Twitter just doubled the character limit to English users from 140 to 280 in order to give the users “more characters to express.” Even though the news came as a surprise, Twitter says, the decision was made to test 280 characters after wide and thorough research across tweets from multiple languages.
According to Twitter, in languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French”, and that is limiting user engagement in these regions.
“Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese. Also, in all markets, when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting – which is awesome”, says Aliza Rozen, product manager at Twitter.
Unfortunately, this extended character limit is now only available to a small group of users, and chances are you are not one amongst those privileged ones. Twitter user Prof. 9 has discovered gives a simple hack through which anyone can now tweet in 280 characters, reports The Verge. So here is how to do it.
First, download Tampermonkey extension for your browser.
Secondly, add a script from GitHub to the Tampermonkey. To do that, visit this link and then click the “raw” button, and you will be taken to an installation page. Hit “install” to install the script to Tampermonkey and you are done.
Now all you have to do is visit twitter.com and start tweeting. Don’t forget to make sure the script is running in Tampermonkey. You can check that by clicking on the Tampermonkey icon on your browser bar and see if “Twitter Cramming” is turned on.
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