Anticipated versus Actual Effects of Platform Design Change: A Case Study of Twitter's Character Limit

Abstract

The design of online platforms is both critically important and challenging, as any changes may lead to unintended consequences, and it can be hard to predict how users will react. Here we conduct a case study of a particularly important real-world platform design change: Twitter's decision to double the character limit from 140 to 280 characters to soothe users' need to "cram" or "squeeze" their tweets, informed by modeling of historical user behavior. In our analysis, we contrast Twitter's anticipated pre-intervention predictions about user behavior with actual post-intervention user behavior: Did the platform design change lead to the intended user behavior shifts, or did a gap between anticipated and actual behavior emerge? Did different user groups react differently? We find that even though users do not "cram" as much under 280 characters as they used to under 140 characters, emergent "cramming" at the new limit seems to not have been taken into account when designing the platform change. Furthermore, investigating textual features, we find that, although post-intervention "crammed" tweets are longer, their syntactic and semantic characteristics remain similar and indicative of "squeezing". Applying the same approach as Twitter policy-makers, we create updated counterfactual estimates and find that the character limit would need to be increased further to reduce cramming that re-emerged at the new limit. We contribute to the rich literature studying online user behavior with an empirical study that reveals a dynamic interaction between platform design and user behavior, with immediate policy and practical implications for the design of socio-technical systems.