As of today, Twitter has increased the size of tweets to 10,000 characters, which in secular size would be about three pages (double that of a web news item). However, this ability to convert a tweet into a literary essay is only available to Twitter Blue subscribers, that is, you can only enjoy this advantage if you pay 9.68 euros per month (8 euros plus €1.68 of VAT) or 101.64 per year.
A real outrage compared to the 280 characters per tweet that the rest of the users of this social network have, at most, those who do not pay the subscription to Twitter Blue. In fact, it is just 280 characters, of space, which occupies this paragraph of text.
Before 2017 and before the arrival of Elon Musk, each tweet was 140 characters. Since Twitter was born as a place to post brief thoughts, such as headlines, and not authentic in-depth reports, which is what paid users will be able to share thanks to this new expansion.
The first attempt appeared in February, with the timid extension to 4,000, a limit that was not having all the success it required. Since in the ‘witch hunt’ to discover which user is paid and which has the famous blue verification for seniority and relevance, making use of this privilege betrayed visibility at the checkbook and not by ‘meritocracy’ within Twitter .
This feature is intended to compete with other newsletter platforms such as Substack, which recently found itself in the crosshairs of Elon Musk. A platform with which there was cooperation until it implemented Notes, with a similar operation to Twitter. Thereafter, users who shared Substack links on Twitter began to be penalized.
The funny thing is that Twitter, before Musk, was testing a notes function for writers and even went so far as to acquire a newsletter company called Revue, in 2021. However, this type of function had been discarded by the tycoon, until now.
Along with this novelty, the platform has also added support for bold and italic text formatting, getting closer to the aforementioned newsletter format. In the same way, it will allow the subscription to specific accounts, thus opening a monetization path for content creators that replaces the ‘Super Follows’ option that already existed. Although this last function, for now it is limited to users residing in the United States.
All these changes, experiments and new features seem to reflect economic problems within the company, as well as the waves of layoffs that have been taking place. According to the business publication The Information, Twitter Blue is hunting and capturing subscribers, since it is estimated that globally it has only 290,000 paying members. That is, only 0.1% of the 250 million daily active users that Twitter has pay the subscription. His path to increasing the company’s revenue and profit level is shedding Twitter’s legacy as a short-form blog. A characteristic that was what made him prevail during these years.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project