Change is brewing in the social media sphere. Twitter, the instantaneous, message-crafting site that is Donald Trump’s favourite ranting platform, has just announced that it’ll officially expand its character limit to 280 in a bid to get users to tweet more.
You could say it’s been a long time coming. Since Twitter’s debut 11 years ago, 140 characters have been the gold standard of tweeting. There’s been no character increase, mainly due to the fact that Twitter’s users have protested against an expansion in the past. Well, all that’s going to change.
The social media giant ran the 280-character limit during a test launch in September. It found that the character limit was a “major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English” (no sh*t Sherlock). Also, the stats showed that 9% of tweets hit exactly 140 characters, meaning users had to frequently edit posts.
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
Whether this move will make Twitter great again remains to be seen. After all, the social media site is like a dinosaur compared to newer, slicker apps like Instagram and Snapchat, and frankly, we’re not sure if giving politicians more room to bicker with each other is a good idea, especially when it concerns nuclear destruction.
As of now, the doubling of the character limit does not extend to languages such as Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin, because of how more thoughts can fit in lesser words due to the different writing systems.
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