Twitter to Lift 140-Character Limit on Direct Messages; Cracks Down On Trolls

Twitter users will witness some useful changes on the micro-blogging website that will make the overall experience pleasant.

Twitter announced a major change on its Direct Message (DM) feature to let users express their thoughts more freely without worrying about the character limit.

According to the company's official developers blog, users will no longer be limited to 140 characters while messaging their social media friends via DM.

It shows Twitter is taking users' feedback to improve its site; after all, the company still falls far behind social network behemoth Facebook.

The change will not take effect immediately but will be rolled out in July, the company said.

Twitter is not exactly lifting the character limit on DM but is simply extending the count from 140 characters to 10,000, which is quite sufficient for lengthy posts. 

Separately, Twitter also announced in an official blog on Wednesday that it is finally cracking down on trolls on its site, a problem that has haunted its users for years. Instead of blocking individual accounts, users can import or share their block lists with people with their community.

The block lists will comprise abusive accounts flagged by users. By importing the list, a user can block all abusive accounts in one shot. In addition, a user can share his or her block list with other users to stop trolls.

The introduction of advanced blocking tools comes shortly after the company's CEO Dick Costolo expressed his disregard on how Twitter is handling trolls on its site.

"We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years. It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day," he said earlier this year, Tech First reports.