10,000 characters per tweet: this is how Twitter tries to compete with newsletters

Once it was 140 characters, like one of those text messages that today (almost) no one uses anymore: five words, three concepts and that was enough to capture the attention of followers and end up among the trends. Fast forward over 15 years and those 140 characters have become first 280, then 4 thousand and now even 10 thousand.

In the Italian night, they arrived on Twitter a couple of news partly expected and partly surprising, some announced in the previous months by Elon Musk, who has been the new CEO of the company since October.

Musk’s fight against Substack and newsletters

The minor changes concern the possibility of writing in bold or in italics, with two new buttons added to the right of the ones already present when typing a tweet: they are not yet available for everyone (actually, for practically nobody) but they are in the testing phase and should be soon.

The most important change touches instead Twitter Blue subscribersusers who pay just over 100 euros a year to have a blue check, priority in searches, the ability to publish longer videos and with 1080 resolution, the ability to edit tweets up to 5 times within 30 minutes of publication and just to write longer ones. Much longer: up to a maximum of 10 thousand characters.

Why did Musk decide this thing? Mainly for two reasons: to attract creators to its platform and to compete with newsletters.

Twitter has long started a creator support program, which can offer followers subscription plans of different prices, with the CEO explaining that “for the next 12 months we will not keep any money” and that the revenues will more or less all go to the authors. The idea is that they allow you to write more make their content more interesting and thus encourage more people to subscribe and pay.

The other game is against newsletterswhich especially in the United States are becoming increasingly profitable for those who write them and for those who publish them, and in particular against Substacks: In recent days, the company introduced a Twitter-like feed called Notes, Twitter has blocked links to Substack and also prevented replies and retweets of tweets with links to Substack in them. The clash also touched writer Matt Taibbi, than at the time of the Twitter Files (What are?) he was friends with Musk but now it doesn’t seem so much anymore: when Taibbi has announced plans to ditch Twitter for Notes, Musk accused him of being an employee of Substack (which he is not) and also stated that the company is allegedly trying to “download a huge portion of the Twitter database to start its own Twitter clone”. This claim has also been debunked, but evidently the battle is only just beginning.

@capoema