Longer tweets have not ruined Twitter

It’s been more than two weeks since Twitter has given some users the option to send longer character tweets, and guess what? Twitter is fine.

When Twitter announced that it was testing longer tweets — some users now have 280 characters to say whatever is on their mind instead of the traditional 140 characters — you would have thought Twitter was forcing people to drink Soylent for the rest of their lives.

People freaked out. All was terrible. Twitter was doomed.

Except not. The company seems fine. Twitter’s stock price is up, no celebrity users have abandoned Twitter as a result, and there don’t appear to be any embarrassing Twitter memes still circulating that roast the company for the test. (Though the below tweet was pretty clever at the time.)

Basically, Twitter’s timeline with 280-character tweets is pretty much the exact same as Twitter’s timeline with 140-character tweets. I am on Twitter more than I would ever care to admit (it’s my job, kinda), and I have yet to come across a single “long” tweet that looked out of place. I hardly even notice them anymore.

In fact, the only thing that caught my eye was a situation in which not having 280 characters was a problem. When there were rumors of an active shooter at the University of Southern California a few weeks ago, the school sent a few tweets encouraging students to get to safety. But without 280 characters, the school’s warning was broken into separate messages. If you’d seen just one of the tweets, and not the other, you’d have missed important context.

Longer tweets would have helped.

Yes, 280 character tweets are not rolled out to everybody yet so we don’t know how it will look when all of us get longer tweets. And yes, President Donald Trump still only has 140 characters. Perhaps, when those things change, I’ll feel differently.

But to those who said longer tweets would mark the end of Twitter, or just raged about how it would look (looking at you, Recode colleagues), please stop. Twitter may still be doomed, but 280 character tweets sure as hell won’t be the reason.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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