Insane. For me it is the complete opposite. Having to read a personal conversation between two people is perhaps the primary reason I do not use Twitter. Far too much noise. And they should count hashtags as double (the other main reason why I cannot stand Twitter).
I tried using Instagram. Downloaded the app and created an account. It promptly emailed everyone in my address book notifying them that I created an account. Deleted the app and my account. Never again.
On twitter, I have thousands of followers and I'm lucky to get even one reply or mention.
On Facebook, however, I have about 300 friends, and I can post an actual paragraph along with a photo or a video. I often get 30 likes and 20 comments on the posts.
Facebook does a much better job of facilitating real conversations, and yet it still allows people to post 140 character blurbs (if they want to).
I get it though. Twitter is what it is, and there are tons of people who love it. I'm not one of those people.
I've been working with people helping social media for a bit, and one common issue in preparing a list of tweets to schedule is making sure the length is ok. So you end up with silly xls files where you have a url column, a text column, etc. and weird formulas to compute the size.
I think Twitter just wants to simplify the life. You can send 140 chars of text/comment. Mentions, urls, images, etc. are not counted because normal people aren't counting like that.
Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules
Submitters: please do not rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please especially don't rewrite them to make them more misleading and linkbait. (Submitted title was "Twitter ditches 140 character limit".)
Because a few times I have left out the year since I couldn't find a good shorter title, and then you added the year afterwards. I would have done that myself. :-)
EDIT: I'm aware of the original reasoning for the limitation, so perhaps "arbitrary" is not the best adjective.
