Twitter is one of the most popular social networking platforms. Users on Twitter post and interact with messages and tweets. What made twitter unique was it’s 140 character limit, which gave birth to creative, short and crisp tweets, trends like “hashtags”, and much more.
But with the character limit changing from 140 to 280 – will things change on twitter?
Apparently, Twitter has been facing low revenues despite high user growth rates. Perhaps they came up with this elementary change to come out of the doldrums. However, the twitterati are not very happy with this move as they feel it would diminish the uniqueness that Twitter had and will take away the crispness that every tweet had.
On being criticized about the change, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, responded cheerfully and positively, tweeting:
We expected (and ❤️!) all the snark & critique for #280characters. Comes with the job. What matters now is we clearly show why this change is important, and prove to you all it’s better. Give us some time to learn and confirm (or challenge!) our ideas. https://t.co/qJrzzIluMw
— jack (@jack) September 27, 2017
Although the feature is in the testing phase, the majority of the platform’s users have rallied against the change.
A large segment of the protesters sees this as a “diversion from more essential improvements to Twitter”, like better ways of tackling harassment and hate speech.
Many people were of the opinion that while there has been a demand for an edit button for a long time, the number of characters was never an issue for the twitter users. They further continued that they wanted things to stay ‘shorter and sweeter’, which made conveying the messages on it much more interesting than the other social media platforms.
Users: We want the ability to edit tweets.@Twitter: Okay, we’ll double the amount of available characters so you can make even more typos. https://t.co/aR7RbtphY3
— ᶰᵒᵗ Jony Ive (@JonyIveParody) September 26, 2017
“We understand since many of you have been Tweeting for years, there may be an emotional attachment to 140 characters — we felt it, too,” the company said in its blog post. “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.”
However, the ones who supported the change said that it will give them ‘more freedom to express’ themselves and are ‘excited about the change’. According to Twitter product manager Alisa Rozen, “I quickly run into the 140 character limit and have to edit my Tweet down so it fits. Sometimes, I have to remove a word that conveys an important meaning or emotion, or I don’t send my tweet at all.”
Well, it definitely takes time to come out of an existing status quo and accept the change. But there seems to be no harm in trying the new feature. You can definitely express your opinions more elaborately, if not, just tweet in how many ever characters you want. There’s no rule that you have to use all 280 characters!