Twitter has always been my favorite part of social media.
I’ve been on Twitter since right around the beginning. I’ve met incredible people.
I fell in love with the 140 character limit. I credit the limit for helping me to understand the power of brevity. Concise communication became my default.
Twitter was like a modern day haiku. The 140 character limit was special, it was iconic. It WAS Twitter. There is literally nothing else that outsiders even knew about Twitter. Twitter recently announced that it will double the character count to 280 characters. I think this is a mistake as it changes the very thing that made Twitter.
280 characters isn’t an unreasonable amount of text. It’s just not a tweet. It’s 2x a tweet. A tweet is 140 characters.
Why was this the solution? Why not just let people tweet twice?
Why not incorporate a feature like Snapchat has where, while recording video, it continuously records but breaks into 10 second frames? Do that with tweets where you can just keep typing and it breaks it into multiple tweets. There’s an app called Stormcrow that allowed for that.
Why was it so essential for Jack Dorsey and friends to destroy the only thing that made Twitter unique?
I feel like I’ve lost an old friend.
Does this change everything?
It’s not that I won’t be able to meet people.
It’s not that I won’t be able to still only use 140 characters.
It’s that my feed now shows individual tweets that are twice as long, take up twice as much space, and empower rambling fools who can’t edit their thoughts into concise statements.
With this change, the leadership of Twitter has also signaled that it’s more important to address a “problem” that affected around 9% of tweets in the US, while ignoring much more important issues like bullying, harassment, a noticeably absent edit button, and one other thing…hmmm…
OH RIGHT! Nazis.
It’s infuriating to be one of the originals, who along with virtually every other original Twitter user, was vehemently opposed to this, offered plenty of alternative and more important changes, many of which with revenue implications, and still, the decision was made.
The world will keep spinning, and this will no doubt benefit Twitter in some ways. But in their pursuit of greater engagement and ad revenue, Twitter looked directly at the users who built Twitter and flipped us the bird.
So long to the Twitter I loved, the Twitter that made social media special for me. Hello to a big, long, scrolling feed of garbage (that now takes up twice as many words, and twice as much space).
RIP140 and fuck you Jack Dorsey for killing the single most iconic feature on the network you helped build.