The doubling of the character limit for tweets has made Twitter users more polite and less prone to using annoying abbreviations, says the company …
Axios reports the change.
The increased length of tweets has also made Twitter a more interactive place.
There’s a decline of abbreviations like “gr8” (-36%), “b4” (-13%), and “sry” (-5%) in favor of the full words — “great” (+32%), “before” (+70%), and “sorry” (+31%).
Only a minority of Twitter users take advantage of the extra characters, however. Only 12% of tweets are longer than 140 characters, and only 1% max out at 280 characters – while 9% of tweets hit the old limit.
A recent change also means that people can include up to 140 emoji in their tweets. I foolishly asked people not to, and this was of course immediately taken as a challenge.
Twitter continues to take steps to encourage more interaction on the platform, recently found to be testing enhanced threading features and presence indicators.
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