Twitter has officially rolled out the 280-character limit for all the languages it supports, with the exception of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese tweets. The popular social media platform argues the density of these languages’ writing systems allow their speakers to convey more with less space. (The average Japanese-language tweet is 15 characters long, while the average English-language tweet is 34, according to Twitter.)
“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,” Twitter explained in a blog post. “With the expanded character count, this problem was massively reduced – that number dropped to only 1% of Tweets running up against the limit. 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 updated Twitter also replaced the character count with a small circle that gradually fills up as you type. This was obviously too much change for some Twitter users to handle.
Twitter began testing the new 280 character limit back in September, when it offered select users twice as much space to convey their thoughts. Since then, many people have criticized the update, claiming it will make posts longwinded and, therefore, less readable. There were also concerns that the new limit would exacerbate the rampant harassment on the app.
