Twitter rolled out a 280 character limit for most of its users Tuesday, and, predictably, lots of people are unhappy.
That doubles the original 140 character limit that Twitter has maintained since it launched in 2006.
Twitter began testing longer tweets in late September, and found that once the novelty of tweeting longer wore off, most people in the test group didn’t use all of the available characters. According to the company, only 5% of tweets sent by people in the 280-character test group were longer than 140 characters, and just 2% were over 190 characters.
Many users complained about the initial tests. Now that just about everyone’s got 280 characters to work with, more people say they’re frustrated or confused by the decision.
Other people were curious about how the new parameters will change the way people interact on the platform.
The big question on everyone’s mind is how President Donald Trump, an avid Twitter user, will use the expanded space. The president has not yet tweeted 280 characters.
Users tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean will still have the original limit. That’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.
The company has been slowly easing restrictions to let people cram more characters into a tweet. It stopped counting polls, photos, videos and other things toward the limit. Even before it did so, users found creative ways to get around the limit. This includes multi-part tweets and screenshots of blocks of text.
Twitter’s character limit was created so that tweets could fit into a single text message, back when many people were using texts to receive tweets. But now, most people use Twitter through its mobile app; the 140-character limit is no longer a technical constraint but nostalgia.
