Prepare to be annoyed—or obnoxious, depending on how you look at it. Late Tuesday afternoon, Twitter began rolling out its new 280-character limit to all users on the platform, because that’s exactly what we need: the ability for people to be both abusive and long-winded at the same gotdamn time.
There are plenty of other things Twitter could be improving about its service—getting rid of the Nazis, finding ways to more effectively police and address the rampant abuse on the platform, being transparent about who is on the purported Trust and Safety Council—but this is Twitter we are talking about, so why should we expect it to do anything remotely helpful?
According to CNN, the service officially announced the character-limit change on Tuesday. It appears to be rolling out slowly to users. As of this writing, I already have the ability to send 280 characters, but some of my friends do not.
I promise not to be obnoxious with it after today. I already threatened The Root Deputy Managing Editor Yesha Callahan with it when we found out I had it, but I’m going to stall her out like Deebo and use my powers for good, not evil.
Twitter began to test the 280-character limit in September with a small group of users. The service found that after the novelty of it wore off, most people in the test stopped using all 280 characters in their tweets—only 5 percent of tweets were longer than 140 characters, and just 2 percent were more than 190 characters.
Let’s all wait with bated breath to see what the dotard in chief does with his 280 characters.
This should be exciting.