1. So Twitter has decided to go ahead and give everyone 280 characters for each tweet instead of the old limitation of 140 characters.
2. To be clear, nobody was asking for this, and it doesn't make the medium better. It makes it noticeably worse.
3. But Twitter has a history of making dumb decisions and giving its users everything except what they actually want.
4. This may explain why their user base has stalled out and why they've never really made any money.
5. Despite this, Twitter has become an influential medium, particularly popular among the political media.
6. That outsized influence is reflected in the fact that Twitter is the favorite place for President Trump to cause trouble.
7. To explain why 280 characters is such a bad idea, it's important to understand the appeal of Twitter as a medium in the first place.
8. The 140-character limit originally came from the limitations of wireless carriers' text-messaging services.
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9. As those technological limits became irrelevant, Twitter tinkered with not counting links and not including usernames in a reply thread.
10. So why not double the character limit? Heck, why not just remove the limit altogether? Why not turn Twitter into Facebook? Or Blogger?
11. When you put it that way, the question kind of answers itself.
12. The key thing about 140 characters is that it enforces brevity, which is good for the writer but even better for the reader.
13. A feed of 140-character tweets can be surfed by the political junkie who wants to poke his head into Twitter to see what's going on.
14. That's how Twitter has become so attractive and even hypnotic for those of us in the political media.
15. You can hop onto Twitter in a few spare moments, or to be honest, while putting off work on your latest article.
16. And just by skimming your feed, you can get a pretty good sense of what is happening in the news and how people are responding to it.
17. If you cast your net wide enough, you see how people on all sides of the debate are responding. And you get to respond to them.
18. One of the best things about Twitter is the way it allows people who might not normally meet or talk to engage one another.
19. I've sparred on Twitter with writers from left-leaning publications, or who are more famous and work for bigger publications.
20. And I've had more or less productive back-and-forth exchanges with random people with 50 followers.
21. There's a Twitter ethos in which you are expected to take on all comers and not be snooty about who has enough followers.
22. But before this there would have been no appropriate way for writers to engage their readers or critics in this way.
23. Twenty years ago, if I wanted to challenge a New York Times reporter, my only option was to write a letter to the editor.
24. So the appeal of Twitter, particularly for political media, is that it's basically the DC cocktail party of myth and legend.
25. Everybody is mingling, sparring, and trying to impress each other with our wit, thoughtfulness, or stuffy self-righteous moralizing.
26. But because we have to speak in 140-character epigrams, we all have to make like Oscar Wilde. Or as close as we can manage.
27. (The only thing worse than being subtweeted is not being subtweeted.)
28. Twitter has also become a spectacular medium for satire, as in the replies to the "chainsaw bayonet."
29. All of this is possible because the posts and replies are short and easily skimmable.
