As the article below points out, part of the current charm (if one can call it that) of Twitter is that it forces people to present concise ideas within the 140-character format. Allowing really long "tweets" would seem to turn it into just another Reddit. Someone would then have to reinvent a replacement for Twitter. In the interim, a major antidote to the ubiquitous textual diarrhea of the blogosphere would be lost. The phrase "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" comes to mind.

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Twitter’s reported plans to remove Twitter’s defining feature are terrible
Latest rumors point to 10,000-character tweets, possibly by the end of the quarter.
by Peter Bright - Jan 5, 2016

Some dude named Shakespeare once wrote: brevity is the soul of tweet. Smart fellow. The 140-character limit is not merely some incidental feature of Twitter; it's the very essence of the service. The mandate to be concise means that Twitter distinguishes itself from abundant conventional blogging platforms. Tweets can be observations, jokes, questions, or carefully distilled ideas, but they cannot be lengthy treatises or complex arguments.

This essential feature is under threat. Re/code is reporting that Twitter is considering removing the 140-character limit and replacing it with a 10,000-character cap. This isn't the first time we've heard such reports; Re/code wrote the same thing in September.

The report suggests that long tweets will be hidden behind some kind of user interaction to expand them, meaning that Twitter timelines will continue to pack in multiple tweets, and we won't be forced to scroll past long essays on the service. This means that the Twitter experience with longer tweets will be similar to the current one.

But it won't be identical. The nature of what people write will change. Freed from the editorial constraint that the 140-character limit imposes, Twitter risks losing both the quickfire off-the-cuff gems, the ones banged out almost stream-of-consciousness style during the latest presidential debate or award ceremony, and the carefully considered, elaborately crafted tweets that use every one of the 140 characters for meaning and purpose. Twitter wants to change the very thing that makes Twitter great, because Twitter is trying to figure out how to make money with the beloved service. Removing the character limit, however, is a terrible idea.

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http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/twitters-reported-plans-to-remove-twitters-defining-feature-are-terrible/