You might encounter some extra long tweets starting today after Twitter raised the character limit for Twitter Blue subscribers to 10,000.
The social media platform calls the change an improvement to the writing and reading experience. By increasing the character limit to 10,000, paid users now have enough room in a tweet to post essays that could top 1,500 words—far longer than the article you’re reading.
However, users are already asking what’s the point, since Twitter was designed to promote short-form content, not long essays. “It's wild to see people in charge of Twitter who have no idea what the whole appeal of Twitter is,” wrote one user.
“It’s a sure bet IMO (in my opinion) that almost nobody on Twitter will want to read a 10,000 character tweet. This is not an essay site,” wrote another.
In 2017, Twitter raised the character limit from 140 to 280 to give people, particularly English language speakers, more room to express their thoughts. But under new owner Elon Musk, Twitter boosted the character limit to 4,000 in February for paid subscribers, allowing them to put all their thoughts in one tweet versus creating a tweet thread.
To prevent long tweets from overtaking a Twitter page, the company will hide much of the content behind a “Show more" prompt, forcing people to click to access the rest. But it looks like the Show more prompt currently has a bug that can prevent it from fully truncating tweets exceeding 10,000 characters.
On Thursday, app researcher Jane Manchun Wong posted one tweet full of the letter “A” to test the 10,000-character limit. The result produced a huge screed that can fill up your entire Twitter feed and more, forcing you to spend several seconds to scroll down to see the next tweet. According to our count, Wong’s tweet was able to post 84,000 letter As before Twitter placed the rest behind the Show More prompt. (Note that it may crash your browser.)
We reached out to Twitter for comment, but the company’s press email is currently set to automatically send back a smiling poop emoji.