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Twitter’s Update Prevents @Usernames from Counting Toward Character Limits in Replies

Over the past year, Twitter has made many moves to prevent their 140-character limit from being too limiting to users. This has meant making it so that pictures and videos don’t count toward the 140-character limit on tweets. In Twitter’s latest update, it has begun preventing @username tags from limiting characters left when replying to posts. This allows users to have more characters to give to their reply rather than having characters eaten up by tags.

Instead of having to add @username to a reply tweet, users will now be able to tap on a button labeled “Replying to…” to manage which people are part of this conversation. This will make it so that the username will appear above the text of the Tweet rather than as a part of it, giving you more of your 140-character limit to use in the reply.

This change is going to make it so that conversations between two or more people on Twitter can move a lot more smoothly. People won’t have to look at the clutter of @username tags on the beginning of the tweet when they are trying to read a conversation. This should help to clear up conversation and make it easier for people to communicate thorough twitter.

The main goal of the update is to make it so that Twitter is a place where conversation is allowed to flow a lot more easily and naturally. Despite this goal, some people worry that this new feature will allow reply tweets to become a lot more spam like in quality. People will be able to post replies to a wide number of people much more easily as these tags don’t count against the character count.