1. So Twitter has decided to go ahead and give everyone 280 characters for each tweet instead of the old limitation of 140 characters.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
2. To be clear, nobody was asking for this, and it doesn’t make the medium better. It makes it noticeably worse.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
3. But Twitter has a history of making dumb decisions and giving its users everything except what they actually want.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
4. This may explain why their user base has stalled out and why they’ve never really made any money.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
5. Despite this, Twitter has become an influential medium, particularly popular among the political media.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
6. That outsized influence is reflected in the fact that Twitter is the favorite place for President Trump to cause trouble.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
7. To explain why 280 characters is such a bad idea, it’s important to understand the appeal of Twitter as a medium in the first place.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
8. The 140-character limit originally came from the limitations of wireless carriers’ text-messaging services. https://t.co/Hpf9LcOTOR
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
9. As those technological limits became irrelevant, Twitter tinkered with not counting links and not including usernames in a reply thread.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
10. So why not double the character limit? Heck, why not just remove the limit altogether? Why not turn Twitter into Facebook? Or Blogger?
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
11. When you put it that way, the question kind of answers itself.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
12. The key thing about 140 characters is that it enforces brevity, which is good for the writer but even better for the reader.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
13. A feed of 140-character tweets can be surfed by the political junkie who wants to poke his head into Twitter to see what’s going on.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
14. That’s how Twitter has become so attractive and even hypnotic for those of us in the political media.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
15. You can hop onto Twitter in a few spare moments, or to be honest, while putting off work on your latest article.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
16. And just by skimming your feed, you can get a pretty good sense of what is happening in the news and how people are responding to it.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
17. If you cast your net wide enough, you see how people on all sides of the debate are responding. And you get to respond to them.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
18. One of the best things about Twitter is the way it allows people who might not normally meet or talk to engage one another.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
19. I’ve sparred on Twitter with writers from left-leaning publications, or who are more famous and work for bigger publications.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
20. And I’ve had more or less productive back-and-forth exchanges with random people with 50 followers.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
21. There’s a Twitter ethos in which you are expected to take on all comers and not be snooty about who has enough followers.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
22. But before this there would have been no appropriate way for writers to engage their readers or critics in this way.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
23. Twenty years ago, if I wanted to challenge a New York Times reporter, my only option was to write a letter to the editor.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
24. So the appeal of Twitter, particularly for political media, is that it’s basically the DC cocktail party of myth and legend.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
25. Everybody is mingling, sparring, and trying to impress each other with our wit, thoughtfulness, or stuffy self-righteous moralizing.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
26. But because we have to speak in 140-character epigrams, we all have to make like Oscar Wilde. Or as close as we can manage.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
27. (The only thing worse than being subtweeted is not being subtweeted.)
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
28. Twitter has also become a spectacular medium for satire, as in the replies to the “chainsaw bayonet.”https://t.co/ICeuPJnCzu
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
29. All of this is possible because the posts and replies are short and easily skimmable.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
30. But what about tweetstorms (like this one)? Someone who had more to say could say it in two parts or seven parts or 127 parts.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
31. But they had to say it in short, snappy segments, and we could hop off the train of thought if it got boring or tendentious.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
32. In short, a tweetstorm still had to earn our attention 140 characters at a time.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
33. The appeal of Twitter as a medium can be seen in the way that it killed blogging.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
34. When Twitter was launched, we were in the heyday of the blog. But we didn’t know that. We thought it was just the beginning.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
35. Instead, blogs faded while social media became dominant. Why is that?
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
35. Part of the reason is that really successful blogs simply became online magazines and media companies.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
36. Part of the reason is that you had to bookmark blogs and remember to visit them, while a Twitter feed is all in one place.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
38. But the real reason is that 80% of blog posts were worth reading for one or two observations buried in a longer, rambling post.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
39. Twitter allows us to find and share just those small nuggets of wit or insight.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
40. The 140-character limit defined a new medium. Adding 20 more characters would have tinkered with it. Doubling breaks the medium.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
41. Jack Dorsey’s tweet on the change was a warning, using 280 characters to say what could be said better in 140.https://t.co/s898JMJ9fJ
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
42. Every tweet that takes the full 280 characters ends up looking like a rambling rant.https://t.co/XLJ0ulvkrH
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
43. More to the point, it is unskimmable. It takes a lot more time to absorb a 280-character tweet and figure out if it’s worthwhile.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
44. And since the folks who run Twitter are both idiots and jerks, they removed the counter that says how many characters you have left.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
45. Now you get a tiny little circle that fills up as you type but doesn’t give an actual count until you get to 260 characters.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
46. We have to assume this is a deliberate attempt to thwart Twitter purists, giving us no easy way to avoid sending over-140 tweets.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
47. Fortunately, some apps are coming out that limit how many characters you can see and send.https://t.co/yOUVYlcvpp
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
48. Personally, I’m hoping this whole idea will turn out to be a bust, the New Coke of social media, and we’ll soon get Twitter Classic.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
49. In the meantime, I have adopted the motto #140orFight, which is kind of a geeky American history joke.https://t.co/dQfKsYVYb5
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
50. I will be pointedly ignoring tweets that use more than 140 characters and keeping my own within the old limits.
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
51. The line must be drawn here for everybody’s good—and to save Twitter from itself.#140orFight !
— Robert Tracinski (@Tracinski) November 9, 2017
