Twitter was born as a platform for microbloggingbut very soon that is about to change, as the character limit It will increase dramatically in the future. After a somewhat convulsive start by the social network, news is beginning to arrive from the social network itself rather than from Elon Musk.
After relaunching Twitter Blue and its subscription system as a financing model, it seems that the next big revolution of Musk’s new Twitter seems to be the increase in the limitation of characters, which will mean, de facto, the death of the endless threads that chain tweet after tweet.
From 240 to 4000 characters
Twitter was born with a limitation of 140 characters that became iconic and made us learn to simplify as much as possible what we wanted to express or use tools like Twitlonger. Later, in 2017, the first major change to the limits of the social network was applied, doubling the characters allowed to the 280 we currently have. This time, the proposed increase is from 280 to 4000, more than 14 times the current cut.
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
@AllanObare4 Yes
December 11, 2022 • 09:54
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The confirmation comes from Elon Musk himself, who responded to a user who asked him about the rumors of this increase in characters that is about to take place, confirming their veracity.
There’s no indication when Twitter’s character limit increase might take place, though probably not Musk’s top priority. Twitter has been publicly struggling since he became CEO, with new features being rushed in and mass layoffs causing widespread chaos.
Previous tweets from Musk suggested that Twitter could make it easier for users to split long strings of texts into multiple tweets that are part of a thread. It seems that an increase to 4,000 characters would eliminate that idea, and users could simply post longer blocks of text in individual posts.
A new wireless Twitter?
Although many were skeptical of Twitter’s increase to 280 characters in 2017, users have finally gotten used to the new norm. Even so, multiplying Twitter’s character limit by 14 is a long way from simply doubling it, and could change the nature of Twitter as a platform of microblogging. Though judging by his actions so far, it doesn’t seem like Musk is concerned about preserving Twitter as we knew it.
What is most placed on the target are the threads, a series of chained tweets in which many users who are passionate about a topic take the time to structure extensive content into several sequential tweets. Twitter threads, although it may sound very obvious, are nothing more than several tweets, one responding to the other, and so on with the following.
Implemented in 2017, when you click on the first tweet in a thread you are taken to another screen where you can see it along with the rest of the tweets that follow it, so you can read them one after the other and understand the context of the exposed topic.
Until now, the threads represented an excellent way of exposing a topic that requires more treatment than the 280 characters that a tweet provides, but give the user the possibility to release the rambling that he wants makes this way of structuring meaningless, the new limit being a tool with which you no longer have the need to do this to create a Twitter thread.
