Twitter Blue users can now send very, very long tweets
Twitter's character limit just got a huge expansion in a bid to attract new subscribers
Members of Twitter’s premium subscription service can now send astronomically long tweets, as the character limit for Twitter Blue members has increased to 4,000.
The standard character limit is a comparatively measly 280. All tweets will be capped at that number on your timeline and you’ll need to hit a “show more” button to fully reveal a longer tweet if you want to read it.
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Long tweets
📜 Twitter Blue subscribers can now send very long tweets
😮 Members’ character limit has been expanded to 4,000
🤏 The standard character limit remains 280
💰 It’s Twitter’s latest attempt to entice users to the premium subscription service
“While only Blue subscribers can post longer Tweets, anyone and everyone can read them,” Twitter said in an announcement tweet that showed the higher character limit in action.
“You can reply to, retweet, and quote Tweet a longer Tweet, no matter if you’re a Twitter Blue subscriber or not. Subscribers will be able to reply and QT with up to 4,000 characters.”
Check out the rather heavy-handed example from the official Twitter account below:
You’ll be able to attach pictures, polls and use hashtags with longer tweets, although for now they can’t be saved as drafts or scheduled to send later. It’s intended to cut down on the need for threads, in which several tweets are tied back to back to create one long chain of thought.
The character limit for standard Twitter users is 280 characters, which was raised from the platform’s original 140-character limit in 2017.
The expanded character limit is the latest way Twitter hopes to entice users to pay for its premium subscription service. For $8 a month, Twitter Blue members also get a blue checkmark next to their account names and the ability to edit their tweets.
Twitter has been slowly rolling out more features for Twitter Blue over the past couple of months. It initially paused the service entirely when it first launched last year after trolls exploited its lack of verification and moderation to impersonate official Twitter accounts. Now, new Twitter users cannot subscribe to Twitter Blue for at least 90 days after their accounts are created.
Since taking over Twitter last year, Elon Musk has made some big changes to the platform. He most recently announced a ban on third-party clients, cutting off their access to Twitter’s API, added a view counter to each Tweet, and started pushing algorithmically determined content before user-curated posts.
These longer tweets may well improve the Twitter experience by tidying up very long threads, but they surely won’t change much. You’ll still have to scroll down a wall of text if you want to get to the end of someone’s thoughts. Twitter Blue will have to offer more if its subscriber base is to expand.