Stay Gold, Twitter. Why the 140 Character Limit Must Remain.

Originally published in 2017. See update at the end for how the platform has evolved since then.

In S.E. Hinton’s classic, The Outsiders, the dying Johnny Cade speaks the words, “Stay Gold” to his friend Ponyboy Curtis.  He’s trying to tell him to keep his special spark, his interest in literature and poetry, that separates him from everyone else they know.  In the larger scheme of things, its a reference to a Robert Frost poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, that the two read together while hiding out.  The poem itself talks about the end of innocence and inevitable changes that happen with time.

This week, Recode reported that Twitter is considering expanding Tweets to handle major essay lengths (10,000 words).  Jack Dorsey of Twitter chimed in to the ongoing dialogue on the topic with a history of the character limit on the service, but basically affirming the experiment.

I’m here to ask Twitter to reconsider and here are my main reasons:

1. The 140 character limit makes Twitter unique.  Do we really want to see Twitter conform to a Facebook standard? Heck no.
2. We don’t need another blog engine.  10,000 words is white paper length. To me, this suggests that Twitter is trying to expand its scope to allow people to compose blogs and other long-form prose. This means competing with Medium, Facebook, WordPress and many more.  It’s already an overcrowded market.
3. Twitter is about news and happenings in real-time.  The new moments feature works because it’s built on top of that notion.  The ad products work because they’re built on top of that concept as well.  Let’s look for ways to focus on that.

All of that said, I see tons of ways that Twitter can be improved by loosening the rules to make the 140 character rule far less encumbering.  I would recommend starting by seeing what other items in the Tweet payload could be removed from the actual 140-character message limit. For example, here are a few suggestions:

1. Don’t include @usernames in the 140 character limit
2. Don’t include hashtags
3. Don’t include links
4. Don’t include images
5. Don’t include videos

I’ve had a long relationship with Twitter as an early user who took a while to fall in love with the service. Now that I have, it’s become an integral part of my business and personal life.  I’d like to see it forget following Facebook and staying true to its roots.

Stay gold, Twitter.

Thanks to the incredible David Meerman Scott for speaking out against this change quickly!

Update: November 2024

When I wrote this piece in 2017, Twitter’s 140-character limit had just expanded to 280 characters—a change that felt seismic at the time. Little did we know what was coming.

Since Elon Musk’s acquisition in 2022, the platform now known as X has undergone transformative changes that have fundamentally altered the constraints-driven creativity I celebrated in this post. The introduction of paid verification ($8/month for a blue checkmark) replaced the authenticity-based legacy system, while significant workforce reductions eliminated roughly 75% of employees according to NPR.

Perhaps most relevant to my original thesis about creative constraints: X has largely abandoned character limits for premium users and introduced a TikTok-style “For You” algorithmic feed that prioritizes engagement over chronological discovery. The platform’s emphasis on becoming an “everything app” represents a stark departure from the focused, constraint-rich environment that once fostered the creative brevity I admired.

These changes, combined with relaxed content moderation policies and the complete rebrand from Twitter to X, have contributed to what YouGov BrandIndex reports as a notable decline in user engagement and positive sentiment. The financial impact has been substantial too, with CNN reporting significant valuation decreases and the New York Times documenting major advertising revenue losses.

The “golden” constraints that once made Twitter special—the character limits, the real-time chronological feed, the earned verification system—have largely disappeared. Whether this evolution represents progress or loss depends on your perspective, but it’s certainly the end of an era for the platform that once proved limitations could spark limitless creativity.