Student Life

Students React to Recent Twitter Changes

Tori Rohlfing, Staff Reporter
January 22, 2016

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Most teens with social media know that Twitter is one of the most used and downloaded apps. With its status as one of the dominant social networks today, including of a total of 320 million users, Twitter continues to become even more popular because of its use by companies, celebrities, and anyone looking to share their feelings, daily activities, and opinions over social media.

With Twitter recently making several large decisions to change the concept of their app and overall service, many students have reacted strongly to alterations that have occurred and the ideas of those soon to come — including the possibility of expanding the maximum tweet length to 10,000 characters.

Souria Luyamba, a sophomore, shares her feelings on the potential change, saying that “honestly I think being limited to 140 characters is a good challenge because Twitter is just for quick thoughts, not essays, so I don’t think they should allow that many characters. Also the change of stars to hearts was a bit frustrating at first but now I don’t really care.”

Another sophomore, Isabella Crowley, has similar views as Souria. She states that “I think that 10,000 characters are too many and that Twitter should not be a place for writing essays. I personally don’t care about the stars versus hearts and lastly, I think that changes are going well other than the increase in ads that have been included in my feed.”

Although many have positive feedback about changes made to Twitter, some users dislike the alterations to the app. “I deleted my Twitter because of all of the drama that was happening,” sophomore Katie Gage said. “Also I felt I wanted a clean slate without feeling like I had to tweet my feelings, causing more drama. I don’t like the likes and hearts changes, I liked the stars better. I also think they should keep it at 140 characters because then it will be too much writing in one tweet.”

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter has explained that he appreciates the limited use Twitter has right now: “It’s become a beautiful restraint, and I love it,” he said. “It inspires creativity and brevity.” However, he also shares the reason in which the change in tweet length is being considered, saying, “We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it.”