Elon Musk gives a short response to a complaint about long tweets and promises to take care of it.
Long story short: Even Elon Musk has a problem with Twitter’s extra long tweets.
“Yeah, the format is terrible,” Musk tweeted on Feb 10. “Update early next week.”
The Tesla (TSLA) – Get Free Report CEO and self-described “Chief Twit” at Twitter, which he bought last October for $44 billion, was responding to the recently announced feature that allows users to attach long-form text to tweets and ending what Musk called the “absurdity of notepad screenshots.”
Twitter Blue subscribers in the U.S. are now able type to up to 4,000 characters.
The new function had a rough debut as Twitter users worldwide began having problems posting shortly after the longer format went online. The problem lasted for about 90 minutes.
The longer tweets weren’t well-received by many users who said they preferred their comments on the microblogging website to be succinct.
“Current implementation of long tweets is terrible,” one tweet read. “Looks like hot garbage to read. Some improved formatting could go a long way. If this feature isn’t improved I suspect it will be canned due to lack of use. Brevity on Twitter is sacred @elonmusk.”
The poster acknowledged that “there are some good sides” to the new format.
“No hard character limit makes tweets easier to write, but worse to read,” a follow-up tweet read. “I can now share some longer stuff that wasn’t possible before, like ChatGPT transcripts without needing a screenshot.”
The poster added that the text is too big and poorly formatted for a long read and “as it stands I’ll be sticking to threads because it’s just easier to read.”
The comments prompted Musk’s “terrible” admission to which the author responded “cool that will improve things a lot.”
Other commenters joined in to express their feelings about long tweets.
“Forcing users to be concise (via brevity) is one of the very best things about Twitter,” one post read. “When posts start getting long, I get flashbacks of those rambling tiny text Facebook posts. Maybe long tweets will work, but was this tested in a closed beta first?”
“This thread was long-winded af,” another person said.
