Why would anybody want to read long-form articles on X?

Elon Musk is still hell-bent on making Twitter, now X, into the universal panacea, and is now offering users the chance to post long-form articles if they pay to use Premium+.

The problem here is that this destroy’s Twitter’s fundamental value proposition: its low signal-to-noise ratio. When Twitter invented microblogging, people immediately understood that encapsulating messages in 160 characters was not a limitation but a virtue. Why? Because it allowed users to indulge in skimming, to receive a lot of information in a very short time. In short, we were able to make Twitter what we wanted it to be, based on our timeline, and that idea, that formula, was a powerful one. The appeal of minimalism never stales.

Over time, that value proposition has steadily been diminished. The first changes, the inclusion of photographs and links, made sense, because you could keep glancing through a timeline that was now even more visual, so that with one more click, you could reach a second level that allowed you to dig deeper into the information. From then on, the increase in the number of characters made using Twitter a noisier experience; and now, the inclusion of long-form articles eliminates that differentiation based on reading speed, on the “injection” of information, turning it into a mish-mash.