[losvedir]

Heh, well that's one way to work around the inane Twitter character limit...!

My personal Musk dream is that he'll abolish that. If I never have to see tweets of pictures of text or tweets ending in `/n` again, it will be too soon.

Though, I sort of remember that Twitter was architected initially in a way that relied on the short tweets and it was a surprisingly complex change to even bump it up the little that they did recently, so who knows.

[Someone]

Twitter started as “an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group”, and SMS messages are 140 bytes (that may store 160 characters when using a 7-bit encoding such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38, but they didn’t go there)

I guess bumping the limit up while keeping the ability to interact with all kinds of SMS systems and ancient phones was a challenge, or just required waiting a few years for some of the weirder systems to die out.

[opencl]

The 140 byte limit actually didn't last very long, it was 140 Unicode code points since at least a decade ago. You could use 140 CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters or 140 emojis, and if it didn't fit in an SMS they just sent a link to the tweet.

Interestingly when they doubled the character limit they also started double counting CJK characters so the limit is still effectively 140 for those languages.

[lifthrasiir]

> Interestingly when they doubled the character limit they also started double counting CJK characters so the limit is still effectively 140 for those languages.

CJK languages do tend to be relatively dense when written and counted by their code points.

[wongarsu]

If they abolish the character limit, do they also rebrand the platform from twitter to blogger? /s

I think there are some interesting observations in how both twitter and tiktok set out with short maximum lengths, establishing a culture of short, easy to digest messages, before relaxing the limit a bit. I'm not sure how much you can relax the limit before you turn the platform into something else entirely. But on the other hand there is a pattern of users circumventing the limit anyways. It will be interesting to watch how it develops over the years.

[evanb]

Twitter’s limit used to be 140 characters. Then it became 280. By simple arithmetic progression the next limit will be…

[mike_hock]

280. Then the next one will be 187 (186.6666...).

    n[0] = 140

    n[k] = 2/k * n[k-1]

[evanb]

That is not an arithmetic progression; I chose my words carefully :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_progression

[droidist2]

Knowing Musk he'd totally be down for changing it to 420.

[ant6n]

Or perhaps 5420.

[jcims]

The prophecy will be fulfilled.