If you’re one of the millions of people that use Twitter, then you’ve probably heard and seen that everyone can now tweet using 280 characters. This is double what it used to be when the limit was 140 characters. To celebrate this new feature, people were tweeting out everything they thought deserved to be in a 280-character tweet, like song lyrics, movie quotes, and funny stories. As someone who likes to scroll through Twitter to get information quickly, I’m not a huge fan of this extended character feature.
Here are five reasons why I don’t like Twitter’s new 280-character limit:
1. I’m on Twitter to read sentences, not novels
Twitter appealed to me in the first place because it’s not like every other social media site where people can write super long posts. Now that people have the ability to tweet up to 280 characters, tweets are no longer short and to the point. In fact, some tweets that I come across seem more like novels than brief life updates.
2. My timeline’s ruined
When tweets were shorter, I could look through my timeline and find out information quickly. That’s not the case anymore. My timeline is no longer aesthetically pleasing. There’s a whole lot of space being wasted from people tweeting out actual blank space to make their tweets vertically longer. Why?
3. Most of the longer tweets aren’t even good
If you tweet something using all 280 characters you have, it better be good. If you haven’t encountered a lot of tweets yet that use all 280 characters, here’s a spoiler alert: they’re pretty terrible. People that used Twitter to rant with 140 characters now have 280 characters to rant, and the stuff they talk about isn’t even entertaining. If people tweeted out some juicy stuff, then I’d be completely fine with them using all the space they have, but so far, nothing good has happened on my timeline.
4. Everyone would rather have an edit button instead
When the news came out that Twitter was allowing tweets to be longer, I saw so many people saying that they wanted an edit button instead. I actually agree with this because it would make correcting tweets easier. Then, people wouldn’t have to completely delete a tweet to fix something.
5. 140 characters was enough
During the good ole days when tweets were 140 characters long, it was fun to scroll through Twitter and see what interesting stories people could tell with the little amount of space provided. Now, I don’t feel like going on Twitter because it’s too much work to read through all the long posts. 140 characters was the perfect number for a tweet, and I already miss seeing short tweets on my timeline.
(Photos courtesy of Giphy)