Twitter Expands 280 Character Limit to Everyone, Users Yawn: ‘What Is This, Infinity War?’

“The commander-in-chief is about to get 280 characters. Be ready,” warned one user

If you weren’t one of the chosen users selected to take part in the 280 character limit expansion Twitter began testing in September, good news: the social media giant announced Tuesday that expansion is being rolled out for everyone.

The only exceptions are people who tweet in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean because “these languages have always been able to say more with their Tweets because of the density of their writing systems.”

The switch marks a landmark change for the San Francisco-based company, which has been tethered to its 140 character max since its launch in 2006. Its 330 million monthly active users will have access to the new threshold by Tuesday night.

Twitter says it found that users with the longer limit experienced “more engagement (Likes, Retweets, @mentions), got more followers, and spent more time on Twitter” from their longer tweets. But, overall, it found that having a higher character limit didn’t necessarily lead to longer tweets overall.

“We saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often. But importantly, people Tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity of Twitter remained,” Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen wrote in a blog post.

She added that “only 5 percent of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2 percent were over 190 characters” during the test.

Brevity preserved or not, it seems Twitter users were largely ‘meh’ about the changes. Some mocked the implications for long-winded users. Others noted it comes while users still want more to be done about harassment and hate speech. Others noted that now Trump has 280 characters too. Others just had fun lamenting the end of what we’ll call classic Twitter. Or as writer Britt Hayes put it, “what is this Infinity War.”

Read on for a sampling.

https://twitter.com/tomtomorrow/status/928008488697171970

https://twitter.com/MissBrittHayes/status/928006851165335560

https://twitter.com/DVATW/status/928005903793651712

On the other hand, some users celebrated the change.

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