Pithy Content

For more than a dozen years, the 140 character limit of Twitter was an excellent product for writers (and readers).

The product design — a holdover from 160 character limits of SMS — was a public training medium which operated as a forcing-function to make writers be concise and self-edit ruthlessly.

The “tweetstorm” was a user hack to thread together longer pieces of content, but it was all housed in the context of microblogging.

A generation of users who engaged with the product learned this skill, and others benefited from their training.

Pithy content respects the reader, packing enough information to deliver an idea and prompt an action.