> 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).
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.
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).