, and he is now seeing things go from bad to worse. Fewer users, less advertising revenue, changes that are not liked… And, meanwhile, the popularity of the billionaire is falling with each tweet.
The future of Twitter, the most influential social network in our lives due to its being used to demand and request changes at a political level (even influencing the agendas of governments and parliaments), is not as bright as Elon Musk thought. And part of the blame is his. That said, if we look back, we will see that this is not the first time Twitter has expanded the length of posts. The current 280-character limit was introduced in 2017, replacing the previous 140-character limit.