Twitter dropped a bombshell today by deciding to expand the character limit for tweets from the classic 140 to 280. This has caused quite of a stir on Twitter where people given the ‘power’ didn’t know what to do with it and others just made fun of the whole situation.
Since Twitter is testing this feature to a select few, well the majority is still stuck to the usual 140 character limit. There is a hack anyway and it is thanks to a Twitter user by the name Prof 9.
First, install Tampermonkey on your browser of choice (it is available in Chrome, Edge, Safari, Opera Next and Firefox), but in this case, i’ll be using Chrome as an example.
On Chrome, install the Tampermonkey extension from the web store. Head over to Github to this Twitter cramming script and click on the “Raw” button to install it. When you’re on Twitter, head over to the tampermonkey extension and make sure that the script is enabled.
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— 𝚔𝚒𝚛𝚞𝚝𝚒 (@kiruti) September 27, 2017
Since this is a workaround, it does not work perfectly. On my first try, it didn’t work and was counting the characters as normal, but it did require a refresh to work. In the ‘280 character mode’, the 140 character counter is ‘disabled’ so you can go on tweeting random stuff until you get the usual red notification of the characters that have exceeded the limit.
Well this is a cool compromise for the millions of Twitter users that are not part of the test group. Since it is still technically a test, it is still unclear whether they might roll this out to all users or decide to dump it altogether.
*UPDATE*
Twitter has since updated the web client that disables the scripts functionality, so back to 140 characters it is.
