Elon Musk: Twitter to add long-form text to tweets, creator monetization

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Twitter used to be capped at a 140-character limit for years before its creators doubled the character limit to 280. But it still wasn’t enough — users have, for years, clamoured to be able to post long-form posts on the platform without having to take screenshots of their notes or worse still, linking to third-party sites like Twitlonger.

Musk also announced that the new feature will be followed by creator monetization for "all sorts of content." 

With Elon Musk now in charge of the site, users will have their wishes granted with the addition of one of many new features that the platform’s new owner has in store.

“Twitter will soon add ability to attach long-form text to tweets, ending absurdity of notepad screenshots,” wrote Musk on Saturday afternoon.

Twitter will soon add ability to attach long-form text to tweets, ending absurdity of notepad screenshots

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2022

It’s worth pointing out that Twitter currently allows for tweets longer than 280 characters if users use the “Alt” text feature, but the text only shows up when appended to images — so the functionality for longer posts already exists, albeit poorly implemented. “Alt” text posts are limited to 1,000 characters.

For now, it’s unknown if the announced feature will be available to all users or only to those who pay the $8 fee for Twitter Blue, which currently also enables users to post 10-minute videos and edit their posts 30 minutes after they’re live.

Regardless of how it’s implemented, it looks like we can say goodbye to having to post screenshots of essays and instead allow users to click a ‘read more’ option.

Musk's other announcement, creator monetization, will allow content creators to make money from the content they post in the same way that TikTok, YouTube and Facebook pay their creators for content. 

Followed by creator monetization for all forms of content

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2022