Not everyone was happy when Tesla and SpaceX billionaire celebrity Elon Musk took over Twitter, the world’s digital town square.
One of the changes Musk made was to Twitter’s stubbornly short character limit. In its previous years, the social media company had only changed the size limit of a tweet once—in 2017, from 140 to 280 characters. That minor change was overall well received.
But Musk’s latest change was platform-altering: 4,000 characters became the new limit, an increase beyond an order of magnitude.
Some had requested a little more room to express themselves, it’s true. But at 4,000 characters—the length of a typical blog post or newspaper article—it’s a loss of distinction for Twitter in the vast sea of social sameness.
The platform’s deliberately restrictive parameters challenged users to compact and clarify messages to say a lot with a little. And if a matter was too complex for yelling at the town square, there were always links out—the modern equivalent of take home literature that everyone feels good about having but seldom bothers to read up on.
Our time is stretched thin. There’s more news and data out there than ever before. We need clarity, simplicity, minimalism—without compromising the essential facts that keep us informed every day.
That is why I launched DECODER.
DECODER identifies the most relevant tech news in Canada and breaks down the facts and fundamentals in 100 words. We save you time and brainpower by presenting a daily scroll of succinct stories that matter without sacrificing important information. And if you want to read the book, so to speak, we of course include links to our original sources.
All the tech news that’s fit to pixelate—and none of the filler. Welcome to DECODER, Canada.
Founder, DECODER