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People Are Freaking Out About Twitter's Possible New Character Count

by Gillian Fuller
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Sick of limiting your tweets to 140 characters? You might be in luck.

Rumor has it Twitter is developing a new feature that would allow users to type up to 10,000 characters per tweet.

Sources reportedly told Re/code the company is calling the new feature, which is expected to roll out this spring, “Beyond 140.” The same sources said the social media site is hammering out design issues, including the best way to display longer tweets.

Though the prospect of not being cut off mid-tweet is certainly enticing, some users aren't too thrilled with the proposed change. In fact, Twitter shares reportedly fell 2 percent after news of the character-limit increase broke.

The 140-character limit is, after all, a nearly foolproof way to keep news feeds spam-free.

Some think 10,000 characters are just too many…

…and others feel the increase is simply unnecessary.

This user says having so many characters “defeats the point” of tweets...

…and this guy says messages that long should just be called blog posts.

Unbearable scrolling is a major concern.

Overall, the reactions don't seem to be positive...

...at all.

In fact, it's tough to find anyone who thinks a character-limit increase would be beneficial.

Sorry, Twitter.

I'm in favor of 10,000 character tweets -- as long as the remaining 9,860 characters have to be emoji. — M.G. Siegler (@mgsiegler) January 5, 2016

Citations: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets (Re/code), Has Twitter gone mad? 10,000 character Tweets could be incoming (Metro)