The origins of the 140 character limit are interesting; it was originally put in place because Twitter was SMS-based, and SMS limits the number of characters to 160. 140 allowed some wiggle room.

But retaining the character limit changes the platform entirely. "Lifting the twitter limit" does not a publishing platform make; it changes everything that Twitter is.

I think Jack explained the psychological reasons very well [1]: Imagine you're standing in front of a blank wall, and instructed to paint the entire thing. You hold yourself in a very specific way. You spend a lot of time and effort thinking about how you should do it. You compose your actions in such a way to fill the entire wall.

Now compare that to being given a post-it note. Not only is it less intimidating and more disposable, but it doesn't take as much mental effort to get to a point where your work becomes valuable.

That's why I tweet incessantly, but I rarely blog. To blog I feel like I have to have some continuation of several thoughts that are strung together in a logical way, and all flow to some larger conclusion. Tweeting is a single thought or impression that is off the cuff. It almost flows naturally out of me.

I even find that when I want to write a blog post, it flows the best when I just start out tweeting. Before I know it it becomes a tweet storm, but breaking the work up into very small, bite-sized chunks makes the entire process manageable.

That being said, it makes sense for there to be some way to easily consume a tweet storm other than someone tweeting 1/ 2/ 3/ 4/. But I don't think that solution is saying, "Alright, go nuts, tweets can be as long as you want them to." My hunch is Twitter would lose an order of magnitude more value than it would gain by doing so.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPLK8lmsjq4

"wiggle room": Username limit was 20 characters (or something like that). 20 for username, 140 for message.

Incessantly tweeting whatever thought is current in one's stream of consciousness is like mental diarrhea, and is usually about as appealing.

It's not literally every thought; ideally it's only the best/most interesting ones.

I rather enjoy seeing what's on the mind of the smartest people in the world (and even moreso what they're reading), and that's what I try to structure my Twitter feed for.

I try to tweet things that are at least somewhat insightful, but maybe I really suck at it. The great thing about Twitter is that if people don't think I'm interesting they can unfollow me. I really love that. Being on Twitter is like being in a room with whomever you would like to at any given time.

>and is usually about as appealing

Well its usually unappealing, doesn't mean always. Look at it this way - would you tell the world to stop writing so many books unless they knew the book they were writing was a bonafide masterpiece?

I never understood 'tweet storms', especially since the feed is in reverse chronological order, possibly interspersed with tweets from other sources. No easy way to read it in order.

You just write a nice "blog post" in this comment :)

I almost commented on the irony of that, but I ran out of characters :)

I get what you're saying, but lifting the character limit doesn't in any way mean you need to write longer tweets. You could still just write off the cuff thoughts when you have them, as the platform currently allows for.

Of course, but I think the psychological benefits to the imposed scarcity are enormous.

I think there are ways to allow tweetstorms without lifting the limit, and I love the concept of things like oneshot that allow you to reference something without making it part of your tweet, but still imposing the limit. My guess would be Twitter builds in some features like that.

To me, the strongest argument for this is that people are dodging the 140-char limit by, incredibly, posting IMAGES of the text they want to type but are not allowed to, thus using two orders of magnitude more data. Which just makes a mockery of the entire limit concept to begin with.

Just up the limit to what you need for a decent English paragraph and be done with it. Right now, you can't even write a complex sentence.

Minimalism is a strong feature of Twitter. The effect of lifting the character limit is unpredictable, and I'm not certain it would be positive. It could be, but my personal reaction would probably be to use it less if the fire hose increased in magnitude.

Use of the word "just" with regard to a technical issue is—in my experience—a good indication that the issue is incredibly thorny and complicated, and there's probably a really good reason why things are the way they are.

That would change the nature of Twitter a lot, though.

writers could write their content on Twitter and have it appear as standard blog posts on their own domains

That makes the posts sound very, very large. That's not what I want from Twitter - I want short, sharp posts that make one single point. 140 characters does feel like a meaningless limit, but IMO they'd still want to emphasise short content somehow.

I'm surprised they haven't added something along the lines of docs.twitter.com that allowed Twitter to host/own long form copy but linking to it via short URLs just as they do with photos. Best of both worlds or too fragmented/confusing?

"they" did, it's called Medium (it was founded by @biz & @ev)

Opening a Medium post opens it in the internal browser / Medium app, not the Twitter app.

I strongly disagree, the only reason I am using Twitter and follow people I like is to quickly read their thoughts on current events if I wanted to read more of them I would have read their blogs instead

the net is becoming so low content, tweets are a miracle of history. Look at blogs and comments anywhere else: so much filler.

I can't name another medium built around this much respect for the time and attention of readers, down to the character. It's great.

Note: the above started as 2 long paragraphs; as an exercise I edited it down to 2 tweets - I think it's better!

Yeah, but it's still two tweets, which kind of proves the parent's point. I think the character limit could be removed, but everything past 280 characters is only visible if you click on the tweet. (and ofc some indicator of this truncation needs to be visible). So then everybody would really want to stick to the character limit, but at the same time you could add some extra text if you're fine with people mostly not reading it.

The interface can just show a more link after a certain number of characters. Then again, I never really got twitter from the publishing side as it's only a read-only thing for me.

I think this had something to do with the length of SMS messages and not splitting them. There are a plethora of 3rd party services that allow you to tweet 140+ characters.

it would be impossible to follow such a text-storm for any human.

Not to mention that adding an image chops 20+ chars of my limit. Want a URL in there and maybe a hashtag? You're down to less than 100 characters. These arbitrary platform limits should not burden the end user.