Twitter frees up characters for reply tweets

Now when you reply on Twitter, those @usernames won’t count toward your 140 characters.

Thestar.com
March 30, 2017
By Sammy Hudes

Buckle up, Twitter users, you now have an opportunity to more fully express your thoughts in some tweets.

Or, more likely, more space for hashtags and snark.

The handles of other Twitter accounts will no longer count toward the 140-character limit when posting a reply, the social media website announced Thursday.

Rather than appearing within the text of a reply, other usernames will now instead appear above the tweet, indicating who is part of the conversation thread.

The move is aimed at making conversations more readable, especially when the beginning of a tweet would have otherwise included many usernames.

Users can still edit or see who they are replying to by clicking on a “replying to ... ” tab on the screen.

Twitter previously removed other restrictions which users felt tied up too many characters. In September, it announced photos, videos, GIFs, polls and quote-tweets would no longer count toward the 140-character limit.