The Blubber

Per Business Insider

After Elon Musk's $44 billion acquisition, the new Twitter CEO constantly looks for new ways to improve the platform. One of these ways is by potentially increasing the word limit.

While Twitter is well known for its character limit, some users feel its effects on communication. Some of these effects include not being able to provide in-depth context due to the limited word count.

The new Twitter owner revealed slides from his company talk with the team, highlighting six major points of improvement; advertising as entertainment, video, encrypted DMs, longform tweets, the relaunch of Blue verified, and payments.

Twitter account @rawsalarts replied to the slides saying Twitter 2.0 should bump the character limit to 420 instead of 280, and Musk replied, "Good idea." Musk had previously noted he planned to extend the character limit from 280 to 1,000 characters.

The "420" reference has been used multiple times by the Tesla, now also Twitter CEO, even during his offer to purchase the social media platform, which was priced at $54.20, as per the NYT.

In a more serious instance, Elon Musk tweeted that he would take  Tesla private at $420 as a joke. This sent the stock soaring up by 11%, even causing a halt in trade for the day, resulting in the SEC asking Musk to explain his actions as per Tech Crunch.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, the CEO highlighted two major improvements, namely longer tweets and videos, saying the character count extension was already on his to-do list.

As of press time, people still engage in "long tweets" on Twitter, except in the form of replies. Users reply to their original tweet to add to the story, usually with a "(1/2)" at the end of the tweet, signaling it is the first out of two tweets, or "(2/4)" signaling it is the second out of four tweets and so on.

This method is still very inefficient, and users struggle with the character limit, even counting the spaces in between.

The last time Twitter increased its character limit was in 2017 from 140 to 180 characters. During this time, Jack Dorsey based his decision on the 160-character SMS limit. Then CEO Dorsey said they increased the limit without sacrificing brevity, speed, and essence.

References:
Business Insider

The New York Times

Tech Crunch

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