It’s been another week of more changes at Twitter as Elon Musk‘s latest tweets on possible changes to the social platform indicate an end to the short-form Twitter that we’d come to know.
Musk says that you’ll soon be able to tweet longer than the current 280 characters in a single tweet. He later tweeted #RIPTwitter – a sure sign of more tweaks to come as the bird grows more unpredictable by the week.
Twitter is reportedly working on a feature that will automatically create a thread if your thoughts about the world exceed 280 characters. “Ability to do long tweets coming soon,” tweeted the new owner on Thursday.
Ability to do long tweets coming soon
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 17, 2022
Read More: New Twitter rules and changes to the platform
After years of requesting the ability to enable longer tweets on the platform, Twitter doubled the original 140 characters in November 2017. The 140-character limit was designed in tune with the character limit of a typical SMS which has 160 characters. SMS on modern phones generally split a longer message into short messages called segments, the equivalent of what a thread would be.
It’s safe to say Musk’s idea may be heading towards the direction of a typical Short Messaging Service (SMS). Though we may finally get what we’ve been asking for, the move stands to change Twitter’s DNA – keeping it short, the thing that’s set the platform apart from most social media platforms, enabling us to quickly get the information we need and get on with it.
The increase to 280 characters remained reasonable, giving many the opportunity to provide the much-needed context in most tweets. Making tweets longer…well, we’ll have to see how that plays out.
As Twitter continues to evolve, five years after moving to 280 characters and with a new owner in charge, the platform seems to be morphing into something no one can actually predict at this point.
Read More: Stop using SMS’ to secure your banking accounts – here’s why
On Friday morning, Musk woke the world up with a #RIPTwitter post from the new owner – paired with the bird’s grave – a tweet that set the bird on fire as the responses poured with predictions on what’s to come from Musk’s Twitter hell.
The tweet received mixed reactions:
Short tweets are a feature, not a bug. Forces writers to put in the effort to condense and summarize ideas into short easily digestible blocks. It’s why people prefer reading tweets over long AI generated multipage news articles. No one wants to read through all that crap
— Pedro Contipelli (@PC42661428) November 17, 2022
This totally made my day. I usually need to cut my threads 2 short. ThanX elonmusk ❤️ pic.twitter.com/fENJmNnV8D
— stephanie pirthiani (@sunnysteph01) November 17, 2022
Keep the threads. The breaks in reading make long reads easier to digest. And with threads, people can RT the parts that are most relevant to them, without having to share the entire saga. We like the threads🍷⚔️
— Cozomo de’ Medici (@CozomoMedici) November 17, 2022
As expected, some gave an example of what they’re expecting once tweets get automatically threaded.
1/82
I’ll be pinning this detailed timeline, as my final piece covering this topic, as now the case is closed in my mind.
This was a crime plain and simple and I’ll put no more wind in this criminals sails:
FTX: Meltdown.
The definitive and chronological thread.
— Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) (@adamscochran) November 16, 2022
#RIPTwitter
On Friday morning, Musk woke the world up with a #RIPTwitter post from the new owner – pared with the bird’s grave – a tweet that set the bird on fire as the responses poured in with predictions on what’s to come from Musk’s Twitter hell.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022