The powers that be at Twitter are laying plans to ditch the current 140-character limit in favour of a 10,000 limit, meaning a new level of insufferable arseholery is just around the corner for humankind.
According to reports, the social media giant is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet things longer than the traditional 140-character limit, and worse still, the company is targeting a launch date towards the end of March.
For one thing, the Easter Rising celebrations have just taken an indirectly perturbing new twist; imagine all the Celtic FC crests tweeting without the shackles of a 140-character parameter? It'll be grammatical anarchy.
Twitter is currently testing a version of the product in which tweets appear the same way they do now, displaying just 140 characters, with a 'call to action' of some description suggesting that there is more content you can’t see. Clicking on a 'See More'-like button on the tweets would then expand them to reveal more content.
This at least means that the conceited, sanctimonious think piece-merchants that already make up roughly 67% of Twitter as things stand, can, for the most part, be ignored to the same extent as always.
if twitter goes to a 10000 character limit i'm going to quit
— drew brown (@drewfoundland) January 5, 2016
However, constraint inspires creativity. See the hilariously bizarre-o sub-culture of 'Weird Twitter', where users such as the ingeniously poignant @jomnysun and the hysterically freakish @dril constantly illuminate the website with uniquely thought-provoking musings and (particularly in @dril's case) frankly repugnant rants.
If these guys can go Twitter-viral through 140 characters of sheer genius, anybody should be able to. By expanding the limit to 10,000 characters, all Twitter will achieve is facilitating the kinds of dickheads who write blogs - known in common parlance as 'blog wankers'.
Look, nothing is confirmed yet, but an online world where Katie Hopkins or Tyson Fury aren't restricted to 140 characters is a potential hellscape, and one would hope a different website would simply adopt Twitter's value of brevity so we could all piss off over there instead.
Twitter might expand character count of tweets to 10,000 which will ruin the great vibe of crazy run on rant tweets which really piss(1/377)
— Joseph Scrimshaw (@JosephScrimshaw) January 5, 2016
Reports: Re/Code