Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Answer cannot contain words "always", "traditional", or "nostalgia".

There's a large distance between 140 and infinitely long.

There is no technical reason. The reasons are all non-technical and irrational. Starting with the word-imagery: Have you ever heard a songbird go "tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet?" No, it ceases to be a tweet at that point. It's a squawk or scream or warble or something else. And probably it's annoying AF too. You probably think that's unimportant or has nothing to do with it.

Twitter is about the tweet. It's how they got big in the first place. It's the word they added to the dictionary. If you're thinking of pivoting away from what you are, you'd better consider it carefully and be sure it's not the main irreplaceable source of your claim to fame.

PS 10 years is hardly long enough for "always," "traditional" or "nostalgia" to apply.

The core problem is that the length of a tweet should be "one concisely-stated thought", but that's hard to write into an API's documentation :)

> PS 10 years is hardly long enough for "always," "traditional" or "nostalgia" to apply.

Not in the real world no, although people are nostalgic for the pre-crash US, but on the Internet I think it definitely is. Put another way, if you changed Twitter into Medium people would be talking about "the old Twitter" with nostalgia.

Well, that's why I said "hardly" and not "not." :)

>Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280?

Why are youtube videos mostly 5 to 7 minutes? Why are pop songs 3 minutes long? Why are sitcoms 30 minutes long?

Forms of expression are defined by their constraints. I think of twitter's relationship to prose as analogous to a haiku.

YouTube videos can be as long as you want.

Songs can be as long as you want.

TV shows can be as long as you want.

You think you're arguing the value of constraints, but you're actually arguing that different media formats have different points of cultural optimization.

If that's true, then is there any need to enforce an artificial length limit on tweets? If shorter, pithier tweets are better, then most tweets will be short and pithy--naturally.

> twitter's relationship to prose

I think we read very different Twitters :)

Oh, do you read a lot of poetry tweets?

Maybe the code base contains a bunch of edge cases where they assume 140 and trying to do anything else causes crashes or other poorly defined misbehavior. (Not what you were talking about but also a legitimate but unfortunate answer)

being a devloper myself this is the dumbest comment I ever read.

Because it was originally SMS messages which were limited to 160 characters. 140 for the text and 20 for user name.

"Why is exactly 140 still the right length?"

That's common knowledge. They were asking, why is it STILL the right length?

If Twitter want to encourage short form content, there are other ways to do it. Either hide 141 onwards behind a [+more] link or style the long ones differently so they have less impact.

Better yet, create multi-panel tweets so content is still presented bite-sized, but in a way that people can delve as deeply as they like.

I could see a version of Twitter that is similar in a way to the latest Instagram release (allowing for up to 10 images per post). So on Twitter you could have up to 10 tweets in a single post. Each still 140 char. Only the first one shows up in everyone's feed (just like it does today) and you swipe/scroll/page to the side to see additional pages. If the first 140 is intriguing enough people will scroll sideways to read more.

I've posted about that concept before. I think it's a no-brainer and it baffles me that they're yet to do it, and that it took Instagram so long to have their equivalent.

Tweet storms are only getting more common in my experience. Further, entire newspaper articles could be presented as a series of bite-sized pieces. Just limit the first one to 140 IMO.

It's also common knowledge that arbitrarily changing a standard costs money. They have to educate hundreds of millions of users, re-jigger their databases and services, and forego a well known trademark feature of their product. Why bother? Everyone's memorized that it's 140 characters, and people have adapted pretty well to 140-character microblogging. Would 1,000 have been better? Possibly, possibly not. I think Twitter's fundamental problems run deeper than the SMS limitation; apart from some celebrity accounts with tens of millions of followers such as @RealDonaldTrump etc., they are starting to lose relevance compared to Facebook and other, more dynamic services.

> The scarce resource is not the number of electrons you send, the scarce resource is the attention of the reader.

Then they should make it a word limit and give you stop words for free (a, the, and, etc).

I think it requires more attention to decode the messages of people trying to work around the character limits (with bad spelling and dropped punctuation, etc).

> Then they should make it a word limit and give you stop words for free (a, the, and, etc).

People would work around that by dropping punctuation so the algorithm would not see word boundaries. Or by writing in German...

yes, speakers of agglutinating languages would be able to shove in a few more words, but a) they'd be looked at strangely by their compatriots for using some strange new combo word and no-one wants to have to decipher megawords like that b) (this should be obvious) switching to a different language means that the people who follow you can't read anything you say. So no, people will not switch to German, or any other agglutinating language to beat a word limit.

You already have something similar with the current system. Languages like Chinese have more semantic load per character, so I'd imagine Chinese tweeters can tweet more complete thoughts.

A better (but more opaque) system might try to estimate the "quantity" of semantic content in a language-specific way.