Enlarge / Now you can pack so much more gibberish into a single tweet. (credit: Twitter / Sam Machkovech)
If you logged into Twitter on Tuesday to rant about the news of the day, from various elections across the United States to the launch of the Xbox One X, you may have noticed some more breathing room in your rants. That’s because the social networking service’s character limit has now officially doubled for all of its Roman-alphabet users.
A weeks-long test began in late September, allowing select, random users to post 280 characters per tweet instead of the default 140-character limit. (Both classes of users could still save on characters by way of shortened URLs and attached images.) In extending that change to almost all users, Twitter Product Manager Aliza Rosen published a statement that claims, among other things, that the test didn’t result in an endless wave of fully packed 280-character posts.
Data about max character counts in tweets before and after the test. (credit: Twitter)
“During the first few days of the test, many people tweeted the full 280 limit because it was new and novel, but soon after behavior normalized,” Rosen wrote. “We saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they tweeted more easily and more often. But importantly, people tweeted below 140 most of the time, and the brevity of Twitter remained.” She then posted separate internal-study articles from Twitter engineers to back up her claims, which included that only two percent of testers’ tweets exceeded 190 characters, let alone got near the new 280-character limit.
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