Only a few months after changing one of the most fundamental and sacred aspects of Twitter — a tweet’s maximum character length — Elon Musk has done it again.
As of now, Twitter Blue subscribers can post tweets of up to 25,000 characters in length. This is an expansion of 15,000 characters beyond the previous limit of 10,000, which was established as recently as April. It was originally announced last week in an excruciatingly long post by a Twitter employee.
There was a previous expansion from 280 characters to 4,000 earlier this year. That, of course, came several years after Twitter controversially went from its original limit of 140 characters to 280 under the site’s previous ownership. In other words, Twitter has done this before but never at the rate and severity that has been seen under Musk’s management.
This opens up possibilities for people to post articles or essays on Twitter in full, perhaps behind a subscriber paywall. However, reading long tweets on the website and/or mobile app still isn’t a great experience. It might have been prudent to fix that aspect of Twitter before upping the character limit to such an extreme, but hey, I’m not the one in charge.
Just know that if you click “See more” on a tweet, you might be in for the long haul.
