This is one Twitter change you actually won’t mind.
After the social network royally pissed people off earlier this year by changing up its timeline, it’s doing some damage control by giving users something they’ve desperately wanted for a while now; more characters, or at least a better use of the 140-limit to which everyone is currently restricted.
According to a Bloomberg News report, Twitter is readying an update that will no longer penalize users for tweeting photos or links. Currently, anytime a person shares a photo or a URL on the network, they’re docked 23 characters. (And if you think giving people only 117 characters to craft a tweet that won’t be instantly buried under a thousand more before it falls into the internet’s black hole isn’t punishment, you’re wrong.)
While it’s not the 10,000 character limit Twitter was rumored to be unveiling – which is a good thing because no one needs that amount of space to fangirl over Justin Bieber or share their love for their 10 cats or whatever it is people do on social media these days – it is a welcome change for people who’ve been barking for ages about the social network’s character count issue.
Because, when Twitter was first created, the service relied on SMS, an 140-character limit was just a technical decision that made processing data easier. As the social network has grown and evolved, and Twitter now logs more than just those 140 characters you’re tweeting – avatars, emojis, sometimes your geographical location – that limit just doesn’t seem justifiable anymore which may be why they’re making the change.
Here’s hoping they’ll soon do away with counting handles and hashtags too.