Twitter, formerly known as a short-form blogging platform, has announced that its subscription service will now support long-form content of up to 10,000 characters, more than double the 4,000 announced in February. Twitter Blue subscribers will also be able to use bold and italic text formatting.
Twitter also renamed its ‘Super Follows’ feature into the more straightforward ‘Subscriptions,’ which lets users subscribe to specific accounts to get access to exclusive content. The feature will allow creators in the US to monetize their content and earn income directly through Twitter – but only if they pay Twitter first via Twitter Blue.
The update is seen as a new attempt to bring in more subscribers and to rival Substack, the popular newsletter service.
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The social media platform continues to struggle to get people to pay $8 dollars a month, and companies and organizations at least $1,000 per month. According to data from The Information, as of mid-January, 180,000 people in the US — or less than 0.2% of its monthly active users — were subscribed to Twitter Blue.
The update also comes just a week after Twitter blocked Substack users from embedding tweets in their content, then blocked engagement on tweets with links to Substack, tagging them as “potentially spammy or unsafe,” and then hid all news stories mentioning Substack in search results.
Substack then introduced ‘Notes,’ a Twitter-like tab that lets users share “posts, quotes, comments, images, and links,” according to a blog post, with no character limit.
While some users are seeing the potential in the Substack-like update, others are finding the update somewhat silly, pointing to the platform’s legacy as the place for short-form content.
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