This Is Why Your Twitter Timeline Might Look A Little Different Today

Usernames no longer count against the 140 character limit for some users.

October 28, 2016
This Is Why Your Twitter Timeline Might Look A Little Different Today

Twitter's big news yesterday was the decision to say goodbye to Vine, and with it wave goodbye to millions of loops forever. While the world was mourning that loss, however, Twitter has also begun taking @usernames out of your 140 character limit.

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TechCrunch reports that this trial will be "appearing to a subset of users" on iOS. Instead of the usual series of @usernames you would normally see in a Twitter conversation, the trial users now see a greyed-out line at the top of the tweet which says: "Replying to [username]."

A Twitter spokesperson confirmed the trial and referred to an official support post from September when the plan was first announced. "If you notice a tweet that includes more than 140 characters, the tweet may come from an account that is in a test group experimenting with our changes to the way replies happen on Twitter," the post reads. "When this change launches to the public, people’s usernames will no longer be automatically included in tweet text and they will no longer count towards a tweet's 140 characters."

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It was in September Twitter dropped counting photos, GIFs, and quote tweets from its character limit.

This Is Why Your Twitter Timeline Might Look A Little Different Today