Stephen King & JK Rowling Slam Twitter’s New Character Limit

Twitter doubled its character limit to 280 per tweet for most users on Tuesday, but not everyone is happy about having the ability to say more on the social media site.

While some celebrities and users on Twitter have been having fun taking full advantage with the new, higher character limit, writers J.K. Rowling and Stephen King have both expressed their displeasure with the social media site’s new wordiness.

On Wednesday, King kept his own character count low when he retweeted Rowling’s more pointed sentiments about the change, offering his own “what she said” agreement. You can read them both in the tweet below.

“Twitter’s destroyed its USP,” Rowling wrote. “The whole point, for me, was how inventive people could be within that concise framework.”

And King wasn’t the only writer who agreed with Rowling’s sentiments. Neil Gaiman retweeted King’s retweet and added his own “what he said she said” agreement.

While King and Rowling’s objection to the character increase was duly noted, it’s worth noting that both authors aren’t exactly known for being brief. It novel writer King has written his own share of lengthy works — including 2009’s 1074 page Under The Dome — and the final installment of Rowling’s Harry Potter series of books, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, comes in at just under a thousand pages in paperback form.

And while writers like King and Rowling are unhappy about the increase in characters, they may not have that much to worry about. It looks like just because users have access to 280 they aren’t using them all. CNN reports that according to Twitter, only 5 percent of tweets from those in the initial 280 character test group were longer than 140 characters and only 2 percent were longer than 190 characters.