It is often said that constraints affect creative production, both in terms
of form and quality. Online social media platforms frequently impose
constraints on the content that users can produce, limiting the range of
possible contributions. Do these restrictions tend to push creators towards
producing more or less successful content? How do creators adapt their
contributions to fit the limits imposed by social media platforms? To answer
these questions, we conduct an observational study of a recent event: on
November 7, 2017, Twitter changed the maximum allowable length of a tweet from
140 to 280 characters, thereby significantly altering its signature constraint.
In the first study of this switch, we compare tweets with nearly or exactly 140
characters before the change to tweets of the same length posted after the
change. This setup enables us to characterize how users alter their tweets to
fit the constraint and how this affects their tweets' success. We find that in
response to a length constraint, users write more tersely, use more
abbreviations and contracted forms, and use fewer definite articles. Also,
although in general tweet success increases with length, we find initial
evidence that tweets made to fit the 140-character constraint tend to be more
successful than similar-length tweets written when the constraint was removed,
suggesting that the length constraint improved tweet quality.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of AAAI ICWSM 201
