Twitter: the platform is testing very long posts, should we say goodbye to microblogging?

Could this be the end of tweets as we knew them until then? In any case, there will be change on this side.

This is far from the first change made to Twitter by the billionaire since he bought the social network, but his latest idea implemented on the network is perhaps the one that will change its use the most. Announced for several months, the passage of the character limit to 4,000 instead of the current 280 has indeed entered the test phase.

A feature probably limited to Twitter Blue subscribers

Users who subscribed to the Twitter Blue subscription noticed since yesterday that the character limit for their posts was no longer 280, but 4,000. Such a change is not really a surprise, Musk himself the announced at the end of last year.

This isn’t Twitter’s first test of the matter. In November, some users had access to the “notes” option which allowed them to write texts without character limit. But for their subscribers, you had to click on a link to access it. Thus, the option did not really differ from what a Twitlonger, for example, offers.

With this new feature, everything can be read directly on the newsfeed, but the longest tweets are partially displayed and a “see more” button allows you to see them in full, like LinkedIn.

Microblogging, the essence of Twitter

This last detail is welcome: the tweet you will find here allows you to understand what a tweet of 4,000 characters represents.

But that does not remove the main question: why? Indeed, it can be argued that the success of Twitter, especially its specificity, is precisely this limit which forces users to synthesize their comments and easily switch from one tweet to another. In addition, there are already many ways to post longer texts: threads, texts on one or more images, more or less dedicated sites such as Twitlonger, Medium or Reddit, or quite simply other social platforms. Note also that the passage of the original limit of 140 to 280 characters had already sparked criticism among users of the platform.

Source : Gizmodo