Twitter finally relaxes 140 character limit, but with a catch

Twitter is finally, at long last, relaxing its 140 character limit with a move it should have made years ago. The company today announced that most things that aren’t plain old text or emojis will no longer count toward your character limit.

Say more about what's happening! Rolling out now: photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters. pic.twitter.com/I9pUC0NdZC

— Twitter (@Twitter) September 19, 2016

You still only get 140 characters towards text messages and links, but adding quotes, polls, videos, or images will no longer reduce precious characters.

Frankly, it’s a move Twitter should have made eons ago. Of course, Twitter likely worried about the implications of expending its character limit; the brevity of tweets has largely defined the social network’s character. This seems like a fair compromise.

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The company did consider increasing the limit to 10,000 characters once upon a time, according to Recode, but the idea was scrapped. In the meantime, the Verge reports the company is testing other ways to give you more breathing room:

The company is also testing out new replies that will omit the username of the person you are replying to from the character limit. If you reply to multiple people at once, Twitter only omits the person who sent the original tweet from the character count.

The expanded tweets are ‘rolling out now’ so you may not be able to use them quite yet, but expect to be able to send longer tweets anytime now.