The One Thing All of Twitter Agrees On: No One Wants More Twitter

You know what no one feels like we need in a time when Twitter helped deposit an ignorant maniac in the White House and is also a breeding ground for hate groups? More Twitter. So, in typical Twitter fashion, that’s exactly what we got with the social media platform’s small test run of 280-character tweets—double the usual limit.

The responses have generally ranged from complaints that the 140-character limit was good for creativity, snark about how much value there really is in such a change, and genuine criticism that the platform’s function as a haven for abuse and harassment is the problem the company should be looking to solve. While they have improved their tools to combat those issues, users are still running into difficulty when reporting obvious threats and abuse inexplicably ends with Twitter’s team deciding not to punish the offender. (It’s far from the only social platform with this problem.)

It’s hard to imagine the character limit change, which has only rolled out to select users so far, took much in the way of development resources, but with the platform’s monthly user count stagnating and even dropping in recent months, it feels like the company is trying to combat that by just throwing together generally meaningless features rather than addressing its actual problems. Twitter’s own co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, acknowledged the response to the change, but he unsurprisingly focused more on the “snark” and less on complaints about the company’s response to the toxic elements the platform has enabled.

Meanwhile, this user edited down his original, Long Tweet about the change to fit the 140-character limit:

Some mocked how, despite complaints, users have already been circumventing the character limit:

And some just mocked:

(That one was predictably, hilariously misconstrued to be serious by way too many people.)

And then, of course, there are those of us who would like to see the service prioritize saving us all from death-by-manbaby-tweet before their own benefit and relevance, but their own explanation as to why  makes it clear we’re wasting our breath—or, at least, our characters. But now we have twice as many to waste!

(image: Twitter, Universal Pictures)

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Dan Van Winkle

Dan Van Winkle (he) is an editor and manager who has been working in digital media since 2013, first at now-defunct Geekosystem (RIP), and then at The Mary Sue starting in 2014, specializing in gaming, science, and technology. Outside of his professional experience, he has been active in video game modding and development as a hobby for many years. He lives in North Carolina with Lisa Brown (his wife) and Liz Lemon (their dog), both of whom are the best, and you will regret challenging him at Smash Bros.

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