Originally a social networking service focused on sending 140 character “tweets,” Twitter is considering revising its character limit to allow for up to 10,000 letters.

The model is designed so that the first couple hundred symbols are displayed, with the user clicking the tweet to display more information. But what’s so special about the number 140?

Contemporary technologies influenced the the original limit. Cofounder Jack Dorsey tweeted that the original limit was influenced by cell phone texts that only allowed for 160 characters. The company decided to allocate 20 of the characters to store the username.

However, part of Twitter’s appeal to the younger generation lies in its brevity and short word count.

“I just started [a Twitter account] and some of the positives are that I can keep up with the general social media trends,” Amy Jin (10) said. “You can tweet short messages, and having a word limit has an advantage in that you can send messages quickly.”

As Twitter extended its reach internationally, it had varied promise among different languages. For instance, the limit offers non-alphabet based languages such as Chinese, a lot more freedom than those using the Latin script.

These limitations may have been responsible for a disparity in the number of users per country. For instance, four million Germans compared to 26 million Japanese own an account.

Other external pressures may have led to the extension of the limit. Twitter’s user base is substantially weaker than that of its competitors: a projected 310.2 million in 2016. In contrast, Facebook currently has 1.5 billion users.

Despite this move, various users expressed their opposition by arguing that it detracted from the company’s core characteristics. In a poll conducted by Telegraph, 63 percent of the readers responded negatively to the change. Indeed, it is altogether possible that extending the length of messages would make it more difficult for Twitter to differentiate itself from competitors, further weakening its position.

“I think [Twitter] will run into problems as people are given too much choice. It’s the same reason Netflix doesn’t allow for downloading movies even if it is capable of doing so,” Jonathan Hochberg (12) said. “It’s something called the paradox of choice, a psychological phenomenon, where having more options leaves you paralyzed. People are going to be thinking more about what they text [so] it won’t be that interesting.”

If Twitter decides to go through with this change, it will find it harder to differentiate itself from other social networking services. But that is balanced by its respective need to attract larger audiences.