> what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets?
Then we can all celebrate the end of an arbitrary and obsolete limitation?
The justifications for the 140-character limit have always been:
1) It was necessary in order to make Twitter-via-SMS work
2) It forces users to create better Tweets by removing the option to be long-winded
Twitter-via-SMS was compelling when the only other way to use the service was their original Web interface, but now that Twitter support is baked into umpty gazillion apps and devices there's no reason to limit the rest of the service just to cater to it. And even if you agree that shorter Tweets are always better Tweets (I would argue that point, but that's another discussion), why does Twitter need to enforce that at the application level? If shorter Tweets are better Tweets, that should be a law that enforces itself as people follow those who keep it short and sweet and unfollow those who don't, no? Why not just let people post what they want to post, and trust the users of Twitter to know what they like?
Why do subreddits (and to some extent this site) have moderators rather than letting people post what they want to post, and trusting them to upvote what they like?
One might argue they shouldn't, but certainly many people see value in it.
A subreddit is a shared resource, and moderation is useful because going based on popular opinion has various flaws, like the fact that the people more likely to vote are also more likely to be crazy.
A Twitter stream isn't a shared resource so that doesn't apply. If a bunch of dickheads come into a subreddit they can really ruin it. But I choose who goes into my Twitter stream, so dickheads can't get in, and if they manage to trick me then I can just remove them.
In essence, on Twitter, each subscriber is moderator of their own little subreddit of one.
True, "dickheads" invading subreddits and upvoting each other, or more generally new people coming in whose preferences may differ from the existing community, is one way the voting algorithm can fail to naturally enforce quality, but it's not the only one. As I see it, most (existing) users of a given subreddit appreciate the improvement in quality that results from moderation, yet when some of the lazier instincts of those same people are pooled by mass low-effort voting, funny or memetic or clickbait or flamebait but ultimately low-quality posts tend to rise. For example, on this site, posts whose titles contain "NSA" and some other keyboards are or were penalized in the ranking, because people here, including many of the most famous users on the site, just love to read and talk about the NSA - which isn't itself bad, but since it's so easy and compelling to instinctively hit the upvote arrow on such posts, it tends to get too common and repetitive, so the algorithm taps (tapped?) the brakes. (At least, that's my interpretation of the reason.) As another example, /r/smashbros is a big subreddit for the Super Smash Bros. competitive community, and it's often happened that the moderators banned X type of posts (comics, non-competitive gifs) because a lot of people were complaining about it and there seemed to be consensus against - but that didn't mean the posts didn't get upvotes. You could chalk that up to a difference between the vocal minority and the many lurkers, but I don't think that's the full story.
Admittedly, I've strayed pretty far from the sort of things that can happen on Twitter. After all, it's not like any feature of the site would discourage me from following 100 people who all constantly post about the NSA, and voting is different from posting. But I think there's a similar general principle when it comes to length, the one important form of "moderation" the site actually has: a user might get annoyed at the overall phenomenon of the length of the posts in their timeline, but it's difficult to exert social pressure on everyone to keep length down, and really easy to feel like one cannot say what one wants in 140 characters, whether or not this is true, if one is not actually forced to make it fit.
Also, the aforementioned general case of splits in the community does apply to Twitter. You can unfollow dickheads, but if lots of popular users are in the subgroup that actually prefers long posts, those users who prefer short ones will have a hard time keeping their streams "clean" without feeling like they're missing out. Of course, if one considers the Internet as a whole, one could say that following long-post users is the equivalent of participating in social websites that allow long posts, but unlike the discrete universes of different sites, or even of different subreddits (in the sense that a given post or comment goes only to a single subreddit), Twitter's network allows, and indeed is designed for, cliques to partially overlap and mix, making it harder to establish different "spaces" with different rules, social customs, culture.
Then we can all celebrate the end of an arbitrary and obsolete limitation?
The justifications for the 140-character limit have always been:
1) It was necessary in order to make Twitter-via-SMS work
2) It forces users to create better Tweets by removing the option to be long-winded
Twitter-via-SMS was compelling when the only other way to use the service was their original Web interface, but now that Twitter support is baked into umpty gazillion apps and devices there's no reason to limit the rest of the service just to cater to it. And even if you agree that shorter Tweets are always better Tweets (I would argue that point, but that's another discussion), why does Twitter need to enforce that at the application level? If shorter Tweets are better Tweets, that should be a law that enforces itself as people follow those who keep it short and sweet and unfollow those who don't, no? Why not just let people post what they want to post, and trust the users of Twitter to know what they like?