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:
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.
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:
Some made similar jokes:
Others made memes and references:
Some used the extra characters to ask the important questions:
Or to share important information:
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:
(Via Twitter)