Twitter has a lot of problems, the 140 character limit was not even in the top 5. That's why people are annoyed. Twitter's house is on fire with cougars eating people in the backyard and people dying of cholera in the front yard, now the owners rush back from vacation in a big white van... only to open it up and reveal a bunch of pink plastic flamingos, which they proceed to use to decorate the yard (in between cholera corpses). It's mystifying and infuriating.
Love the analogies.
All of Twitter's problems stem from its being taken over by marketing wonks who drove out the techies. This led to naïve attempts at monetization (such as closing off the API), and naïve monetization is always user-hostile.
Well, the 140 character may not be a problem for existing users, but it’s also a great reason not to use twitter if you don’t have a desire to cram arbitrary thoughts into arbitrary formats.... what kind of discussion can you have in that medium? Not a very meaningful one....
It’s certainly amusing to see people get angry that the experience is less stressful.
Just saying—it seems pretty obvious this is at least in part to increase attractiveness of actually using the platform. The content certainly ain’t gonna do the trick.
Or to put it another way, the last person to see how shitty it is is someone who already uses the site.
Twitter has numerous engineering teams. The pink flamingo team had an easier task than the ones putting out fires, slaying cougars, and curing cholera.
Several of them might require the expenditure of money (or a temporary decrease in revenue) and such solutions are difficult because they make investors nervous.
For users of some non-english languages, the 140 character limit was a lot more problematic than anything else.
If you try even comparing German text with english or even japanese on twitter, you'll notice one big issue immediately: You can barely put 3 German words into a tweet, while Japanese can fit an entire novel in.
