Before Twitter, X and Threads, the most popular way to share long articles was by writing blogs. The blogging medium is now less popular, but many people still want to read long articles to discuss complex ideas that require more than a few hundred characters to explain.
Threads is currently testing a feature that allows users to write long articles on the platform. When used, short excerpts of long articles will be displayed in a small gray window. Long articles can then be read by clicking on this small window. The feature was discovered by Threads user @rpn.
This support for uploading long articles is similar to the Articles feature that has been supported on X since last year. On X, Articles is only available to Twitter Premium+ subscribers, as it is seen as a way to turn X into a news site. Although Articles has been around for a long time, it is rarely seen in use by Premium+ subscribers.