While it must be hard to imagine Twitter without its 140-character limit, users of the platform will have to do exactly just that in the next few days.
The company will soon bid goodbye to the limiting rule that the platform has always lived by ever since it came into existence — although not to the extent that everyone initially imagined.
The first time news broke that Twitter has plans to remove the character limit on its platform, it was initially thought the company was bent on ridding the platform of its character limit altogether.
That thought was first considered wrong when the company laid out some of its planned changes to the social media platform several months ago.
It was, however, only just recently that those speculations were finally put to rest, after the company confirmed planned changes on the platform that’s scheduled to roll out next week.
According to The Verge, starting Sept. 19, Twitter will no longer count media attachments and quoted tweets towards the platform’s 140-character limit — a move that the company first announced it had intentions of doing way back in May.
The platform will also no longer count @ mentions towards the character limit on its users’ posts.
Challenges
With the platform’s rising number of competitors, the company is consistently faced with seemingly overwhelming challenges that pose grave threat to its survival in general.
Today’s increasingly growing number of popular social media tools has left Twitter constantly fighting for a spot on the top social media platforms’ list.
While the platform dominated as a social media tool for many years, the rapidly changing wants and needs of users has left this once dominating social media tool in the dust.
In light of this, the company was forced to accept the fact that changes on its platform need to happen, and that these changes need to happen in the soonest possible time.
And because imminent changes were expected on Twitter, initial speculations suggested that the company will likely lift its platform’s 140-character limit altogether — mostly due to the fact that this limiting rule has always been seen as an impediment by many.
Twitter, however, made an announcement four months ago which suggested that the company only has intentions to ‘relax’ the platform’s character limit, instead of eradicating the rule entirely as originally believed by many.
Users of Twitter initially had mixed feelings about the looming changes on the platform, but the fact that only minor changes appear to be in Twitter’s plans for now — has gotten many of the platform’s users willing to embrace change, after all.
The biggest question, however, is whether or not a series of minor changes will be enough to salvage whatever is left of Twitter.