Draft:Character limit

A character limit is a limit on the number of characters in a message which is used in SMS messaging and on social media platforms such as X, Mastodon, Blue Sky, GNU social, Bilibili, Pixiv, and Jejemon.

History
The character limit originated with SMS (Short Messaging Service) messages which had a limit of 160 characters. The idea for the 160 character limit came about in 1984, when the German engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand was sitting at his typewriter at his house in Bonn and he typed out some random sentences and questions on his typewriter, he then tallied up the total characters used (including spaces and numbers) and discovered that most messages amounted to 160 characters or less. He then argued that 160 characters were sufficient to express most messages.

This character limit was adopted by X (then called Twitter) when the site launched in 2006, based on 160-character limit used in SMS messages. Twitter used 20 characters for the username, reserving 140 characters for the post. The original limit was seen as an iconic fixture of the platform, encouraging "speed and brevity".

In March 2017, the character limit on Twitter was changed so that media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, quote tweets) nor mentions in replies would no longer increase the character limit.

In November 2017, Twitter increased it's character limit from 140 to 280 characters. The increased limit was faced with backlash from Twitter users who were concerned that they would get longer posts on their feed. Twitter assuaged people's fears by saying in a blog post that during the trial period only 5% of tweets were sent out with more than 140 characters and of those, only 2% were over 190 characters. They added that only 1% of Tweets hit the character limit after the expansion to 280, compared with 9% of Tweets historically.

In 2023, Twitter boosted the character limit for Twitter Blue subscribers. In February, they increased it to 4000. In April, they increased it to 10,000 and in June, they increased it to 25,000.