Twitter character limit and human behavior

When Twitter increased its length character limit to 280, the world started writing them off (again!) and called the entire experiment a useless exercise.

The results are out. There are more pleasantries on Twitter than earlier.

Last year, we upgraded tweet length to 280 and guess what? Use of 'please' is up 54% and 'thank you' is up 22%. I love that! Also, people are asking more questions and having more conversations. All this, and the majority of tweets are still under 140. It worked.

— Biz Stone (@biz) October 30, 2018

The product hypothesis, team must have had was that people are rude because Twitter forces the character limit and users have no option but to get-to-the-point, which was making Twitter a place full of (perception-ally) negative sentiments.

After all, straight talks are often perceived as rude talks.

For sure, this experiment of Twitter has definitely taught a few lessons to product managers and the opined minds with this experiment – launch metrics matter and could be totally different from what the world imagines it to be.