There’s a new method for journalists, creators, and rambling VCs on X to be tiresome on main. Long-form “Articles” can now be published by verified organizations and Premium+ subscribers on X.
The feature offers various text formatting choices, such as the ability to create bulleted lists, and a basic text-editing interface with embedded media. Additionally, it seems that articles can be longer than the 25,000 characters that the “longer posts” option for premium users is now limited to. My initial testing showed that, at little over 100,000 characters, or roughly 15,000 words, I had reached the article character limit.
Here’s what the editing interface looks like:
Notably, Twitter began working on longer form posts long before Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. The company showed off an early version, originally called “Notes” in 2022, as it looked to lure newsletter writers and other creators to the service. Musk confirmed last summer that the publishing tools were still in the works.
The rollout of publishing tools is notable as Musk has often been hostile to journalists on his platform. Last year, Musk directed a change to X’s recommendation algorithm so that links to newsletter platform Substack would not appear in users’ “For You” feeds, which has throttled many independent writers’ reach on the service. X also stripped headlines from news stories shared on the platform last fall (headlines eventually returned, in a much smaller font).
