Twitter is finally expanding its oft-criticized character limit from 140 to 280 for tweets written in all languages except those that don’t suffer from cramming (Japanese, Korean, and Chinese).
The company announced the change in a blog post on Tuesday, explaining how the limited trial it released in September was a success, with users tweeting “more easily and more often.”
It claimed only 1 percent of users hit the new character limit compared to 9 percent who reached 140 characters. Surprisingly, only 5 percent of tweets during the trial were longer than 140 characters and only 2 percent passed 190 characters.
Not everyone is happy with the change. People are already complaining that the expanded limit sacrifices the brevity of posts.
I see #280characters everywhere and by that I mean I see a bunch of tweets I'm not reading because they're so damn long.
— Bre (@dust2dust34) November 7, 2017
If I wanted to read #280characters or more, I'd read Facebook. Or like an actual book. pic.twitter.com/cfUTUqZb2T
— Nick Caruso (@LittlestWinslow) November 7, 2017
https://twitter.com/cdorso/status/928006697490272261
However, most users are already happily experimenting to see what they can do with the new limit. But some of these posts confirm the fear that longer tweets will take up precious space on your timeline.
https://twitter.com/DannyCalidonia/status/928023774607310848
https://twitter.com/girlhoodposts/status/928036180704354304
While it’s still not clear what the majority of Twitter users think about the change, there is no questioning the desire for Twitter to have addressed larger problems first.
TWITTER USERS: It would be nice if you stopped people making death threats.
— Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) September 26, 2017
TWITTER: OK, but what if those death threats could be LONGER?
Others could care less about having more space to express their thoughts and would instead prefer a way to edit tweets.
https://twitter.com/Tiffy_Russell/status/928033186843475968
But can we talk about that edit button though?? #280characters pic.twitter.com/maqaMUbV4A
— jinfinity (@AwakeForSeokjin) November 7, 2017
https://twitter.com/artvandelay9317/status/928028349955497984
The 280-character limit should to available to all users a few hours after its official announcement.