Twitter Expands to 280 Character Count

Twitter is dropping its historic 140 character limit. But is it dropping more than just that?

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by Ethan Hausmann

Goodbye character limits
Twitter officially increased tweet character limits to 280, replacing the historic 140 limit. The stated reason was because people have been demanding an expansion since 140 characters is too limiting. Apparently people need more characters to complete their thoughts. Is this the real reason though?

Certain languages like Korean, Japanese, and Chinese can express more than double the information in the same 140 character limit as English, Spanish, and French for comparison. Twitter has decided that this is unfair. Thus every language will get 280 characters for the new limit except the above Asian languages.

Twitter is losing its identity
I think that this move to 280 is a bad choice on the part of Twitter. What's the point of using Twitter to share your thoughts if you can do the same thing on Facebook or Instagram or other social platforms? One of the things that made Twitter special was the character limit. You had to condense your thoughts and yet still make your point. Now Twitter has photos and a much higher character limit. People will continue to use Twitter, but I don't see anybody switching to this platform or joining, if they can get a similar experience on another social network.

Limits are good
People thrive best when they have limits. Whether it is a timeline for finishing a project or a limited amount of space in an apartment or a small number of colors on a palette or character limits for sharing a thought. When humans are given freedom to do whatever they want, they tend to fail and get lazy. Having a larger canvas to spread information will just lead to more fat and less excellent content. Just like in high school with word counts for essays, Twitter users will fill their tweets with unnecessary words and not add anything to the conversation.