Twitter expands character limit from 280 to 4,000 (and promptly breaks)

Loquacious people, rejoice! Twitter just expanded its brief 280 character limit to an oversized 4,000… but there’s a catch.

In order to use wall-o-text-length tweets, you have to be a member of Twitter Blue’s monthly subscription service, which costs real money dollars. Talk about a buzzkill, yeah? You also have to be located in the United States, as other countries don’t have access to this feature yet. You can peruse the details in the tweet below.

need more than 280 characters to express yourself?

we know that lots of you do… and while we love a good thread, sometimes you just want to Tweet everything all at once. we get that.

so we're introducing longer Tweets! you're gonna want to check this out. tap this 👉…

— Twitter Blue (@TwitterBlue) February 8, 2023

The idea is to eliminate Twitter threads, which are longer ponderings that get broken up into shorter tweets. Personally, I prefer shorter tweets because that’s what drew me to this social media platform in the first place. I didn’t have to sift through paragraphs upon paragraphs to get the information I wanted. Simple and to the point. That’s what Twitter used to be. Nowadays, like most folks, I’ve no idea what the hell is going on with it.

Twitter has been a major trash fire for quite some time now. Whether they’re leaking data from 200 million users or slamming third-party clients with the ban hammer, the social media platform is the virtual wild, wild west. Last night, shortly after rolling out the new character count and controversial API changes, Twitter suffered from widespread technical issues that prevented folks from tweeting or following new people for several hours.

Although the issue has since been resolved, Twitter appears to get more and more unstable by the moment. Will it eventually implode? Who knows. Either way, Elon Musk’s Twitter is awfully hard to trust right now though.