The 140 characters or less limit on Twitter has been much maligned in the almost 10 years since the social media site's inception, but as the tech service considers a drastic expansion to tweet sizes -- we're talking more than 71 times the current maximum here -- a lot of users are starting to cling to its tradition of succinct snippets.
Granted, part of that might be a misunderstanding about the exact way this might impact everyone's timelines -- per Re/Code, said alteration would leave the way feeds look intact but allow for click-through expansion up to 10,000 characters, whereas most users interpret it to become something like this:
Of course, there are downsides in either case, and the couch critic juices are flowing right now. Among the feedback the Twitterverse has offered up are a few solid suggestions, however.
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For example, this fella wants to make a simple character count adjustment that might help us squeeze in a few extra words, but otherwise keep the status quo of tweets being ≤ 140 characters.
This is actually a pretty clutch suggestion because goodness knows that group tweets get pretty complicated when every person's @name counts too. (Of course, we don't want to open the floodgates to spambot trolls, either... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
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There's also the possibility of a slightly less sweeping increase to the limit, right?
From 140 to 10,000 is a moon landing-sized leap for Twitterkind, so maybe something a little less exponential would make everyone feel better about what's happening here?
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Plus, for a lotta people, that whole "Moments" business just has gotta go, and this seems like as good a time as any to mention that.
How do we make you go away, little lightning bolt?
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Also, an editing function (!!) has always been a highly in-demand item.
It makes sense that when you're putting something out there into the foreverness that is the internet, you should get a second shot at tackling those typos instead of having to rinse and repeat with an all-new tweet.
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There are also those who are willing to work with this expansion idea, but only if they can opt out from the get-go.
This guy is an actual novelist and yet he still thinks 10k characters is way too much reading to expect of people.