What you need to know
- Twitter Blue now supports tweets of up to 10,000 characters in length.
- As part of its subscription tier, the service has also added support for bold and italic text formatting.
- Twitter's "Super Follows" feature will be renamed "Subscriptions" as well.
In Musk’s Twitter-verse, it seems like the sky is the limit when it comes to post length, as the micro-blogging platform has introduced support for up to 10,000-character tweets for Blue subscribers.
Twitter Blue began experimenting with 4,000-character tweets in February as a way to give subscribers in the United States a decent space for their lengthy tweets. Previously, users were forced to break tweets into multiple threads if they intended to write a post that exceeded the platform's character limit. The latest change more than doubles the recent increase and allows for tweets that are more than 35 times longer than the longstanding 280-character limit.
We’re making improvements to the writing and reading experience on Twitter! Starting today, Twitter now supports Tweets up to 10,000 characters in length, with bold and italic text formatting.Sign up for Twitter Blue to access these new features, and apply to enable…April 14, 2023
The new post format isn't entirely unexpected, seeing as Elon Musk has been flirting with plans to extend the Twitter character limit in recent months. In response to a Twitter user's question about whether the service could add code blocks to tweets, Musk stated that the character limit would be increased to 10,000 in the near future.
While unsurprising, the latest extension marks a major shift in Twitter’s longtime micro-blogging format. This brevity is what distinguishes Twitter from rivals, such as Tumblr, Reddit, and other similar rivals.
It is presumably meant to allow Blue subscribers to make money off longer tweets. The increase in character limit coincides with Twitter's rebranding of its "Super Follows" feature as "Subscriptions," which charges users up to $10 per month for exclusive content from their favorite influencers. The feature is currently only available to users in the United States.
Musk promised not to take a cut of the revenue generated by this type of subscription, at least for the first year.
Twitter's latest move is seen as a heightened effort to challenge newsletter platform Substack, which earlier this month launched a Twitter-inspired feature known as Notes. Musk has also directed the platform to block tweets containing links to Substack in recent weeks.
In addition to the increased character limit and Subscriptions, Twitter has added support for bold and italic text formatting.
However, it remains to be seen whether these new Blue perks will be enough to persuade those on the fence about the subscription service to sign up. After all, Blue hasn't quite attracted a substantial portion of Twitter's user base, representing only 0.2% of its monthly active users in the U.S., or around 180,000 people, according to a leaked document seen by The Information.
