The social network tweeted the change on Monday evening.
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Twitter has inherited its 140 character limit from its origins as a mobile service with heavy reliance on text messaging, which is limited to 160 characters. While the company remains adamant that it’s not eliminating its 140 character count, the elimination of additional media from a tweet might hopefully encourage more usage, streamlining things so users, particularly new ones, won’t become frustrated having to try and cram everything they’re thinking into a short message.
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Brace yourselves for a post-140 character world, everyone.
Twitter is also testing out a new replies system which will not count the username of the person you’re replying to, if multiple people are being replied to, only the person who sent the original tweet will be omitted from the character count. Of the changes announced in May, users are already allowed to retweet and quote tweet themselves.
Hashtags also still count against the 140-character limit, likely to dissuade people from hijacking hashtags in order to get more attention for their tweets. But keeping tweets short and concise are often part of Twitter’s allure when compared to its competition, so many users didn’t want to see the character count abolished and instead just some relief for the extras.
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Today’s announcement comes days after a report from The Verge claiming that Twitter would make this significant move to improve the overall user experience.
