Members of Twitter’s paid subscription, Twitter Blue, now have the ability to use up to 10,000 characters in their tweets, as well as additional text formatting features such as bold and italics.
A tweet from one of the company’s accounts, @TwitterWrite, confirmed the change, revealing that it would occur on April 13th.
Twitter Blue members previously had their character limit for tweets bumped from 280 all the way up to 4,000 in February. The additional formatting changes look like an attempt to stand out from other newsletter platforms such as Substack, which recently introduced a ‘notes’ feature, much to Twitter’s shock.
Before Elon Musk’s takeover of the company in October of 2022, the platform had been toying with ways to up introduce long-form writing, such as its own ‘notes‘ feature. This feature was subsequently axed by Musk after his arrival at the company.
We’re making improvements to the writing and reading experience on Twitter! Starting today, Twitter now supports Tweets up to 10,000 characters in length, with bold and italic text formatting.
Sign up for Twitter Blue to access these new features, and apply to enable…
— Write (@Write) April 14, 2023
Twitter has also chosen to re-brand its ‘Super Follows’ feature to ‘Subscribers‘ and promote it alongside the new character limit and formatting options for creators looking to earn income directly through Twitter.
Musk tweeted that the company would not be taking any money made by creators through subscriptions for the next twelve months. The ability to monetize through Subscriptions is currently a U.S.-only feature.
If persuasion through new features wasn’t enough, Twitter is beginning to take matters into its own hands to sabotage rival platforms. The company began to block Substack users from embedding tweets into stories before flagging posts with Substack links as “potentially spammy or unsafe.” It wasn’t until Substack introduced its new ‘Notes’ feature that Twitter started to ease off.
It will be interesting to see going forward if a new character limit and text formatting abilities will be enough for everyday users to make the switch to Twitter Blue. Reports from The Information indicate that only around 0.1 percent of daily active users are subscribed to Blue, so Twitter likely hopes these new features can make a difference, and fast.
Source: @TwitterWrite Via: The Verge
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