Longer tweets won’t debase the art form

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has taken a lot of flak for tweeting last week that the company might abandon its 140-character-per-post limit. Many see the “beautiful constraint,” as Dorsey called it in his post, as the service’s defining feature. It’s not, and it shouldn’t be.

Dorsey suggested that the ability to post more text could add utility to Twitter. In response, the movie producer Brian Koppelman tweeted: “I don’t believe those who love Twitter want this. Why do you love it? This message doesn’t make that clear.” That was one of the milder comments. Other users accused Dorsey of caring only about the increased ad revenue that allegedly could be derived from longer posts. Yet others wondered how Twitter would differentiate itself from Facebook, which technically allows posts of 63,206 characters.

Twitter’s users probably include a disproportionate number of journalists and other professional writers. That’s definitely true of the 150,000 verified users. Of this select group among Twitter’s 300 million user base, 25 percent are journalists and 6.5 percent are media outlets. Those of us who write for a living like translating our thoughts into the abbreviated format.

As Dorsey pointed out, the limit was added to Twitter “early on” so a post could fit into a single SMS message. Remember those? People used to send them when mobile operators ruled. But in 2014, WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging app – just one of several popular over-the-top messengers – surpassed the entire global SMS system, moving more messages per day. The messenger apps don’t have character limits, so the original reasoning no longer holds.

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Facebook acted a long time ago. Until March 2009, it had a 160-character limit for wall posts – also to allow users to post by SMS. Then the limit was raised to 420 characters; the big leap, to 5,000, was in September 2011.

Twitter, with its stagnating user base and slow revenue growth, is right to be concerned about increasing user engagement and convenience for newcomers.

Purity is an attractive stand, but it’s rarely the most convenient or profitable one. Twitter is a mass product. It cannot afford to stagnate and scare off potential users. As for the writers who loved the “beautiful constraint” – well, we’ll figure out what to do to keep our Twitter feeds dynamic and to the point. That’s what our work is about, after all. •

Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist.

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