If you thought the decision to move from 140 to 280 characters per tweet was a mistake back in 2017, brace yourself for the new character limit Twitter Blue subscribers now enjoy.
Late yesterday, the official Twitter account of the Twitter Blue service published a very long tweet. It was so long, in fact, that it broke the existing character limit rules. But as the tweet revealed, that limit is no longer 280 characters—anyone who subscribes to Twitter Blue in the US can now tweet up to 4,000 characters at once.
Up to the first 280 characters will be visible on your timeline, with the rest of the tweet content hidden behind a "Show more" prompt. These very long tweets can be read, retweeted, and quoted by all Twitter users, and the other rules for tweets, including those for images, hashtags, and polls remain the same.
The Twitter Blue tweet insists that "Twitter is still Twitter," but it will certainly come as a surprise the first time users click or tap the "Show more" prompt and up to another 3,720 characters fill the screen. Surely nobody needs that many characters for a tweet? But then, isn't that what we used to think about 280 characters?