But doing it has friction, both for the writer and for the readers. If you remove the friction, you get more of it.

This feels like maybe a [citation required] thing. Facebook doesn't have any particular length limit on posts, and anecdotally vast screeds are quite rare on my feed, and most posts are pretty terse regardless.

Is there data to suggest that people will just rant all the time if they're permitted to?

[edit] Anecdotally, my current top 20 posts in my FB feed: 17 under 140 chars, 3 greater than 140 chars.

Nobody's arguing people will rant all the time. A lower frequency of longer texts is expected, even if Facebook didn't show it.

Does this include adding 23 chars for a link, and possibly also for images (which I think used to count as extra but no longer do)?

We don't need twitter to be another facebook.

Not sure why you've been down-voted. Twitter is so different from Facebook in terms of what it's primary use is, that it doesn't make sense to compare them, and while I wouldn't quite word my response this way, I agree with the sentiment that Facebook usage data doesn't tell us enough to predict Twitter usage under higher character limits.

Yeah, plus what happens now is you get these almost garbled, code-like sentences with emojis, inB4 type abbreviations, truncated URLS, hashtags, @ references and its unreadable/unscannable. I would totally prefer a 140 character block where the hashtags, @references and links fell outside and I coukd parse the tweet more naturally.

Yet, the people who like it, like it, and changing it would mostly make them leave, and the people who don't like it already left for something else and aren't coming back.

Its like daydreaming if the next version of Microsoft Word were reskinned EMACS with a new splash screen. Superficially that sounds pretty cool. But six months later everyone who wanted EMACS continued to use real EMACS and everyone who didn't want EMACS switched away from the MS Word clone of EMACS, leaving MS Word with zero users.

That's twitter's problem, the people who are really into "twitter 2016" are just going to leave if things are changed, yet the number of people into "twitter 2016" is seen as too small.

Perhaps their best bet is to abandon acting like a startup. Absolutely no one wants my local electric company to pivot into water and sewer services or open an office on Mars. There's nothing immoral or lower class about operating a respected public utility.

What twitter should be terrified about isn't finding the next billion users, but avoiding the 1970s CB Radio bust or the decline of BBSes in the 90s. The odds are much higher that twitter is going to be out of business and forgotten in 20 years than they're going to be ten times bigger in size/revenue/profit. Essentially twitter is a fad or a utility or in between and has to be monetized as a fad or a utility.