While the 280-character trial may have come as a surprise, Twitter's been quietly making its platform more flexible for months. In 2017 alone, it has removed photos, videos, quotes and, most recently, @replies from being counted against the 140-character limit. Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen said in a blog post that the latest change is designed to remove a major constraint for users, with the hope that it makes sharing their thoughts easier. Basically, when someone you follow goes on a tweetstorm, it'll just take fewer tweets now. It's also worth noting that, even before tweetstorms became a trend, people were already using screenshots and images of text as a workaround to the 140-character cap.

Mom: Wow, our baby is carrying a knife, that seems unsafe.



Dad: What should we do?



Mom: Double the size of the knife.#280characters —Frederick Douglass (@HITEXECUTIVE), September 27, 2017

"Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese," she said. Rosen pointed to Japanese-speaking users because their language lets them express themselves in fewer characters than would someone in, say, English: "We see that a small percent of tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters (only 0.4 percent). But in English, a much higher percentage of tweets have 140 characters (9 percent). Most Japanese tweets are 15 characters while most English tweets are 34."

Juan Lupión, chief technology officer at The Cocktail, a leading digital consultancy firm in Spain, says that developing this character-limit feature was no easy task for Twitter. He says that given the scale of it, "simpler things become surprisingly harder." In other words, Twitter likely spent a great amount of resources developing this, which you can argue could be better spent solving more pressing issues. "Twitter's architecture is anything but simple," he said. "One can think that switching to a longer text length is as easy as modifying some kind of length in a couple of variables, but that's not really the point: Twitter is already deploying sophisticated components that are probably not bound by a hard 140-character limit."

Rosen claims that, in all markets, data shows that "when people don't have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people tweeting." Still, it's hard not to think about all the other reasons Twitter decided to do this. For one, the company's most recent earnings report proved that it is struggling to keep users from leaving its platform. More than a million users quit Twitter in just three months this year, though there's no reason to believe character count had anything to do with that.