Twitter announced today a change to the way it counts characters with respect to replies in a bid to make conversations easier to follow. Now, when users reply to others or to a group, their usernames will no longer count toward that tweet’s 140 character limit.
“Who you are replying to will appear above the Tweet text rather than within the Tweet text itself, so you have more characters to have conversations,” product manager Sasank Reddy wrote in a company blog post. “When reading a conversation, you’ll actually see what people are saying, rather than seeing lots of usernames at the start of a Tweet.” Additionally, a ‘Replying to…’ designation will now appear above all replies so that users can see and select who is a part of each conversation.
Twitter has made previous changes to its 140-character limit — a foundational yet much-debated feature on the platform. Last September, for instance, the company announced that photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets would no longer count as characters.
