All Aboard the Twitter Canoe! Users Can Now @-Reply Up to 50 People

Twitter's 140-character limit restriction—long the curse of power users—has been tweaked to give users more space in their tweets.

On Monday, Twitter started rolling out changes that mean media attachments such as GIFs or quote tweets and polls will no longer count towards a user's character limit, nor will the username handles of people a tweet is replying to. This is what group replies will look like:

As a group conversation snowballs, Twitter told Motherboard that up to 50 usernames could be replied to in a conversation without the usernames taking up any of those precious 140 characters. Twitter canoe, anyone?

According to Twitter, the change will make "having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group."

It's a logical step to facilitating better group conversations on the social networking site. Chats will look cleaner and allow for more expression.

Oh boy, new spam opportunities! Huge flamewars! https://t.co/NQQZCCaPU4
— Asher Wolf (@Asher_Wolf) September 20, 2016

But if reply usernames are not counted towards a user's character limit in replies, is Twitter about to get a whole lot spammier?

Motherboard asked if there was a limit to the number of people a user could reply to in a tweet. "The upper limit will be 50 @ usernames," said a Twitter spokesperson. "To stress though, you can't just paste in 50 @names, it has to be built up as part of an organic conversation." This means you can't just add people into the response and keep your characters; they have to be incorporated in the thread of replies to an initial tweet.

But imagine being caught up in a flame war with up to 50 users replying to all above them with full 140-character tweets, not having to remove nonessential users by manually deleting their usernames to create more room. It's not yet clear if there's an option to permanently opt out of a conversation that gets out of control.

It's easy to imagine brands getting in on the action too, having the ability to reach up to 50 users with a perfectly crafted 140-character tweet in one shot (albeit only if they were all replying to each other already).

The changes come after the social networking site switched on Direct Message read receipts by default earlier in September. The .@ tradition has also been abolished with the latest update, with tweets that begin with a username now reaching all followers. It's clear these changes are attempts to boost visibility and conversation, but they haven't been welcomed with entirely open arms.

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