Last Updated on February 5, 2022
When news of a potential change to the Twitter character limit was being considered, social media went nuts. It worked.
“It’s a good constraint for us.”
That’s how Twitter’s CEO described that sometimes-annoying, always-brilliant 140 limit we have to compose our thoughts on the social media platform.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey joined NBC’s Today hosts Matt Lauer and Carson Daly in the show’s “Orange Room,” where they follow social media trends, that a proposed change to that limit wouldn’t happen after all.
Back in January, we heard rumors the platform was considering increasing the per-tweet character limit from 140 to 10,000, which would have made tweets comparable to private messages.
Re/code reported tweets would have still shown 140 characters in the Twitter stream, but tweets that were actually longer than that would have had some sort of button to click to expand the tweet to display all the characters, whether the tweet was 141 characters long, 400 characters long, 4,000 characters long, or as 10,000 characters long.
Facebook has that “see more” link on posts that reach a certain length, and those so-called “Seymour” posts are the butt of jokes and the bane of social media consultants’ existence.
The thing is, Twitter’s character limit can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
When you’re communicating with someone on a one-on-one basis, it can be too limiting. You either have to resort to potentially annoying abbreviations or multiple tweets (and sometimes both) to convey your point.
On the other hand, since Twitter is a convenient home for many weekly chats like Blogchat, brevity can be a good thing. It requires people to make their point quickly. A 10,000-character tweet would either not be read in a fast-moving Twitter chat or it would slow the pace of the chat to a standstill.
The points being made in those longer tweets may be just as valid, but because it would slow the chat pacing, fewer voices could potentially be heard. That’s not necessarily a good thing.
Twitter’s direct messages are a different animal; when it’s a private message, the number of characters shouldn’t really matter, anyway; that’s more like an email, isn’t it?
It seems rare these days, though it probably isn’t, that a company like Twitter would listen to its audience in this way. But at least it recognized that a 10,000-character limit would have changed their platform in a way many would have considered as horrible.
Twitter could still make a change from the 140-character limit, but if they ever decide to do so, they could bump it up just a little. How about a 180-character limit? Most of the time, when the 140 cutoff is a problem for me, I end up needing only a few more characters — maybe a dozen. This would keep messages short, but at least give just a bit more space. (Some of us don’t like abbreviating every single word.)
I cannot imagine trying to read or compose tweets in #blogchat that were long. The hour flies by so fast already that I am still playing catch up at the end of the hour. I am happy that the decision to keep it at 140 characters stuck. Makes no sense to increase that limitation as it would change what Twitter is and how people interact with it.