It is official. After over a year experimenting with various types of longer tweets, Twitter is finally letting everyone tweet with 280-characters at a time.
We're expanding the character limit! We want it to be easier and faster for everyone to express themselves.
More characters. More expression. More of what's happening.https://t.co/wBpYdy1K40
— Twitter (@Twitter) November 7, 2017
The double-sized tweets are rolling out as the default length limit for users around the world, except Japan and Korea. The iconic 140-character limit will be phased out, although Twitter suggests the change won’t affect most tweets.
According to the blog post announcing the change, most tweets stayed below the old limit even when they had the opportunity to say more. However, “we saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they tweeted more easily and more often.”
Twitter also noted that “historically, 9% of tweets in English hit the character limit.” With the new extended length, that number has dropped to only 1% of tweets.
Of course, some on the platform seem to be outraged by the break in tradition. Most, including celebrities, are celebrating the longer tweets with jokes and pointlessly long tweets for fun.
We all have 280 characters? Well, as Shakespeare wrote, “Brevity is the soul of wit. The soul of wit is what brevity is. Brevity? Soul of wit? They're the same thing. Like if you had brevity in one hand and the soul of wit in the other, you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart.”
— Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) November 8, 2017
