Twitter’s Planning to Extend Long-Form Tweets to 10k Characters

Have you ever seen these super-long tweets, hidden behind the ‘Present extra’ indicator, showing in your Twitter feed? Need to see even longer tweets?

In the event you answered sure, you’re in luck, as a result of Elon Musk says that longer lengthy tweets, up to 10k characters, are coming quickly to the app.

To recap, the present long-form tweets, now accessible to Twitter Blue subscribers, may be up to 4,000 characters long, and have been launched early final month.

It nonetheless appears ironic to me that Twitter itself couldn’t discover any good purpose to put up an extended tweet to spotlight the performance, however however, 4k tweets are actually accessible to the 300,000 users paying for Twitter Blue, and are getting used to share longer content material within the app.

And shortly, it’s going to broaden much more, with Blue subscribers ready to put up huge, lengthy reams of textual content as tweets.

Which appears a bit of misplaced, possibly not what Twitter is about – however Musk and Co. are eager to get extra long-form content material within the app, so as to maintain customers engaged, whereas additionally, finally, offering a brand new avenue for creator monetization within the app.

As a result of as soon as individuals are spending extra time watching a video or studying an extended tweet, Twitter can insert adverts, then share income from such with creators. It’s nonetheless a means off changing into a factor, however that’s the longer term vision for long-form content material within the app, with lengthy tweets being one other a part of an expanded Twitter eco-system that may now not require creators to redirect their audiences to different platforms to view their content material.

The query, then, is whether or not creators, and customers, really need that. Twitter’s constructed its repute because the short-form chief, because the place you go to get up-to-the-minute updates on the newest occasions and happenings, in fast, bite-sized summaries. There’s an artwork to being good at Twitter due to its brevity, and it does look like increasing the size of tweets might go in opposition to that.

Nonetheless, there was a heap of backlash when Twitter went from 140 to 280 characters again in 2017, but the utilization information since has proven that individuals like having more characters to work with. So whereas it could look like a counter-intuitive transfer, typically, these modifications work anyway, and it could be that extra individuals do discover extra worth in posting longer content material inside tweets, with all new use instances and choices arising in consequence.

And for those who don’t need to, you don’t have to put up longer missives. On this sense, it’s most likely a reasonably protected, and lo-fi guess for Twitter to roll out, even when 10k character tweets do look bizarre on preliminary viewing.

Both means, it’s taking place, with Musk pushing for extra long-form content material choices to facilitate expanded engagement within the app. So prepare for tremendous lengthy tweets, which broaden to take-up your entire timeline.

I imply, the UI may look totally different to that – possibly extra like its ‘Notes’ long-form option that it was testing final yr.

That was depreciated as a part of the Musk takeover, however possibly, at 10k characters, it makes extra sense to re-use this format for displaying longer posts within the app.

Appears that we’ll discover out – Elon says that 10k tweets are coming quickly.