It will be one month since Elon Musk completed the purchase of Twitter on October 28th, 2022. But, he fought a battle to win the war! The platform was dwindling due to the hampering state of free speech and that’s what Musk ensured when he was in the process to buy the social media platform for $44 billion. But, the visions of the Tesla owner could not materialize as he wanted them to. Elon started making radical decisions to revamp the platform naming his mission “Twitter 2.0”.
The first decision he implemented was to change the workforce capacity. He fired the top executives from the company and then reduced the head counts of the workers due to excessive loss. For the platform, he introduced a blue tick subscription of $7.99, but it was a failure due to the emergence of many replicas of the original accounts. So, after stalling it, he may resume it on December 2nd, 2022, with different features. Recently, there was a suggestion made to increase the word limit on Twitter which is 280 characters currently. The CEO has assured to do so in the coming days.
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Elon Musk Has The Change Of The Word Limit On His To-Do List
There seems to be a lot on Musk’s plate right now as he is aiming to give Twitter a makeover! Since he acquired the platform, he has introduced new features and is running the platform on a ‘trial-and-error’ basis. He has been on a mission to eradicate the bots on the platform.
This was the cause that halted his purchase and then led to a chaotic legal battle between the platform and him. After this, he blocked accounts that were parodies or faux accounts pretending to be someone else, because it was a hindrance to the subscription system he brought in place.
It’s on the todo list
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
He is, famously or infamously, known for taking suggestions and replying to other accounts on the progress of the revamping. Recently, John Kraus suggested increasing the limit of the words on Twitter which is 280 words currently. He proposed an idea “on expanding the character limit to 1000”.
Kraus wrote, “Char. limit should be 1000, but only show the first 280 on timeline with a “… (show more)” to indicate tweet is longer. When tapped, expand entire tweet. When scrolled to end, it smoothly transitions back into timeline. Cuts down on “x/87″ threads, keeps same feel on timeline.”
To this, Elon replied, “It’s on the to do list”. He continued, “Twitter experienced slight degradation of service today from an old 3rd party tool used to block accounts that had no rate limit (sigh). Should be fixed now”.
Also Read: Will Elon Musk Provide “Amnesty” To Blocked Twitter Accounts After Users Vote In Favor?
He Fired Ikuhiro Ihara, The Engineer Who Put His Foot Down For 280 Characters
The evolution of Twitter has been noteworthy. The platform tried to give space to opinions and diverse views and ideologies. The scrutiny has been biased at times, but it helped us to express the most intriguing mundane thoughts to fiery political and social outlooks. And all that happened due to the limit of characters that it provided. From 140, it went to 280, and now people are suggesting an expansion of the character limit.
Good idea
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2022
A media outlet, Rawsalerts tweeted, “Let’s go! Twitter 2.0 should make the character limit 420 instead of that annoying 280”. Musk green-lit the idea. But, a senior software engineer, Ikuhiro Ihara put his foot down to increase the character limit after thorough research. Through his research, he found out that Twitteratis typing in English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French have to edit a lot due to the limited number of words that people type in Japanese.
In a blog, along with Aliza Rosen, he wrote, “We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re doing something new: we’re going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean)”.
But, now, Ihara is expelled from the company after the “code reviews” that happened on the eve before Thanksgiving Day. After serving for 10 years, the veteran software engineer was fired. Looking at the current layoffs in sales and engineering can hamper the quality of the experience that people have experienced over the years. He pushed for free speech, but he fired two of his engineers for publicly criticizing his decisions for “Twitter 2.0”.
Also Read: Why Does Stephen King Think Elon Musk Is A “Terrible Fit” For Twitter?
