According to a report from TheVerge, the mega microblogging site, Twitter, is making changes to the 140-character limit on tweets. By September 19th, the company will redefine the kind of content that count as part of the platform’s 140-character limit. And as such, content like Media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, etc.) and quoted tweets will no longer reduce the character count. In this way, the character limit will centre around the message itself — not the media attached to it.
Twitter hinted earlier on this year about some of these improvements. As part of the update, usernames within a reply tweet won’t be counted as characters (even if you’re replying multiple people), and you can also retweet yourself if that’s something you really want to do.
Twitter users are optimistic about future changes that will allow them edit their tweets after publication and also hope to see better strategies put in place to reduce abuse and harassment on the platform. Looking at the company’s recent moves, there’s reason to believe some of these improvements will be made sooner than later.
Nonetheless, by Monday, we at least hope to see the changes to the character limit roll out to the platform.