Leading cyberbullying platform Twitter announced this week that it’s mulling the possibility of doubling its current 140-character limit to 280, a dramatic change for a company that’s become as synonymous with 140 as Jordan is with 23. What does this mean for you, the pithy user or your valuable brand? The pros and cons of Twitter going all 280:
PROS
• Expanding to 280 characters gives users way more room to be racist
• After a natural disaster/mass shooting/one of 2017’s 300 hurricanes, politicians will no longer have to abbreviate “thoughts and prayers”
• Should reduce ampersand use by 700%
• Allows more space for the President of the United States to share his wisdom and inspiration
• Tweet threads that start “1/18” will be reduced to a much more manageable “1/9”
• Should let Ted Cruz to be more informed about his choice in mom-porn
• Defiant users can safely just say “don’t at me” instead of using that ridiculous symbol thing
• If you thought Chick-Fil-A’s 22-year-old corporate-approved social media manager was funny in 140 characters, oh man you just wait
• Nazis generally run out of gas after about 160 characters
• Would allow LeBron to use the correct spelling “You bum”
• Whatever, just get whatever you’re doing done before Taylor drops her album, she needs to plan that shit
• Physiologically, it’s easier for the human brain to ignore large blocks of text, just ask the news industry
FacebookPinterestCONS
• Is change. Gross
• Russian spies will have to translate twice the material
• Kim Kardshian has never written 280 characters of anything in her life
• Will take you twice as long to plead for attention
• No longer have to watch senators contort themselves pathetically in writing things like “hlth care bill = bad 4 U”
• Trump to spend twice as much time figuring out which words to randomly capitalize
• People generally disapprove when you take the one thing a social media platform does well and change it for no reason
• Would make it look more like Facebook, which is the thing everyone’s on Twitter to avoid
• Will cause design chaos in the world of mombloggers who post screenshots of their tweets
• Bots could maximize extra space, run wild, become self-aware, take over world
• If this nonsense continues, people will have to somehow merge their short quips, pithy asides and broken-English thoughts into sentences, which would then have to be organized into paragraphs, which would then have to be arranged as stories or articles and no one wants to pay for that shit