Twitter To Extend Its Character Limit Beyond 140

And some users are not down with it, to put it mildly. Social media is like infrastructure: users resist change to Twitter or Facebook like they might dread the back-ups when a highway or a bridge goes under construction. So when Twitter founder Jack Dorsey (@jack) Tweeted today that the character limit for Tweets would be extended from 140 to 10,000 — yes, ten thousand characters — users gave a collective shrug. Like, it’s been real, y’all, but Twitter will be unusable pretty soon.

For those who already feel like Twitter is a bad habit at best and a pressured obligation at worst, the news isn’t all bad.

Change can be scary, we know. But, contrary to some complaints stirring up the hivemind, Twitter proponents and independent tech journalists alike attempted to reassure users that all was not lost. According to Re/code social media correspondent Kurt Wagner, posts exceeding a certain character count will simply allow users the option to expand the post to read it in full, ideally without cluttering their feeds.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo prescribed a chill pill to soothe users’ angst rash, pointing out in a post that, for now, Twitter will be maintaining its 140-character limit. Apparently the potential overhaul is meant to mirror Twitter’s recent implementation of a 10,000 character limit for Direct Messages, which had previously been limited to 140 characters just like Tweets. Which was super annoying when you wanted to chat with a fellow user at length and in private. On that note, maybe it won’t be so bad if Twitter does in fact go from microblogging to regular ol’ blogging. Buzzfeed’s Executive Editor of Culture, Saeed Jones, just correctly predicted the next great Internet paradigm shift.