Two things have historically separated Twitter from Facebook and other forms of social media: the chronological, ever-moving feed and the 140-character limit. The site has already moved away from the former feature, with all kinds of recommended tweets and tweets you may have missed, and now it is moving away from the latter.
On Tuesday, Twitter announced it was experimenting with doubling the maximum available characters in a tweet, from 140 to 280. In an explanation post on the site’s blog, a Twitter product manager and software engineer confessed that although this was just a test, they “feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change will have.”
https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/912783930431905797
This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu
— jack (@jack) September 26, 2017
Most of the announcement was spent explaining the differences between English and Japanese, which did not satisfy the many people who pointing out that brevity is Twitter’s defining characteristic and that 280-character tweets might undermine the site’s entire appeal.
how many times does FUCK YOU fit in 280 characters
— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) September 26, 2017
if i wanted 280 characters i’d reread game of thrones
— Sarah McLaughlin (@sarahemclaugh) September 26, 2017
https://twitter.com/TheFienPrint/status/912785563274559488
Twitter now allows 280 characters per tweet. Meh, I liked the 140. Straight to the point.
— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) September 26, 2017
My initial thoughts on Twitter changing the character limit to 280 pic.twitter.com/x8duI7I93k
— JWP (@JWP1022) September 26, 2017
if you post a tweet longer than 140 characters on my feed i’m going to whoop your ass
— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) September 26, 2017
Twitter obviously saw these criticisms coming, and they attempted to head them off in their announcement post.
Twitter is about brevity. It’s what makes it such a great way to see what’s happening. Tweets get right to the point with the information or thoughts that matter. That is something we will never change.
We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters – we felt it, too. But we tried this, saw the power of what it will do, and fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint. We are excited to share this today, and we will keep you posted about what we see and what comes next.
Though Twitter says it is committed to brevity, it’s inevitable that the site’s essence will change a bit when the character maximum is doubled.
That said, here’s a prediction: Once the 280-character limit becomes universal, a lot of people will complain loudly and passionately for several days about what is lost from this tweak in their favorite social-media site. Then they will keep on tweeting.
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