Twitter's Latest Attempt To Get New Blue Subscribers Is An Insane Character Limit

For several months since his takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk has been raving about the benefits of the social media's paid tier — Twitter Blue. While Musk has fawned over the verification check mark, it has proven to be one of the lesser significant reasons for anyone to switch to Blue. Instead, Twitter Blue offers other desirable features such as editing tweets, seeing fewer ads, and bypassing the paltry 280-character limit.

While the erstwhile character limit of 4,000 characters for Blue subscribers already felt unrealistic, you may soon see tweets longer than the entire feed. Twitter is now more than doubling that limit to an insane 10,000 characters, which is both — fascinating and unexpected. On average, that many characters are practically unlimited enough to write entire essays and could be leveraged by writers and journalists to build a following and improve their chances of earning from their tweets.

Besides allowing Twitter Blue subscribers to publish full-length essays, the platform adds formatting options such as bold and italic. 

Interestingly, the announcement comes from the Twitter Write handle instead of the official Twitter Blue handle. The former has been the representative for Twitter Notes, a feature that already lets free and paid users share articles up to 2,500 words in length. Notes were built upon Revue, a Substack-like editorial and newsletter-sharing platform that Twitter bought in 2021 and eventually killed in December 2022.

While Twitter Notes is a viable way to share long-form content on Twitter, it is restricted to certain regions only. If there are any lessons from Musk's ways of operating the blue bird app, we can safely assume Notes may never be globally available or even be deprecated to give Twitter Blue better visibility. Nonetheless, the 10,000-character limit may finally be a worthy feature that makes the $8 payout to the Chief Meme Officer at the company freshly named X seem reasonable.

Meanwhile, if you still want to use an effective notes-sharing service that doesn't cost you to publish your views, you can try the recently announced Substack Notes, a new distribution feed that was launched after Twitter started flagging Substack links as unsafe.