Twitter Didn’t Need 280 Characters To Joke About The New 280-Character Limit

Something that made Twitter unique and led to its success was its 140-character limit, forcing brevity upon users since 2006. This quickly turned Twitter into a punchline machine for funny people (well, at least until it turned into a spam and propaganda machine for bots and bastards.) Then, back in September, Twitter started testing a 280-character limit for some users.

Although 95% of those test tweets were still under the 140-character limit (and 98% were 190 characters or less), Twitter announced on Tuesday that they’re rolling out the 280-character limit for almost everyone (tweets in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are still limited to 140 characters).

Meanwhile, some Twitter users pointed out what they really wanted:

https://twitter.com/Sushimibelle/status/928145807030730752

Well, you’re not getting that. You’re getting 280 characters instead. Even though the feature wasn’t particularly popular in the testing phase, they’re still rolling it out.

https://twitter.com/SethAMandel/status/928006743518535681

This clever so-and-so responded by editing Twitter’s announcement for clarity so it would fit the old character limit:

Twitter has also instituted a little graphic that completes a circle as you approach the new 280 character limit. This guy suggested a different graphical representation more befitting our dystopian Twitter hellscape:

But there may be consequences for him:

Meanwhile, other Twitter users made predictions:

https://twitter.com/jmehough/status/928158810073690112

Some made similar jokes:

https://twitter.com/MissBrittHayes/status/928006851165335560
https://twitter.com/franhoepfner/status/928014406549753856

Others made memes and references:

https://twitter.com/OctopusCaveman/status/928085934704246784

Some used the extra characters to ask the important questions:

https://twitter.com/Home_Halfway/status/928030287610765312
https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/928025067518398465

Or to share important information:

https://twitter.com/pattymo/status/928013085276884993
https://twitter.com/ItsMegNotMegan/status/928131484229259264

https://twitter.com/jrobertlennon/status/912872315993706496

https://twitter.com/poniewozik/status/928011829900693506

https://twitter.com/martinrickman/status/928021294574129152

Others glimpsed a terrible future of pedantic @-replies:

And some people are already sick of these full sentence tweets like it’s a damn novel or something:

https://twitter.com/runolgarun/status/928152120011800576

(Via Twitter)