You see this now, whole paragraphs of a noteworthy book punctuating a timeline, people taking screenshots of text, or otherwise cluttering up my Twitter with textual soundbites in the guise of a JPEG
a.) These are not very accessible
b.) I am too lazy to transcribe / OCR these
c.) It defeats the purpose of Twitter
d.) It would be far more handy to have big text blobs like this in a Tweet's JSON schema Something like
{ textBlob: '...book quotes galore...'}
b.) Images as text are a huge waste of resources. A lot of bandwidth could be saved by persuading tweeps to use a text-blob instead of an image (Free bandwidth people, that's what we all want is it not?!)
Not if there are tools that abstract away all the difficulty. Type 10K chars into a box; hit post; magically the first 140 show up as a text and the rest as an image.
I think they should have a weekly character limit and let users use those characters as they want. That way you get a limit to prevent just reams and reams of characters in tweets, but allow flexibility with how you tweet.
I like this idea, or let users filter by what they want to see. 200 character, 500 character, 5000 character.
It still seems like twitter is trying to find their niche. The 140 character limit is long past its purpose, but it's also kind of a defining characteristic of twitter. It forces brief comments and an easy-skim timeline, at the expense of real conversation or information exchange.
> What was its purpose and why is it long past it?
To allow people to use Twitter over SMS. SMS are 160 characters, so a 140 character tweet leaves room for a 20 character header to allow for metadata and actions.
You can still use Twitter this way, which is why (as of relatively recently) you couldn't post a tweet that began with the word "Get", even from the web interface.
SMS has a 160 character limit, and Twitter was originally supposed to be SMS driven. I personally don't know anyone who has ever Tweeted via SMS though, or whether that is still even possible.
I used it on an old Moto Razr for a while back in college when that was my daily driver. Address is still in my phone copied from SIM to SIM to Cloud (shortcode 40404).
On an old iPhone with just basic speech to text abilities I would sometimes use Bluetooth to "text twitter ..." and that worked. (Nowadays we got our Siris and Cortanas and direct app integration, but that "text twitter" is still sometimes a more reliable voice trigger than "tweet".)
I still often turn on SMS notifications for accounts I want to specifically hear from or events I'm attending.
TWITTER
Twitter Basics: Why 140-Characters, And How to Write More
We’re all used to the 140-character limit by now, but do you know how it started? Here’s a little history lesson for anyone wondering why they’ve got to condense their thoughts into 140-characters or less – and how to get around the limit without turning off your followers.
The origins of the 140-character limit
Once upon a time, long long ago… a group of young programmers whipped up a program that could send SMS to and from a small group of recipients.
This blossomed into Twitter, a web- and mobile- based messaging system that lets users send short messages – known as tweets – to one another.
So why the 140-character limit?
Twitter was (and still is) a service that relied heavily on mobile-messaging. Sure, you can send and receive tweets on your computer, but a huge draw of Twitter in the early days was its ability to be accessed from mobile phones.
And since the worldwide standard length of SMS (or text messages on phones) is 160-characters, the founders of Twitter thought it wise to stay within that bounds so as not to inundate people’s phones with 3 or 4 staggered, delayed, or even partially missing 4-part messages.
140-characters was chosen as a good length, leaving 20 characters for the username of the sender. This way, anyone receiving a tweet via SMS would get the whole tweet in a single text message, with nothing spilling over into a second or third message that pops up minutes later.
Well... some back-of-the-envelope math. Assuming average characters-per-word of 4.5[1] and also add 1 for space/punctuation for a word unit of 5.5:
10000/5.5 = 1818 words.
1800 words @ 250 wpm average reading speed is ~7 minutes.
A 10,000 char (7 minute article) expansion looks to me like a "micro-blogging" platform rather than "tweeting". I'm guessing it all goes back to Twitter trying many things to become bigger than traditional Twitter. Hence the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513237
(It goes without saying that not every "mega" tweet will use all 10,000 chars.)
Wouldn't average characters per sentence be a slightly better measure? In German and other Germanic languages it's common with compounded words, thus word XY seem long but would in English just be written as X Y.
the 160 character limit on twitter helped me learn to speak more concisely.
I've had an account since 2009, but didn't start using it until 2014. It was work at first - I didn't "get" it - but i stuck with it, and gradually i enjoyed it more. All my tweets went through to faceebok, where they recieved more positive feedback than my typical facebook posts.
People can read 160 characters of text quickly, and enjoy it. Long paragraphs, not so much.
I originally agreed with you, but after thinking about it I think the devil is in the details of how this is released. That is, Twitter's uniqueness is that it is geared towards short, real-time "bursts of consciousness", but people with lots of followers still occasionally put out long "blogs in tweet form" with multiple tweets.
If Twitter keeps the focus on the short bursts, but still has a separate way to do "Twitter blogs" or whatever, I think it could work. If Twitter just unconditionally changes all Tweets to 10k it seems like it would kill what makes Twitter unique in the first place.
Completely non-sequitur fact, but maybe fun from a "hacker" perspective:
Most parakeet cages I've seen in bird stores have a bell-in-a-ball type toy. Try picking it up and ringing it sometime. For some reason, all the parakeets will stop chattering as long as the bell is ringing.
I think they should increase their character limit linearly with time. Kinda like Gmail storage back in the day. Twitter wouldn't be twitter without short messages. Or maybe allow users to skip the limit once a day.
We already have that - it is called tumblr. Also the social media outragists will have slightly harder time pulling things out of context - think about all the other media which income comes from producing outrage over tweets ...
Twitter's limit is too low, but it does have a certain appeal, and I'm following a lot of smart people that express a lot in 140 chars. Would be happy if this limit was raised to 250 chars.
But raising to 10,000 chars would probably kill Twitter for me.
I don't think the size of tweets will have much of an effect on load. I imagine the bulk of the cost is in processing a request, rather than the size of it.
Yeah, my first thought was "The Death of Twitter has been announced". Although, I left Twitter for G+ quite a while ago precisely because of the character limit.
If G+ serves as a valid alternative to Twitter for your needs then you were using Twitter differently than most. Twitter's value is in its network, not the ability to share longform content, and G+ can't touch Twitter as a social network.
Yeah, it was super bittersweet and still is. My developer circle is mostly on Twitter, which I still interact with from time to time, to see what is going on in that circle.
I just hate trying to micromanage my words and grammar sooo much.
Yeah they should separate out links (with a maximum number total links not characters per post) and hash tags (again with a maximum number of total hash tags not characters per post). Something like 5 links and 15 hash tags should be enough for even the most hardcore of Twitter users. Then up the post limit to 200 or 250 characters.
I have heard about Twitter looking into upping the limits for years now and I think they are over thinking the problem. Then again I have no idea if their backend is some how weirdly designed with the 140 character limit and changing that might require a lot of work. I wouldn't have thought so though. Well I should say I hope not, you never know what some devs do ;)
640 characters limit is perfect on Sublevel. The average number of characters per post on Sublevel is the same as Facebook. You can see more statistic on the about page.
I think it will work if they make the long tweet into a native card, like a screenshot, instead of "read more." Having too many truncated tweets + "read more" would kill the experience. Twitter works because it's skimmable.
Removing the character limit is similar to the spam problem. It shifts the mental burden from the sender to the receiver. Instead of the sender being forced to compress, the receiver has to spend more time processing the text.
Meh, I doubt it would bring me back. 90% of my friends are on FB and the lack of a limit (or one I've ever hit) is quite nice. I'm able to write out full sentences with much less ambiguity or "text-speak" and while FB isn't my favourite company ever I'm going to go where my friends are at the end of the day. I don't write pages and pages or even multiple paragraphs most of the time but 1-2 sentences is normally not enough to express a full thought and because of that Twitter just doesn't work for me.
Presumably, post-140 Twitter will be pretty much the same as classical 140 twitter, but instead of 3/4 of all twerps ending with links to properties outside of Twitter, a huge chunk of those will link to more content inside of Twitter.
The only major change in post-140 Twitter would be the death of the Andreessen-style twerpstorm.
> The only major change in post-140 Twitter would be the death of the Andreessen-style twerpstorm
You'd think that's the case but I'm not so sure about that.
The hidden secret of secret of Tweetstorms is that they take up the space of multiple tweets, which means that people can retweet more times (people do retweet entire Tweetstorms!) and occupy the entire space on their followers' timelines.
Although, if you Tweetstorm when a 10k character limit exist, the shenanigans would be obvious. Anyone who pulled this would instantly get an unfollow from me, of course.
Also, I feel like "Tweetstorm" are also closer to the raw metal of how people actually think out loud (or at least anecdotally how I tend to think out loud), building from the last thought a small fragment at a time. To some extent that's what I appreciate about Twitter is sometimes capturing the raw point-to-point (scattered) thought process over blogs where one has a tendency to expand, revisit, and rewrite, obscuring the thought process but building a better narrative in the result.
I like the idea of going back, "merging tweets" into a collection, and then writing a narrative on top of it, connecting dots and building revisions that complete it as a "post". I guess kind of like Storify.
From what i understand they wont remove 140 tweets but will introduce their own variation of "posts".
Every media distribution site atm seems to try to also own the content.
Twitter's value isnt that you have to write short messages but that others can scan dozens of ideas/tweets of multiple people in a very short time. They wont take that away. Most likely you will even have to attach a 1400 tweet to the post.
The Twitter engineering team is probably hating this decision. I bet a lot of their infrastructure is built around the assumption that tweet.txt is short :) This has huge implication on the data schema, caching, search, etc.
If that's the case, that's their own fault. Seriously.
As an engineer, you can hardcode your assumptions or make them parametric. I get that 140 chars has been a core part of the Twitter identity, and maybe there are some infrastructural aspects that have to be hardcoded to optimize for that. But if they've got `140`s sprinkled all over their code base because that was the assumption of the day, god help them.
Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest.
To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet would be much nicer.
If they implement the feature like that, which is implied in the article, this would be a big improvement to Twitter in my opinion.
One more click to get to content. Millenias worth of clickbait scrolling. Why not summarize Medium articles into 140 characters and slap on a multiplexed feed?
One thing I've wanted to see tried with Twitter is the idea that you have your typical stream of tweets (vertical), but that any tweet can have depth (by swiping horizontally). Your "my thoughts" example would indicate "1/8" automatically, updating as it was created.
Means that someone can read as usual, or delve for the full series of tweets. They could provide an indication to the writer of what percentage of people read to which depth, for example.
It could work well for presenting news articles (sentence or paragraph at a time), photo galleries/essays, slidedecks, stories, advertising, etc. Using a news article as an example, some people will be interested in just the headline, others in the first three bits, a few in the full story to its end.
This is a really cool idea. It's a really simple solution to the same problem that would be really beautiful and easy to use on mobile especially. It doesn't quite reach the same depth, but I think it's a good way to start.
Always had it on my list to build a prototype of the concept and pitch it to media companies. Baffles me that they do so much work plugging Twitter handles for newsreaders, journalists, etc but then use a platform that hardly helps them.
- Cards seem quite similar to a carousel with maybe different movement options.
- Twitter character limit is already exceeded by people writing somewhere and posting the screenshotted image of the text, which is awful.
- 1/N.. N/N style can be expressed better by extended character limits, but that will decrease the number of tweets, which a public company may see as a deteriorating metric.
Unfortunately Twitter has more usability problems than char limit in the main timeline user interface.
- Viewing a conversation is pretty much confusing. You click on a tweet, it expands and it's not obvious how the conversation with a tree-branching structure proceeds
Ugh. Marc Andreesen is the worst with this. I had to stop following him. Twitter is the wrong platform if you want to smear 1500 characters worth of information across multiple tweets.
actually we get the implementation, but it is bad UX practise. it adds friction to the reading experience and will increase the quantity of tweets with truncated text within the first 140 chars. Twitter poorly handles this already with its URL preview cards. from a UX side, it's bad no matter how much spin Twitter will bring.
I was initially really against this, but parent comment brings a compelling argument: people are already using the service to say more than 140chars worth of stuff. The current methods to do it result in a far worse user experience than the tried and true "Read More" button would.
That said, I'm skeptical of it just in terms of product definition. Like Instagram adding portrait/landscape photos, more than 140 characters to a tweet does nothing but obscure what exactly the product is and how you're supposed to use it (even if people circumvent that anyhow).
I agree ethanbond with your 3rd para. It will muddle the product definition even further. It's rather telling to me that Twitter is willing to AB this without concern for its image or userbase - one that is mostly providing negative sentiment.
UX is something many businesses seem to really struggle with. If unnecessary friction is added, it really should cause stakeholders and designers to pause. The "read more" CTA will lead to more truncated tweets within the first 140 chars, something that is visually unappealing and breaks the reading experience by forcing a manual action. The workarounds you describe are not used by everyone and I'd wager that most users simply keep their posts within the 140 char limit rather than pict-tweet or storm a longer convo. Yes it forces brevity, but that is the Twitter identity which supports the product's skimmability usefulness. Give users a read more option, and many will post a few extra chars just because they don't have to put much thought into their wording now. Short term: usage goes up. Long term: quality decreases as Twitter becomes just another Facebook or Medium. It will be worse than Medium though because the audience Twitter is going after is more generic.
I've always argued that Twitter's userbase is more influential and valuable because of its forced brevity and fact that it was unique.
I already avoid truncated tweets and want to read long-form content elsewhere. So, I won't be using Twitter more. Maybe others will, but again, I'd wager that Twitter is simply sliding down a path that will be ultimately more harmful for its long term sustainability.
Personally, I love aspect ratios on Insta. It's a far better posting experience. As far as browsing, it's pretty much the same as before, I'd say. I haven't noticed anything, other than fewer awkwardly letterboxed images.
The way i know it from imgur comments it's not that bad. There the comments are not nessecarily sorted by time. What's the issue? It still discourages longer rants because every write up- and download cycle forces a short wait.
With this addition they will have officially become a user-focused Reddit. It's certainly not a bad thing but I doubt it's where the Twitter devs saw themselves heading. I'm sure people will continue to write 140 character messages but they'll probably become a minority over time. The bulk of tweets will just become title+link to external content or title+discussion starter.
> With this addition they will have officially become a user-focused Reddit.
I totally disagree. I still find it impossible to follow threads of conversation on Twitter. I'm a software developer and don't consider myself to be an idiot, either.
(Unrelated: I accidentally downvoted you when I was trying to copy-and-paste, and I'm terribly sorry!)
Agreed. Ive been frustrated looking at the tweet at the root of what I know is a long, branching conversation with many participants, unable to see the flow or follow it at all. Slashdot and Kuro5hin solved threaded/nested conversations over a decade ago. How does Twitter still suck at it?
I do think there is a tendency for social media sites to converge towards the same thing. As features are added, and limitations are removed, the lines between different types of sites begins to blur. Something that started as some simple niche site, starts allowing users to host content, create forums, have their own chat app, adds features from discussion sites, etc. Eventually we will end up with some kind of hyper-FaceTubeRedditumblrkype.
> Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest.
So Twitter wants to be RSS with better discovery. If there were discovery and UX for blogs like there is for podcasts (Pocketcasts, Overcast, etc.), then Twitter wouldn't even have a leg up on RSS at all.
I've often dreamed of a decentralized "Twitter" that allows you to subscribe to any Twitter, Facebook, or blogging feed and makes them all equal, first-class citizens (including the ability to reply/retweet/etc.)
Ask 99.9% of Sticher/Pocket Casts/Overcast/iTunes users what RSS is. They'll have no idea, and yet those apps rely on RSS to subscribe to podcasts.
The application can obfuscate the underlying technology. You don't need to know what RSS is to use it every day and love it, just as you don't need to know about DNS, TCP/IP, or most other internet technologies to enjoy the web.
Ok, that makes sense, although the content creators for iTunes, etc, still often have to find out what RSS is.
I'm still not sure what your point is - you said Twitter is trying to "be" RSS, but that's just the format, not the application. Twitter is not trying to aggregate content from elsewhere, either.
I don't get it. Twitter is a one to many broadcast channel. Its point is to be public. Privacy doesnt factor in. I think you could make a fake email, but twitter serves as a public channel so if you want privacy and twitter you are sort of asking for an sms message?
You give up privacy in many ways on Twitter, not just when you publish content.
Twitter can track you across third-party sites using its widgets, and it also knows your subscribing/reading behavior.
A decentralized system could be self-hosted and only pull in data through RSS, keeping you as anonymous as the IP address that you use. You'd only give up anonymity by replying to posts.
I've often dreamed of a decentralized "Twitter" that allows you to subscribe to any Twitter, Facebook, or blogging feed and makes them all equal, first-class citizens (including the ability to reply/retweet/etc.)
aka FriendFeed/Google Buzz. Neither of which were at all successful or exist anymore.
The problem is that there is no incentive to use them as platforms. People just output their other primary sources through them, and then engage on their primary platform.
That makes them horrible for users (who write comments and never hear back).
I don't think it will be a big improvement - I think it will become Medium Nano. Which is bad, because Medium and Wordpress (etc) already own that space, and a nano version adds nothing useful.
140c is great for one-liners and linkbait, which is - apparently - the main reason people read Twitter.
If it turns into a micro-blogging stream of extended self-expression, I think a lot of people won't have time for that.
If going beyond the 140 visible limit (or however many it ends up being) is highly discouraged (by the rest of the content being highly unlikely to be seen), I could see this working OK without lessening the magic of Twitter too much.
Agree with you. Twitter is way more easy to skim than FB or LinkedIn.
To be honest, I find the limit of 140 characters as its best feature because it is something that forces me to distill my thoughts in as less words as possible. A kind of exercise.
Also, this fixes an existing usability and accessibility nightmare of Twitter. People already post longer texts, just either split into multiple tweets (a horrible distraction if you don’t want to see it and incredibly hard to read if you do) or as screenshots (throwing accessibility completely out of the window – also not as nice an experience whenever reception is flaky).
I honestly see this more of a fix. All these horrible ways of using Twitter which are already commonplace will no longer be necessary. I don’t think it will fundamentally change how Twitter is used. People already use it in that way.
> One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet would be much nicer.
If people want to use twitter in that way than it's not the right place for them, there are already similar platform out there. Twitter's core and unique feature is micro blogging platform and i think it's never loose that unique feature.
> Twitter's core and unique feature is micro blogging platform
Trust me, from many, many discussions with people at Twitter, they absolutely do not see themselves as a micro-blogging platform, and do not enjoy the comparison.
Based on tweets with the #Twitter10k hashtag, many users don't think it sounds like a good idea. Wall Street and the userbase seem to both agree for once.
A good solution would be having a 10000 character limit, but formatting under-140 tweets differently so they stand out more. This would encourage people to keep things short, while giving them a way to publish longer posts if they really want to.
I must be the only one who thinks this is a good idea (not the 10,000-char limit in specific, but something much higher than 140-char).
Some of the most interesting ideas I've seen on Twitter were in tweetstorms, which is a pretty nasty and ugly hack itself. Proponents of the 140-char limit usually cite some notion of terseness and thought-density, but I see more half-formed ideas and deliberate grammar/spelling mangling to make things fit. That's not terseness, that's gray-matter-powered lossy compression.
But I'm also one of those crazy people who uses Facebook like others use Twitter - I don't write whole essays but 140 chars is like thinking through a straw.
(Side note: I also have a pet theory that Twitter's problems with epic shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or less)
>I also have a pet theory that Twitter's problems with epic shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or less
I'm pretty sure those arguments and "shit-storms" are occurring everywhere there is written text on the internet, regardless of character limitations.
Sure, though I feel like it's worse on Twitter than in most places for a few reasons: it's really easy to retweet and disseminate someone's post, and the public nature of accounts/tweets makes it very easy to dogpile.
On Facebook you might get some flak from your uncle, on a forum you might get into a tussle with another poster, but there are natural limits to the severity and the scale. On Twitter many of these limits are stripped away - it's very easy, and very common, to retweet someone "look at this fucking idiot" and invite your circles to pile on, many of whom will have never heard of the offender before.
This is also how harassment and abuse on Twitter is worse than other platforms - on Facebook you might get into a flamewar with your uncle and face awkward family dinners for a while, but on Twitter a dogpile is millions of users large, and you're statistically guaranteed to get a few people with legitimate screws loose in that bunch who might actually SWAT you or stalk you or otherwise take things way, way too far.
Add this to the fact that Twitter's length limits discourage nuance and encourage soundbites and you get IMO the worst intersection of soundbite culture, outrage culture, and massive built-in virality.
If Twitter is finally willing to increase the limit, maybe they should consider options to monetize it. Like my suggestion from years ago that they should sell a $1 per month subscription for users wanting to double their limit: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=65
I can't believe that there are so many backers of the old limit! Don't you guys hate that you have to always compromise on punctuation, select shorter (but less precise) synonyms, and other just to fit into the story that Twitter was trying to push all this time, but which wasn't the reality (of people using Twitter via SMS)? Okay, now, Twitter goes to another extreme - from too short, to too long. I'm fine with shorter message, but 140 is way too short. Modern phones combine SMSs into a bigger blob. Use that and just make a limit of 5 SMSs or something along these lines.
it's what gave Twitter it's identity and allowed me to discover valuable information quickly. sticking a read more button to expand a tweet is just lazy and bad UX but worse, alters the fundamental usefulness of Twitter for me. it basically breaks the reading experience while introducing a host of issues and unnecessary friction. I'll surely alter my usage as well. I post way less now because of all of this AB testing and lack of product leadership.
I actually really enjoy the process of having to re-write my thoughts to have them fit. Reminds me what is crucial and what is superfluous. (139 chars)
u r so rite! 140 char limit limits my thoughts 2 that which is critical. without it id waste tons of space expressing my brilliant thoughts (140chars)
(speaking of crap formatting, I still can't get used to HN comment formatting.. apparently no way to make a line feed or a list, at least, none that's documented)
But seriously, it's ironic that Twitter limits tweets to 140char but the site and mobile app are some of the worst wastes of screen real estate I've ever seen. I keep trying to find it of some value but I just can't do it. Either nothing shows up in my feed, or I follow "must follow" people and get to hear them go on about random crap I don't care about. My real actual Twitter mobile app feed currently looks like this:
* retweet
* promoted tweet
* while you were away (1)
* while you were away (2)
* while you were away (3)
* while you were away (4)
* while you were away (5)
* actual tweet in proper chronological order (1)
* actual tweet in proper chronological order (2)
* people you may want to follow (1)
* people you may want to follow (2)
* people you may want to follow (3)
I had to scroll down 4 entire (iPhone 6) screenfuls of tweets before I got to the chronologic list of recent tweets I actually want to see, and even then, saw only 2 of them before the next chunk of junk! The light grey bar on a light grey background is poor delineation between sections, as well. It blows my mind that a mostly-text medium with such a strict character limit manages to have vastly worse information density than Facebook.
I use them differently, too, of course. Facebook feels more personal; I'm friends with real-life friends, and am a member of some groups for fun. Most of the updates feel personal to me.
Twitter I use to follow "important figures" and some friends.. but no friends tweet, and the important figures never say anything interesting.. or at least, if they do, I can't get to it, because the UI is such garbage.
True, but often people need to post multiple tweets, and somebody manages to reply in-between and then tracking the conversation becomes harder on the reader.
This is going to kill Twitter for me. A few more characters is likely a good move. 256 seems nice.
But, I don't use Twitter for long form content. I do use Twitter as a way for people to get me interested in long form, or to raise awareness of something.
If my feed gets clogged with long form, I'm moving on. Too much info, wrong use case.
Seems to me Twitter could gather a lot more value out reconsideration of how hostile they have been to the ecosystem that grew up around Twitter.
Finally! I have been wanting them to remove that for a long time now.
Twitters biggest problem is that they are a protocol router more than a destination. And so while people use it to find content they consume this content somewhere else out of reach for twitters add engine.
Now that people will start writing on twitter this will mean a lot more time is spent on twitter consuming content on twitter and reading ads on twitter.
With this they get to keep the protocol part while keeping users longer on their platform to consume content.
I am talking about Twitters biggest problems from the point of whether it will survive you talk about it from the point of whether it's a better product experience.
it's a short-term fix. also, the details will likely introduce UX issues when so many others could have been addressed. this, along with a non-reverse chronological timeline is a product pivot with lots of risk. maybe it'll work out, but I'll use it less. I'd rather invest in time elsewhere based on where Twitter is headed.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threada.) These are not very accessible
b.) I am too lazy to transcribe / OCR these
c.) It defeats the purpose of Twitter
d.) It would be far more handy to have big text blobs like this in a Tweet's JSON schema Something like
b.) Images as text are a huge waste of resources. A lot of bandwidth could be saved by persuading tweeps to use a text-blob instead of an image (Free bandwidth people, that's what we all want is it not?!)Make the words cheap, and twitter will turn into just another prolix platform in a sea of noise.
Absent external effects, it's easier to write a long message than write concisely.
Twitter in its current form imposes an artificial cost on long messages, which encourages you to do the extra work to write something short.
Remove that cost, and you'll get more lazy, long messages.
That's my theory, anyway.
It still seems like twitter is trying to find their niche. The 140 character limit is long past its purpose, but it's also kind of a defining characteristic of twitter. It forces brief comments and an easy-skim timeline, at the expense of real conversation or information exchange.
What was its purpose and why is it long past it?
It's past its purpose because noone uses Twitter via SMS and people routinely circumvent it with text in images and multi-part tweets anyway.
To allow people to use Twitter over SMS. SMS are 160 characters, so a 140 character tweet leaves room for a 20 character header to allow for metadata and actions.
You can still use Twitter this way, which is why (as of relatively recently) you couldn't post a tweet that began with the word "Get", even from the web interface.
On an old iPhone with just basic speech to text abilities I would sometimes use Bluetooth to "text twitter ..." and that worked. (Nowadays we got our Siris and Cortanas and direct app integration, but that "text twitter" is still sometimes a more reliable voice trigger than "tweet".)
I still often turn on SMS notifications for accounts I want to specifically hear from or events I'm attending.
We’re all used to the 140-character limit by now, but do you know how it started? Here’s a little history lesson for anyone wondering why they’ve got to condense their thoughts into 140-characters or less – and how to get around the limit without turning off your followers.
The origins of the 140-character limit Once upon a time, long long ago… a group of young programmers whipped up a program that could send SMS to and from a small group of recipients.
This blossomed into Twitter, a web- and mobile- based messaging system that lets users send short messages – known as tweets – to one another.
So why the 140-character limit?
Twitter was (and still is) a service that relied heavily on mobile-messaging. Sure, you can send and receive tweets on your computer, but a huge draw of Twitter in the early days was its ability to be accessed from mobile phones.
And since the worldwide standard length of SMS (or text messages on phones) is 160-characters, the founders of Twitter thought it wise to stay within that bounds so as not to inundate people’s phones with 3 or 4 staggered, delayed, or even partially missing 4-part messages.
140-characters was chosen as a good length, leaving 20 characters for the username of the sender. This way, anyone receiving a tweet via SMS would get the whole tweet in a single text message, with nothing spilling over into a second or third message that pops up minutes later.
http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/twitter-basics-why-140-cha...
(It goes without saying that not every "mega" tweet will use all 10,000 chars.)
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=average+characters+per+word
http://www.extremetech.com/internet/79260-four-microblogging...
For German, where we have 14.3 characters per word on average[1], we get:
10'000/14.8 = 676 words.
676 words @ 250 wpm is 2 Minutes 42 Seconds.
A 2½ Minute article is very short, like a short comment in a newspaper, and would fit very well into a microblogging site.
[1] http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/durchschnitt...
It’s hard when you need 3 or 4 tweets for a simple sentence explaining why Sony DCP projectors used to be easier for piracy than competing products.
I wonder how pissed Ev will be when his old company steals his new company's idea - especially if Jack Dorsey gets all the credit.
[1]https://medium.com/data-lab/the-optimal-post-is-7-minutes-74...
I've had an account since 2009, but didn't start using it until 2014. It was work at first - I didn't "get" it - but i stuck with it, and gradually i enjoyed it more. All my tweets went through to faceebok, where they recieved more positive feedback than my typical facebook posts.
People can read 160 characters of text quickly, and enjoy it. Long paragraphs, not so much.
In keeping with the bird analogy, messages will be that annoying parakeet in the pet store rather than spring time finches.
If Twitter keeps the focus on the short bursts, but still has a separate way to do "Twitter blogs" or whatever, I think it could work. If Twitter just unconditionally changes all Tweets to 10k it seems like it would kill what makes Twitter unique in the first place.
Most parakeet cages I've seen in bird stores have a bell-in-a-ball type toy. Try picking it up and ringing it sometime. For some reason, all the parakeets will stop chattering as long as the bell is ringing.
But raising to 10,000 chars would probably kill Twitter for me.
I just hate trying to micromanage my words and grammar sooo much.
I have heard about Twitter looking into upping the limits for years now and I think they are over thinking the problem. Then again I have no idea if their backend is some how weirdly designed with the 140 character limit and changing that might require a lot of work. I wouldn't have thought so though. Well I should say I hope not, you never know what some devs do ;)
Removing the character limit is similar to the spam problem. It shifts the mental burden from the sender to the receiver. Instead of the sender being forced to compress, the receiver has to spend more time processing the text.
The only major change in post-140 Twitter would be the death of the Andreessen-style twerpstorm.
You'd think that's the case but I'm not so sure about that.
The hidden secret of secret of Tweetstorms is that they take up the space of multiple tweets, which means that people can retweet more times (people do retweet entire Tweetstorms!) and occupy the entire space on their followers' timelines.
Although, if you Tweetstorm when a 10k character limit exist, the shenanigans would be obvious. Anyone who pulled this would instantly get an unfollow from me, of course.
I like the idea of going back, "merging tweets" into a collection, and then writing a narrative on top of it, connecting dots and building revisions that complete it as a "post". I guess kind of like Storify.
Every media distribution site atm seems to try to also own the content.
Twitter's value isnt that you have to write short messages but that others can scan dozens of ideas/tweets of multiple people in a very short time. They wont take that away. Most likely you will even have to attach a 1400 tweet to the post.
As an engineer, you can hardcode your assumptions or make them parametric. I get that 140 chars has been a core part of the Twitter identity, and maybe there are some infrastructural aspects that have to be hardcoded to optimize for that. But if they've got `140`s sprinkled all over their code base because that was the assumption of the day, god help them.
Without the ability to format the longer text, 'Tweets' will just end up being unreadable.
To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet would be much nicer.
If they implement the feature like that, which is implied in the article, this would be a big improvement to Twitter in my opinion.
Means that someone can read as usual, or delve for the full series of tweets. They could provide an indication to the writer of what percentage of people read to which depth, for example.
It could work well for presenting news articles (sentence or paragraph at a time), photo galleries/essays, slidedecks, stories, advertising, etc. Using a news article as an example, some people will be interested in just the headline, others in the first three bits, a few in the full story to its end.
- Twitter character limit is already exceeded by people writing somewhere and posting the screenshotted image of the text, which is awful.
- 1/N.. N/N style can be expressed better by extended character limits, but that will decrease the number of tweets, which a public company may see as a deteriorating metric.
Unfortunately Twitter has more usability problems than char limit in the main timeline user interface.
- Viewing a conversation is pretty much confusing. You click on a tweet, it expands and it's not obvious how the conversation with a tree-branching structure proceeds
- "Read later" is needed independent of "Like"
Vivek Wadhwa, on the other hand... his rants were a mess.
I was initially really against this, but parent comment brings a compelling argument: people are already using the service to say more than 140chars worth of stuff. The current methods to do it result in a far worse user experience than the tried and true "Read More" button would.
That said, I'm skeptical of it just in terms of product definition. Like Instagram adding portrait/landscape photos, more than 140 characters to a tweet does nothing but obscure what exactly the product is and how you're supposed to use it (even if people circumvent that anyhow).
UX is something many businesses seem to really struggle with. If unnecessary friction is added, it really should cause stakeholders and designers to pause. The "read more" CTA will lead to more truncated tweets within the first 140 chars, something that is visually unappealing and breaks the reading experience by forcing a manual action. The workarounds you describe are not used by everyone and I'd wager that most users simply keep their posts within the 140 char limit rather than pict-tweet or storm a longer convo. Yes it forces brevity, but that is the Twitter identity which supports the product's skimmability usefulness. Give users a read more option, and many will post a few extra chars just because they don't have to put much thought into their wording now. Short term: usage goes up. Long term: quality decreases as Twitter becomes just another Facebook or Medium. It will be worse than Medium though because the audience Twitter is going after is more generic.
I've always argued that Twitter's userbase is more influential and valuable because of its forced brevity and fact that it was unique.
I already avoid truncated tweets and want to read long-form content elsewhere. So, I won't be using Twitter more. Maybe others will, but again, I'd wager that Twitter is simply sliding down a path that will be ultimately more harmful for its long term sustainability.
I totally disagree. I still find it impossible to follow threads of conversation on Twitter. I'm a software developer and don't consider myself to be an idiot, either.
(Unrelated: I accidentally downvoted you when I was trying to copy-and-paste, and I'm terribly sorry!)
I do think there is a tendency for social media sites to converge towards the same thing. As features are added, and limitations are removed, the lines between different types of sites begins to blur. Something that started as some simple niche site, starts allowing users to host content, create forums, have their own chat app, adds features from discussion sites, etc. Eventually we will end up with some kind of hyper-FaceTubeRedditumblrkype.
This is already what the bulk of tweets are today. What Twitter (and Facebook) want is for people to not have to leave to read external content.
So Twitter wants to be RSS with better discovery. If there were discovery and UX for blogs like there is for podcasts (Pocketcasts, Overcast, etc.), then Twitter wouldn't even have a leg up on RSS at all.
I've often dreamed of a decentralized "Twitter" that allows you to subscribe to any Twitter, Facebook, or blogging feed and makes them all equal, first-class citizens (including the ability to reply/retweet/etc.)
* Not to mention, even if folks knew what RSS was, they don't necessarily want to host their own blog.
The application can obfuscate the underlying technology. You don't need to know what RSS is to use it every day and love it, just as you don't need to know about DNS, TCP/IP, or most other internet technologies to enjoy the web.
I'm still not sure what your point is - you said Twitter is trying to "be" RSS, but that's just the format, not the application. Twitter is not trying to aggregate content from elsewhere, either.
Maybe not directly, but they sure make it easy for third party sites to have "Share this article via Twitter" buttons.
Twitter can track you across third-party sites using its widgets, and it also knows your subscribing/reading behavior.
A decentralized system could be self-hosted and only pull in data through RSS, keeping you as anonymous as the IP address that you use. You'd only give up anonymity by replying to posts.
aka FriendFeed/Google Buzz. Neither of which were at all successful or exist anymore.
The problem is that there is no incentive to use them as platforms. People just output their other primary sources through them, and then engage on their primary platform.
That makes them horrible for users (who write comments and never hear back).
140c is great for one-liners and linkbait, which is - apparently - the main reason people read Twitter.
If it turns into a micro-blogging stream of extended self-expression, I think a lot of people won't have time for that.
Tumblr?
To be honest, I find the limit of 140 characters as its best feature because it is something that forces me to distill my thoughts in as less words as possible. A kind of exercise.
I honestly see this more of a fix. All these horrible ways of using Twitter which are already commonplace will no longer be necessary. I don’t think it will fundamentally change how Twitter is used. People already use it in that way.
If people want to use twitter in that way than it's not the right place for them, there are already similar platform out there. Twitter's core and unique feature is micro blogging platform and i think it's never loose that unique feature.
Trust me, from many, many discussions with people at Twitter, they absolutely do not see themselves as a micro-blogging platform, and do not enjoy the comparison.
Some of the most interesting ideas I've seen on Twitter were in tweetstorms, which is a pretty nasty and ugly hack itself. Proponents of the 140-char limit usually cite some notion of terseness and thought-density, but I see more half-formed ideas and deliberate grammar/spelling mangling to make things fit. That's not terseness, that's gray-matter-powered lossy compression.
But I'm also one of those crazy people who uses Facebook like others use Twitter - I don't write whole essays but 140 chars is like thinking through a straw.
(Side note: I also have a pet theory that Twitter's problems with epic shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or less)
I'm pretty sure those arguments and "shit-storms" are occurring everywhere there is written text on the internet, regardless of character limitations.
On Facebook you might get some flak from your uncle, on a forum you might get into a tussle with another poster, but there are natural limits to the severity and the scale. On Twitter many of these limits are stripped away - it's very easy, and very common, to retweet someone "look at this fucking idiot" and invite your circles to pile on, many of whom will have never heard of the offender before.
This is also how harassment and abuse on Twitter is worse than other platforms - on Facebook you might get into a flamewar with your uncle and face awkward family dinners for a while, but on Twitter a dogpile is millions of users large, and you're statistically guaranteed to get a few people with legitimate screws loose in that bunch who might actually SWAT you or stalk you or otherwise take things way, way too far.
Add this to the fact that Twitter's length limits discourage nuance and encourage soundbites and you get IMO the worst intersection of soundbite culture, outrage culture, and massive built-in virality.
(speaking of crap formatting, I still can't get used to HN comment formatting.. apparently no way to make a line feed or a list, at least, none that's documented)
But seriously, it's ironic that Twitter limits tweets to 140char but the site and mobile app are some of the worst wastes of screen real estate I've ever seen. I keep trying to find it of some value but I just can't do it. Either nothing shows up in my feed, or I follow "must follow" people and get to hear them go on about random crap I don't care about. My real actual Twitter mobile app feed currently looks like this:
* retweet
* promoted tweet
* while you were away (1)
* while you were away (2)
* while you were away (3)
* while you were away (4)
* while you were away (5)
* actual tweet in proper chronological order (1)
* actual tweet in proper chronological order (2)
* people you may want to follow (1)
* people you may want to follow (2)
* people you may want to follow (3)
I had to scroll down 4 entire (iPhone 6) screenfuls of tweets before I got to the chronologic list of recent tweets I actually want to see, and even then, saw only 2 of them before the next chunk of junk! The light grey bar on a light grey background is poor delineation between sections, as well. It blows my mind that a mostly-text medium with such a strict character limit manages to have vastly worse information density than Facebook.
I use them differently, too, of course. Facebook feels more personal; I'm friends with real-life friends, and am a member of some groups for fun. Most of the updates feel personal to me.
Twitter I use to follow "important figures" and some friends.. but no friends tweet, and the important figures never say anything interesting.. or at least, if they do, I can't get to it, because the UI is such garbage.
10k blog posts with 140 charsbof content to decipher.... No thanks. Showing the first 140 only with a "read more" button does not fix that.
Rip twitter
But, I don't use Twitter for long form content. I do use Twitter as a way for people to get me interested in long form, or to raise awareness of something.
If my feed gets clogged with long form, I'm moving on. Too much info, wrong use case.
Seems to me Twitter could gather a lot more value out reconsideration of how hostile they have been to the ecosystem that grew up around Twitter.
Twitters biggest problem is that they are a protocol router more than a destination. And so while people use it to find content they consume this content somewhere else out of reach for twitters add engine.
Now that people will start writing on twitter this will mean a lot more time is spent on twitter consuming content on twitter and reading ads on twitter.
With this they get to keep the protocol part while keeping users longer on their platform to consume content.
We already have five-craptillion blogging platforms and I feel this change would morph Twitter into yet another one.
I can understand the motivation, but I'm not a fan of social networks tendency to be THE PLACE WHERE YOU DO EVERYTHING NOW.