Where Did Twitter Get Its Character Limit?
A story of the technical quirk that created a defining feature of one of the world’s largest social networks.
One of the most distinct features of Twitter is its character limit.
When sending a tweet, users are restricted to making messages of only 280 (previously 140) characters. This has annoyed users at times, but it’s also given Twitter a unique voice, and it’s shaped the platform to give it relevance in a modern media environment.
The question is, where did the character limit come from?
While most people use Twitter through its app or its website, it wasn’t made like that. Twitter was first created in 2006, and was meant to be used through SMS. You would make a tweet as a text message, and then send it out to be posted on Twitter.
At this point, Twitter looked a lot different than it does now. Tweets (which weren’t yet called tweets) would essentially show up as text messages, and the network was mostly a private one. During the first few months, there were maybe 50 users on the platform, all of which were friends of the creators.
In late spring of 2006, Twitter went public, and as the platform gained more popularity, the creators had pressure on them to fix some of its flaws. As the platform was still SMS based, an issue that quickly came to their attention was split messages.
At the time (and still now), most SMS carriers limited messages to 160 characters. When it started, Twitter didn’t have any character limit, meaning if you went over 160 characters, your message would be split into two parts.
This was a problem as Twitter was still in beta, and thanks to glitches, split messages wouldn’t always be delivered together or sequentially, which could make things quite confusing.
To fix the problem, Twitter’s management decided to instate a character limit. Users needed 20 characters for their name and a colon before their message, so subtracting that from 160, they got 140 characters as the limit for how long the actual message could be. That is how the character limit was born.
As Twitter grew, it became less and less SMS based. Today, no one uses Twitter through texting the way it was originally designed, yet it still has its character limit. This is surprising, since now the technical limitation that created the limit is gone, wouldn’t Twitter want to let users write as much as possible?
The answer is no, as the character limit makes Twitter stand out.
People remember that Twitter is the social media network with the character limit, and it gives them something that makes them distinct from other networks. It’s also created a unique culture within the network.
While on Facebook, you can write a 2000 word rant on the state of politics or how annoying your family is, Twitter restricts you to being brief. You’re more careful with your words, as you have fewer of them, and that results in Twitter having more consumable content.
There certainly still is garbage on Twitter, but a lot less of it, and in general content quality tends to be higher as the brevity of tweets makes low quality content easier to weed out.
The character limit has also made the site better for an increasingly attention deficit population.
Studies have shown that the attention spans of humans are getting shorter and shorter, making it harder for social networks to grab our attention. On a site like Facebook or Medium, there are many posts that get so long that you just have to cut it off. You lose attention, and have to move onto something else.
With Twitter, however, content is so brief that you literally can’t lose focus, since you get through it so quickly.
And, of course, there are traditionalists.
Any time social media networks try to change anything, there is always an uproar, and Twitter’s character limit is now one of its most recognizable traits. Back in 2016, when Twitter increased the character limit from 140 to 280, there were a lot of people who came out to complain that it was making the platform worse.
Whether or not these people are right, they have proven that the character limit is a defining trait of Twitter they are now obligated to keep. If they get rid of it, they will become just like any other social media network, and no one will have any reason to use them.
