Twitter’s Revolutionary New Idea Is Doubling Its Character Limit, From 140 To 280

Twitter has been having user growth problems and has been trying all kinds of things in order to entice new users to try the platform out. Its newest attempt involves the revolutionary idea of doubling its character limit from 140 to 280. The move is still in its test phase but the company believes that giving its users a few more characters to work with results in more Tweets.

Increasing the character limit on the microblogging platform was a concept that Twitter thought about implementing before. However, each time it was brought up, the people who make the decisions always chose to ax the idea. In a recent blog post, it seems the social media company has finally decided to try it out.

“Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese,” the blog post reads. “Also, in all markets, when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting – which is awesome!”

It seems that the problem centers on the fact that the character limit also restricts the message that users want to convey. Trying to edit sentences or even entire words to preserve the original message with only 140 characters to work with is certainly tiresome. That’s why users either end up losing the message of their Tweet or send out multiple Tweets.

The new character limit apparently applies to every major language except Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, The Verge notes. Excluding those languages from the increased character limit stems from the fact that their word structures can be shortened while still keeping the point of the message. For example, a Japanese Tweet can often use only 15 characters.