280 character limit has made Twitter users more polite, use fewer awful abbreviations

The doubling of the character limit for tweets has made Twitter users more polite and less prone to using annoying abbreviations, says the company …

Axios reports the change.

54% more messages say “please” and 22% more use “thank you” since the character limit doubled.

There’s a decline of abbreviations like “gr8” (-36%), “b4” (-13%), and “sry” (-5%) in favor of the full words — “great” (+32%), “before” (+70%), and “sorry” (+31%).

The increased length of tweets has also made Twitter a more interactive place.

30% more tweets include a question mark, and there are more replies to tweets.

Only a minority of Twitter users take advantage of the extra characters, however. Only 12% of tweets are longer than 140 characters, and only 1% max out at 280 characters – while 9% of tweets hit the old limit.

A recent change also means that people can include up to 140 emoji in their tweets. I foolishly asked people not to, and this was of course immediately taken as a challenge.

Twitter continues to take steps to encourage more interaction on the platform, recently found to be testing enhanced threading features and presence indicators.

Photo: Shutterstock

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