[PhasmaFelis]

Twitter with no character limit is just a blog site. There are plenty of blog sites, none of them close to as successful as Twitter. The character limit is key to holding on to the modern zero-attention-span user.

The exact number 140 is legacy, but the super-brief "microblogging" format is vital.

[icebraining]

There are plenty of blog sites, none of them close to as successful as Twitter. The character limit is key to holding on to the modern zero-attention-span user.

There's a slight fallacy here: that no single blog site is as successful as Twitter does not mean blogs as a whole aren't, and therefore that you need the character limit to be successful. I don't have any hard data, but my anecdotal experience matches that: almost nobody I know uses Twitter, whereas every computer/smartphone user I know reads blog posts at least occasionally.

[PhasmaFelis]

> almost nobody I know uses Twitter

Nobody I know voted for Trump, but here he is president. HN readers and their close friends are nowhere near being a representative sample of internet users.

[icebraining]

I get that, but I'd think HN users and their friends would be overrepresented in Twitter, not underrepresented.

[mekkkkkk]

In my experience, the tech crowd is pretty average when it comes to social media (ab)use.