POST Posts: Way Too Many Characters, December 2022

The following article was originally published as "Way Too Many Characters" on POST on December 12, 2022. -jh

The following post is not a tweet. Yet.

Words change meaning over time, and with the advent of the internet and the rise of social media, we have seen this happen rather quickly. There’s a generation that doesn’t immediately think of “a period of two weeks” when they hear the word “fortnight.” The word “woke” no longer means “not asleep” to a lot of people. It means either “being politically and socially aware, being alert and conscious to prejudice, discrimination, and systematic injustices in society, and the need to address them” or “EW! This thing has a woman, a minority, a progressive, an empathetic person, and/or a member of the LGBT in it or a part of it.”

And a “tweet” used to mean “a small, sweet note made by a bird.”

Short.

Succinct.

Sweet.

That was the point of the small text messages by the users of the Twitter platform. Short, sweet, succinct messages.

Originally, these messages, known as tweets, were no longer than the previous line of dialogue I had just typed. 120 characters. Of course, that includes the space between the words as well, so, technically speaking, that line would have been much truncated with fewer words.

Then, Twitter increased the word count to 280 characters. In other words, about the size of the previous paragraph. You could say a lot with that much space. Clever tweeters could do it with so much less.

Someone could make a tweet with nothing more than the word “No” and have it retweeted by tens of thousands. It’s voluminous in its succinctness, especially if you have the clout, prestige, and influence to make a post like that.

You don’t need a lot of space to say a lot, and if you did, you could easily thread those tweets together. I’ve done it many times over and had fun doing it. That said, I know it’s a lot to read tons of words at once on something that’s supposed to be quick thoughts or burst of inspiration.

That’s why it’s baffling that the despotic muskrat is threatening to announce plans to increase the character count to 4000.

In other words, about half of what I just wrote. At this point, a post like this is no longer a tweet.

It’s a burp.

A loud, voluminous, smelly burp with a cloud of saliva, phlegm, and food particles. Imagine a timeline filled with long, rambling tweets by people too lazy to create a blog, a newsletter, or a simple webpage. 4000 characters can make up a lot of words and a lot of paragraphs. I’m just over 2400 characters at this point, and I’m winding this down because, well, this is kind of exhausting. I can’t imagine creating a tweet this size regularly because this is not what the Twitter platform was meant to be.

Twitter was about speed and succinctness. You had a point to make, and you made it in under 280 characters. If you need nearly 15 times the space to do that, maybe you should reconsider making a tweet and just post on another platform. I hear Tumblr’s nice. Blogger may not be as widely used, but it’s a steady platform too.

And I hear this place called Post is rather fetching if you can get in.

You could tweet a link to that post rather than clutter your friends and followers’ timeline with a lengthy tweet.

I’m legitimately thinking the moronic privileged despot is purposely trying to devalue, delegitimate, and destroy a platform he spent way too much money on at this point. Attracting a toxic climate, alienating a huge core of users, bringing in policies to stigmatize and threaten so many, and pissing off advertisers is no way to run a mainstream business. Letting users just go all out and post lengthy tweets not only to their followers but also as responses to others as if it was a message board from the 2000s just doesn’t make any sense. Hell, that’s why many Twitter users left message boards in the first place, to escape pointless, lengthy noise from people you don’t want to deal with.

We don’t need 4000 characters to make a point on Twitter.

We don’t need to make MORE noise on Twitter.

We need to get back to being like birds making short, sweet tweets.