Users don’t hate 280 characters
Twitter decided a few weeks ago to use 280 characters, what were the reactions at the time? It was a bad idea, no one will read it, Vox was sure that users hate it, stock price would be affect, and my favorite: millennials were causing it:
“Generating 280 characters for a simple idea will probably exhaust me” — says writer and editor of Mashable, who has a 1298 characters bio AND has a post about his 203 characters tweet that went viral.
Does it mean anything? That at least who is complaining does that just for the clicks. And yet this is a bad, it slows down innovation. Let’s break down some myths about 280 characters:
Tweets don’t need to have more than 140 characters
After the new limit was implemented 9 times less tweets are maximum allowed. Only one thing can be inferred from this data: users are more comfortable now not being limited to 140 characters.
Source, where it explains further the relationship with 280 characters.
More characters leads to less interactivity
Most of these complaints came right after Jack Dorsey announced the 280 limit, but had no data to back it up or even any reason. But time is king and after a little while the data is clear: tweets with more than 140 characters gets 50% more likes and RTs, source.
“Why do this instead of _____”
The weirdest behavior I think came from the so called experts. Some of them implying somehow that when Twitter decided to increase the tweet size, automatically no other innovation would come up. Wired had a lovely article: “6 things Twitter should have done instead of 280 characters”.
And in the very next week Twitter implemented threads and is considering new features after this one was well received by investors too.
Twitter is fine, stock price has gone up, users are getting more and more interactive on the platform. Why people still complain?
Because they are used to.
And that is how innovation slows down, Pessimists Archive does a really good job explaining why this kind of behavior is so common, and even natural.