What’s happening?

Twitter’s bold step of expanding its character limit to 280 characters has been official and rolled out on 7th November to all users in supported languages, including English. Twitter has first announced it in early September to move beyond its traditional 140 characters. But initially it was just as a trial and applied to only a group of people.

The #280Characters Controversy

The decision of twitter to expand the character limit has been in trend and took over the Internet as soon as it was announced officially. It already met many controversies.

Many of the people glad about the decision and thought of it as Twitter will be now much more expressive than 140 characters, while many argued that this expansion would make Twitter less readable and less innovative.

And it somewhere and somehow it makes sense. J. K. Rowling tweeted this just after some time of the official announcement of twitter, and it makes a lot of sense.

Twitter’s destroyed its USP. The whole point, for me, was how inventive people could be within that concise framework. #Twitter280characters

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 8, 2017

Others suggested that Twitter is much focusing on a feature that no one really asked for and its diverting the attention from more crucial issues such as abuse, harassment, cyber bullying that is very common and frequent on Twitter.

And So does Author Chetan bhagat!

#280characters Double the hate. Double the trolling. Double the outrage. Double the judgmental behavior. Double the personal attacks. Double the confirmation bias. Double the my camp vs yours. Yay!

— Chetan Bhagat (@chetan_bhagat) November 8, 2017

While the hashtag #280characters was in trend worldwide for whole 2 days and it’s still trending in many countries, it is forcing Twitter to give this a second thought. Although twitter has explained about why they decided to double the characters limit in the latest article on their blog;

“Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending. With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit.

Source: Twitter.com

Since we saw Tweets hit the character limit less often, we believe people spent less time editing their Tweets in the composer. This shows that more space makes it easier for people to fit thoughts in a Tweet, so they could say what they want to say, and send Tweets faster than before.
The company added that even though the option exists to write 280 characters, most people end up keeping their tweets brief and below 140 characters. (The change won’t apply to Chinese-, Korean-, or Japanese-language users.) But already the expanded limit has come in handy – for making fun of the expanded limit:”

They also added; that the people who have crossed to 280 character tweets received more likes, retweets and mentions, and even followers and resulting spent more time on Twitter.

“We are making this change after listening and observing a problem our global community was having (it wasn’t easy enough to tweet!), studying data to understand how we could improve, trying it out, and listening to your feedback,” said Twitter.

“We’ll continue listening and working to make Twitter easier for everyone while making sure we keep what you love.”

Tell us, what you feel about the #280characters tweet huge step below in the comment section, or we can have a great conversation about it on the Twitter itself! Reply us here!

Thanks!