Expanding Twitter’s Character Limit. Again.

The point of Twitter was its brevity. The need to conform to SMS standards was why it was limited to 140 characters with 20 set aside for the username. Five years ago they raised it to 280 long after it no longer needed to match SMS and now they apparently want to raise it again to 4,000. 

Some time after Twitter allowed people post up to 280 characters they said the majority of tweets don’t reach the limit but they never said how popular threads were and how long was the average thread. Twitter has always been more suited for story tellers so it makes sense to let people write longer posts.

Twitter’s reach and discoverability was a major selling point to bloggers and journalists to share their thought streams and link to their work. It’s why they were among the early adopters of Twitter alongside the startup crowd.

Letting people post long tweets is basically coopting the blogging experience, essentially telling people that they can just post everything there, not bothering with links. Most people don’t blog anymore so that’s moot but people do share stories and they make long Twitter threads, which means threads are going to go away. 

Twitter’s plan to release Notes (Twitter Write) was in early stages before the takeover and it was a full blogging experience with embedded images, captions, and titles but they were going to be separate from the regular tweets, a lot like Instagram’s Guide, which was likely inspired by Twitter Moments. Curious how they’re going to roll it out now after the people who worked on it are no longer around. 

It would be relatively easy to just expand the character limit but it’s also lazy. Turning Twitter into a full blown story telling or blogging platform would make more sense and it may serve to head off the migration to other platforms like Tumblr or Mastodon (face it, Google’s Blogger just isn’t a thing anymore) but that’s only looking at it from a product perspective. 

The return and increase of right wing political radicals on Twitter is a major turn off for many people and many have jumped over to other platforms. However there are crowds that are not affected directly by these groups, can’t afford to switch platforms for whatever reason, or simply chose to stay. They may still stick around, oblivious or dismissive to what’s happening, and most likely be taking advantage of the new features instead of jumping to another platform. 

Change is challenging and it’s not just about features or environment. Leaving your playground or asking people to move to a new one is not easy. The push factors need to be stronger than the pull factors and if people don’t feel the need to move, they won’t, no matter how much you try to convince them. Letting people write even longer tweets could be a reason for people to stay.