Now here’s a massively major change to Twitter! Since Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media company, there have been handfuls of smaller changes but this… this is a big one.
In a reply to another Twitter user asking about the validity of a rumor of the character limit change, Elon confirmed that the supposed increase to 4,000 characters would be happening:
We don’t have details on how Twitter will handle such a large-scale change just yet; however, we have reason to believe that this character limit expansion could come as an elaboration on Twitter threads.
Back in the day, a tweet was limited to just 140 characters… that is not a lot. You could barely express yourself given the restriction. The last two sentences were just shy of 140 characters and that was barely a full thought!
In 2017, Twitter expanded character limits to 280 – which helped things a bit, though users still needed the ability to string threads together to really get into nuanced thoughts and details. Twitter was originally created with the OG 140 character limit in mind but it’s clear the platform has moved into actual articulated discussion.
It’s hard to say if Elon’s confirmation of a 4,000 character limit is as black and white as a “Yes”, since he’s given generalized statements like this in the past and other members of staff have needed to clarify a bit.
I think, on the surface, this could be a good change. Tweet threads are already so common – and people already use Twitlonger if a thread won’t cut it, so they may as well cut out the middle man!
I just hope Twitter doesn’t become even more like Facebook… I’m trying to be positive here.
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