Ex-twitter eng here. Twitter has been debating this change internally for at least 5 years now. They were afraid to pull the trigger because no one inside knows why they've had the success that they've had and they're afraid to change too much (lest they pull a Digg).
This move isn't made out of desperation, but it's probably being done right now because they've nothing to lose by randomly trying things.
Isn't it obvious? Twitter is a dopamine pump combined with a misunderstanding machine that has gamified the cult of personality.
Familiar readers feel a reward for their constant interpretive skimming of aborted thoughts, outsiders project the worst kind of interpretation to feel superior, as it automatically turns everything you post into a shareable post card with your face on it.
280 would be the absolute maximum. I think their hope is that the number of English tweets that reach that amount is very low; at the same time they allow users to tweet easier.
And in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images containing large blocks of text which is worse for everyone than just removing length limits.
> And in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images containing large blocks of text
The blog post explains how that’s not true with their Japanese example:
> Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese.
If Japanese people feel they have enough space to write their thoughts, why wouldn’t the English ones with a bit more space?
The point is that their analysis is garbage. They looked at the length of tweets, and what percentage of tweets hit the 140 character limit. But the reality is that users impacted by the limit either send multiple tweets (1/n, 2/n, ... n/n) or attach an image containing a block of text. How do you measure that?
Multiple tweets or attaching an image of a block of text are both annoying for users. If in one language users are more likely to be annoyed than in another, why not fix the problem?
The analysis was really interesting. I wonder if there's cultural bias as well - i.e. English speakers tend to be more verbose because we have a need to speak more
Hah, in Japanese and Chinese a lot of words are single characters. To use your post as an example, "analysis", "really", and "interesting" will probably be one character each, they're several UTF-8 bytes, but Twitter counts those still as single characters...
In Japanese those three words could be translated as 分析、本当に、面白い respectively, 8 characters in total - i.e. the same length as just "analysis" in English.
This seems rash. I feel like you should have to select something in order to have a 280 character tweet. I think the reason Twitter has worked is because of the constraints and the creativity working around said constraints. By opting everyone in immediately, I feel there may be some culture shock.
"Although we feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change will have, we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone"
I feel like this could be a good change, looking forward to seeing how it goes either way.
Twitter needs to keep moving forward. There have been several features that feel like the core of their platform, but based on their revenue growth, they may be holding them back. Personally, eh, 280-length tweets feel weird and long and I don't see the need, but I'll probably get over it. If they can change how Twitter is used open up new audiences and conversations, this is good.
The character limit is a core aspect of what makes consuming content on Twitter so engaging vs. other platforms.
Will this change improve engagement number or ad revenue? I sincerely doubt it.
An actual useful change would be versioning functionality so that users can edit tweets to correct typos or factual errors while not erasing the record.
Because this is more important than something you delegate. It's the biggest change to the company since the company was created. It's not like Twitter does 10 products, and it's like "bring Phil up to talk about this one". This is Twitter. If it was discussing random licensing deals with the NFL, fine, you can, and probably should, delegate that in order to signal its relative importance. But for this to be treated like something of that magnitude is wrong.
Presumably there are going to be a lot of broken 3rd party plugins on people’s sites(design wise at a minimum).
Should there have been more of a warning period?
Seems like one possible solution is to increase the character limit, but also increase the "pain" a user has to go through to use the additional characters (my ghetto solution would be to use a captcha to unlock the higher char limit).
That way people would only use the additional chars if they really needed them, reducing noise from otherwise unnecessarily long tweets.
> Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain.
When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's blog.
The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy.
Then came the bots and the spammers and the place got ruined. Twitter has a bunch of problems, but the 140 characters isn't one of them.
I really wish twitter had stuck to their guns on their previous solution to this: a built-in tool to post longer text blocks as embeds inside tweets, just like people post images of text right now, but essentially "text of text" instead of images of text.
But everybody lost their shit when twitter proposed that, so now we get 280char tweets instead.
> Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy.
I think most people view “have to do a bit of puzzling” as opposed to, rather than supporting, being “read worthy”. Terse stops being valuable when it goes beyond concise (as brief as possible while still clearly conveying intended meaning.)
The 140 character limit was an artifact of Twitter being designed to be usable over SMS in an era of ubiquitous SMS-equipped phones before smartphones were themselves ubiquitous.
I agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter.
But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it. The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitter is aswell a tool to share simplistic ideas with people that already agree with you.
If the content is better, it's pictures of text and 12 tweets in a row. Right now it seems you have to fight the platform if you want to post something good. Not sure if 280 solves it, but it might become more useful, as it still restricts verboseness.
And the aim of twitter should be to be usefull, rather than twitter. As being twitter does not earn them any money.
/edit:
1) I feel german "grime twitter", a buch a trolls being extremists of all flavors insulting people with way too much ego is the best part. It's like 4chan, with less racism and slightly more grown up. And it is, as you can image, toxic garbage. And that's the best part in my view.
I'm not a active user and unfortunately don't care enough to go there, log in to check it. If feel like I tried to "get" twitter long before it was mainstream, that's all i wanted to say.
Agree 100%. I've tried to really get into it many times. Maybe once a year or so, I'll tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to really 'get' twitter this time."
The people I follow are some genuinely interesting people. And god writers. I subscribe to their blogs' RSS feeds. But engaging in that conversation with them is almost impossible if you don't already know them in person.
I'm not terrible at saying things either. I think I have total fewer than 50 tweets and around 300 followers. 6 new followers per tweet seems like a pretty good rate of gaining attention. But I don't know anything about these people or how to engage with them. So I don't.
Frankly, I do assign part of the blame for the rise of the internet outrage machine to twitter conditioning people's behavior, no matter how unintentional.
The formulae is simple: find something you think is distasteful. Tweet about how it's evil or racist or sexist or communist or whatever bad thing you want to make sure people don't think you are. Sit back and watch all of the other people who don't want people to think they are that thing pick up their pitchforks and go to town against your target in the manner of something I can only describe as as mindless as a holy war. Now sit back, relax, and feel good: mission accomplished.
The same things happen on Facebook and Reddit. But it's more obviously absurd on twitter. Social issues are too complex to be dealt with effectively in 140 or even 280 letters. The best you can do is point a finger at someone or some thing and throw a label at it.
It really is garbage that's lowered the standards of discourse.
Again, I don't think tha was ever twitter's intent. But that's the effect it's had.
I understand the argument that various platforms we use are simply a reflection of society as it really exists and has always existed. And I disagree with it.
Every social interaction has a reward potential. Obtaining those rewards is what generally drives behavior. The modes of interaction that we have in person generally reward positive social interactions.
Both my parents are conservative, religious people working in a university environment. As I was growing up, they would have liberal and non-religious colleagues over for dinner because that was how university professors hung out after work 30 years ago.
Disagreements were polite, thoughtful, and lengthy. This was a positive interaction for both sides of the debate. You get to sit down with someone who strongly disagrees with your foundational principles, eat dinner, and walk away respecting the other people even though you disagree.
I'm not pining for the good old days or saying that technology is bad because human interaction promotes social behavior.
But the behavioral reward is there: don't act like a dick, and you're colleagues will respect you.
With twitter, on the other hand, the only behavioral reward available is attention--measured by likes and followers. And the easiest way to get that attention high is not through genuine, respectful, human interaction. The fastest way to being a twitter super star is anti social behavior: acting like a dick.
Humans will always take the path of least resistance to the greatest reward. Whether that's using sloppy logic and false equivocations to label some thing you don't like as evil or if it's embracing the evil label, magnifying it, and claiming it as a right, either way, it represents the lowest form of discourse. And twitter is the emperor of low discourse. Facebook and Reddit are just wannabes.
That's a lot of criticism for one of the world's largest communication platforms. You might ask if I have a solution to any of that.
I don't. I'm not sure it needs a solution. Maybe twitter should just embrace what it is and accept that.
Shit. I think that was more than 280 characters. Oh well. No one on twitter would read it anyway.
I've had a different experience with Deep Learning related Twitter - I can talk to anyone and they reply back to me: authors of papers, celebs (for example, Andrej Karpathy who heads Tesla's self driving car had the time to write a line to poor me).
I think the quality of the content really depend on the people we end up following.
When I started Twitter, I started out with my school/college friends and some random tech blogs/site etc. My friends doesn't tweet a lot(Less people use Twitter in India compared to Facebook) or the sites that I follow mostly had crapy content, making my timeline looking awful. I stopped using Twitter. About a year before I came back to the platform, un-followed all of them and started following tech people. Mostly people from js/golang/python communities. Now my timeline has more quality content that I do not get time to read all of them(links to blogs etc). I do agree that at times there are some political opinions but not the majority so its okay.
I've had a Twitter account since 2008 but couldn't quite see what was great about it. Recently, I have 'followed' a bunch of Deep Learning guys and it's a whole different thing. It's even more dynamic than /r/machinelearning, maybe the best place to discuss DL online.
> It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other
Really? My timeline is nothing but fun, informative and new content I usually want to see. Of course there's the occasional annoying retweet or sponsored tweets.
You really need to follow only people who generally tweets what you're interested in and regularly trim people who seemed interesting but ended up annoying.
For me it is best used as a constant buzz of more or less interesting material that you can look at very very briefly every now and then (I check it less than once per day).
This seems to be an unpopular opinion for some reason, but I don't think the core of what you're saying is wrong. There was an article on HN a few weeks ago about how Twitter was originally meant to be the "pulse of the planet". Part of what made it feel like that, for me at least, has always been the ability to get a quick snapshot of what someone has to say.
I don't go on Twitter to read in-depth analysis or discussion (though, as has been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Twitter has great potential for improving its ability to support real discussion). Twitter, for me, is a lot like the front page of reddit - I go to my Twitter feed to get an overview of what's going on. If I want to know more, I'm fine being linked to a blog post or article, or getting into a discussion elsewhere.
NB: Thinking about it more, I think my opinion stems from filling out one too many "describe your startup in n characters" forms...
140 characters might be one of them. There is honestly not a lot of difference in being limited to either 140 or 280 characters. In that you still cannot tell a whole story. But now you might run into the situation where you can't even finish your sentence a lot less, which is a positive in my opinion.
Any reason not to simplify that measure and make it 280 chars for all? They might not use it in Japan but what's the point of limiting them if they apparently don't use the space anyway?
Forcing brevity is the whole point of twitter. They've found that they are limiting the English twitter with 140 characters, but 140 characters seems to be working well for Japanese.
Luckily the demoscene graphics showcase platform https://www.dwitter.net still enforces the 140 character limit! Keepon making those webgl canvas graphics!
I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc?
Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it.
I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 140 characters that matters, it's also all the other times when people don't feel social pressure to write up longer, perhaps more thoughtful messages, that's important here.
I don't use Twitter myself, but I think the reason behind the limit is that SMS can send 140 bytes in each message. When sending regular text messages a 7-bit alphabet is usually used, for 160 characters in total.
The SMS limit was decided when an engineer working for German Telecom decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences. Twitter based their limit on the SMS limit (140 + user address).
That's not what is meant. Twitter was originally an SMS service, which would text you whenever someone you followed posted a tweet. In order for you to be able to tell who had posted each tweet, the message had to contain the poster's username. This is distinct from the username of whoever they were replying to.
> decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences
From what I heard, the SMS limit was actually a protocol limitation: it piggybacks on signaling messages, which have a small size limit (this is also why SMS can sometimes work even when everything else doesn't). Quoting from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS):
"Messages are sent with the MAP MO- and MT-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signaling protocol to precisely 140 bytes (140 bytes * 8 bits / byte = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet, the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS-2 alphabet. Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual short message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters."
Can you explain what you mean by this? If you're talking about the 'title' of each search result, it looks like it's capped at a way lower number of characters than that.
For what it's worth, your message required a lot more attention from me than it would have, if you had used the word "number" rather than the strange glyph "#". I guess you were doing this with some sort of meta humour because the story is about twitter, but the point was inversed. Your attempt to abbreviate things to make them more legible, made them less so.
The lesson above applies, incidentally, to pretty much everything twitter.
Well, apologies. I got the impression that your argument was that you make a messages easier to understand by shortening them. I just gave you a concrete example of when a message got harder to understand because it was shortened.
But good job on deliberately missing the point as a discussion strategy. That too, was very twitter of you.
Things fall into place by accident. I'd say there's no telling what would happen.
Imagine what this is going to do to president Trump. His short quips had a striking impact. He'll never again need to end a message with the one word sentence "JOBS!"
I feel like the core value proposition is something like "public expressions that can be consumed quickly and produced with little forethought". I think it's important that Twitter gives you the excuse to be less precise: there isn't enough space.
It's a small thing sure, but if you look at the differences between the popular social platforms, it's all about small differences. If Twitter loses that which distinguishes it from everyone else, that may give them an initial boost when it's a new feature, but then the novelty will wear off and maybe they will have lost what makes them unique.
I'd like to compare this to Hollywood. It feels like the kind of alteration a studio might come up with by relentlessly screen-testing a movie using test audiences. It's one way to guarantee a bland, non-specific result, that won't command any lasting mindshare.
Clearly moving from 140 characters to 280 characters isn't yet that just-like-everything-else end result, but it somehow feels like a step in that direction to me.
Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish. When the platform limits his words, that works in his favour - no nuance can be conveyed, his utterances are sharp, authentic sounding, plausible.
Give him 1000 words to make his case, and suddenly he's stuck. His thoughts were never that deep, and they don't stand up well to being expanded on - there wasn't any substance to begin with.
Twitter is what it is in large part because of that 140 character limit. It allows boofheads of all stripes to sound convincing, because the platform was tailor made for short blasts of hot air.
> Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish.
There's no idiot shortage on Twitter (or elsewhere), but I'll bet an overwhelming majority of the people who read your sentence above thought of the same person.
Wow. I tweet very infrequently, and agonize over exactly what to say and how to phrase it so that it is intelligible and interesting in 140 characters.
Then again, I only have a few hundred tweets and endeavor to make each one count.
Twitter with no character limit is just a blog site. There are plenty of blog sites, none of them close to as successful as Twitter. The character limit is key to holding on to the modern zero-attention-span user.
The exact number 140 is legacy, but the super-brief "microblogging" format is vital.
There are plenty of blog sites, none of them close to as successful as Twitter. The character limit is key to holding on to the modern zero-attention-span user.
There's a slight fallacy here: that no single blog site is as successful as Twitter does not mean blogs as a whole aren't, and therefore that you need the character limit to be successful. I don't have any hard data, but my anecdotal experience matches that: almost nobody I know uses Twitter, whereas every computer/smartphone user I know reads blog posts at least occasionally.
Nobody I know voted for Trump, but here he is president. HN readers and their close friends are nowhere near being a representative sample of internet users.
It's hard to compress your thoughts and present it in limited time or space while still keeping its essence and power. This is why lot of tweets are iconic: They are presentation of very strong ideas and opinions in tiny amount of space. You can wear them on t-shirt or thumb it out on smartphone while using just few seconds you have. Larger char limit means diminishing of this quality from writers part and also higher cost from readers part. The 140 chars might be accidental limit but it was just the right balance given the amount of tweets that already exists and able to express intent in that much space.
I agree with you that the 140 is iconic and it's probably not a good idea to abandon it. What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.
That way you don't lose the iconic 140 characters thing, and you don't have any problem to solve by making weird compromises where the user names or media URLs don't count toward the 140, blurring the lines of what 140 means and losing the "creativity loves constraints" factor.
>What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.
Indeed, especially as people have been already doing this by sharing longer posts as pictures of text
I was even thinking things like links to Twitlonger and Pastebin could be used for embedded text, the same way twitter knows how to handle imgur & youtube links and embed their content with tweets.
> What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.
Better solution is to let users solve a complicated CAPTCHA when they want to tweet longer messages. That way, there is no social pressure to make long tweets (no reasonable person can pressure you to solve boring CAPTCHAs), while it's still there if you need it.
Or, phrased differently, they should make it harder to tweet longer messages.
A Chinese character is much more dense than two roman letters. When I was texting in china during the SMS phase, I got around 16 or maybe 20 characters before it was broken into extra messages.
No way. Maybe someone Chinese knows the limit better, but I definitely couldn't send a 70 character message without it having been broken up into 3 or 4 texts.
In the interest of being fair, let's compare bytes:
日日是好日 (15 bytes)
Every day is a good day (23 bytes)
It's not just how one counts "characters;" some languages are written more compactly than others. I would not be surprised if Hebrew is also a bit more compact than English, as it is typically written without vowels.
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel
May I suggest this reading of a Charles Bukowski poem. It's helped me to get out of bed a number of times, when the days look so foreboding. http://youtu.be/yVisTfbVSFE
In the first verse, there doesn't seem to be any pattern to the lengths (in syllables) of the lines; 10, 7, 8, 8, 12, 8. I'm not sure the meter would really be damaged that much by reducing the last line by one syllable.
But then, the poem will be 124 words (by changing "thirty two" to "eighteen"), so we will have to change 125 to 124. Then, he will be able to say "I love you" an exactly 18 times. So now we are 3 words shorter (by removing "and a third"). So it comes 121. With 121 words, he will be able to say "I love you" exactly 17 times. So, there you go. Change "one sixty seven" to "one twenty one", and "thirty two and a third times" to "seventeen times".
It's actually "thirty-two" which, by the rules established in the poem, counts as one word only. It works with 125 words by chance. The author missed an opportunity for a neat hack.
At first I didnt understand why either, but looking at poem more and thinking about if I were writing it; I think he did it so he could use the "Thirty two and a third" line. It's much more dramatic and stimulating ("...I love you, I...") than just saying "twenty-five times".
Edit: Oops, I think I screwed up my math. It would be 22 times.
Edit: misquoted! worked in a record store too long. :)
EDIT: Nevermind, I shouldn't comment late at night. Keeping the comment intact in case someone is currently responding, so context is preserved.
EDIT2: It would work with the actual number of words in the poem (125) though, he would have to say "Eighteen and a third times". 59+11+18*3+1 = 125
OLD COMMENT: What do you mean? "Thirty-two and a third times" means exactly that, and not 22. He used 59 words that day, plus the eleven for the first part of the call, plus 32 times 3 ("I love you"), plus a third of "I love you", which is just one word. Makes 167.
In this case, it makes sense because the author was trying to preserve the line breaks in the original poem, which give cadence to the writing and are integral to the work.
Don't blame the commenter. Blame HN for having broken <pre> blocks (or at least for consuming single line breaks otherwise).
For those (like me) on mobile who can't read this (well):
"In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.
"When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way.
"Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you.
"When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe."
People could just use > like the internet has for ages:
> In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.
> When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way.
> Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you.
> When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.
Of course, the effect is best when the poem is laid out properly (which sometimes includes using indentation). But using slashes is better than alternatives like using commas (which is ambiguous, since a comma can mean a pause or clause boundary within a line)
The browser's displaying things just fine. The problem is forums that provide custom markup implementing an insufficient subset of what HTML allows for. In this case, HN provides formatting for blocks of code, but not quoted blocks of prose.
Oh, and HN is still using tables within tables within tables (within...) for their text formatting. I'm sure someone here will defend that. looks at calendar
Anyways, flying cars everyone! We're going to be the VC for flying cars!
Great poem. And what I like about HN is that the first dozens of comments on the poem are about technicalities like how it is displayed in the browser, the mathmatics of it etc., not its interpretation :-)
Thank you very much for sharing. Touching. Did not expect something like this in the comment section. You definitely made my day with this beautiful poem.
> When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello.
Actually I often do this with unknown callers, it usually confuse them especially when it's advertisement, they usually wait for someone to speak up, but at least it's easier way to save your breathe if someone who is calling you doesn't even know your name to ask "is mr. XY there?", then you can just hang up.
I'll be impressed with Twitter when they actually show they care about the security and safety of their users by implemented end to end encryption for their DMs...
492 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4ZGKI8vpcg
This move isn't made out of desperation, but it's probably being done right now because they've nothing to lose by randomly trying things.
Familiar readers feel a reward for their constant interpretive skimming of aborted thoughts, outsiders project the worst kind of interpretation to feel superior, as it automatically turns everything you post into a shareable post card with your face on it.
I think they should try to allow easier creation and reading of "thread" (when one user starts a long stream, while keeping the 140 char base.
The blog post explains how that’s not true with their Japanese example:
> Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese.
If Japanese people feel they have enough space to write their thoughts, why wouldn’t the English ones with a bit more space?
Also, I'm not sure why there isn't a separate expanded post field as well. Use the twitter feed for your headlines to a post.
"Although we feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change will have, we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone"
I feel like this could be a good change, looking forward to seeing how it goes either way.
It's not like they switched the scrolling from vertical to horizontal or something.
Twitter needs to keep moving forward. There have been several features that feel like the core of their platform, but based on their revenue growth, they may be holding them back. Personally, eh, 280-length tweets feel weird and long and I don't see the need, but I'll probably get over it. If they can change how Twitter is used open up new audiences and conversations, this is good.
They are trying something big, and that is Good.
Will this change improve engagement number or ad revenue? I sincerely doubt it.
An actual useful change would be versioning functionality so that users can edit tweets to correct typos or factual errors while not erasing the record.
https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-...
Proof I guess: https://twitter.com/r3bl_/status/912800305833799686
even worse, buffer overflows
That way people would only use the additional chars if they really needed them, reducing noise from otherwise unnecessarily long tweets.
When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's blog.
The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy.
Then came the bots and the spammers and the place got ruined. Twitter has a bunch of problems, but the 140 characters isn't one of them.
But everybody lost their shit when twitter proposed that, so now we get 280char tweets instead.
I think most people view “have to do a bit of puzzling” as opposed to, rather than supporting, being “read worthy”. Terse stops being valuable when it goes beyond concise (as brief as possible while still clearly conveying intended meaning.)
The 140 character limit was an artifact of Twitter being designed to be usable over SMS in an era of ubiquitous SMS-equipped phones before smartphones were themselves ubiquitous.
But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it. The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitter is aswell a tool to share simplistic ideas with people that already agree with you.
If the content is better, it's pictures of text and 12 tweets in a row. Right now it seems you have to fight the platform if you want to post something good. Not sure if 280 solves it, but it might become more useful, as it still restricts verboseness.
And the aim of twitter should be to be usefull, rather than twitter. As being twitter does not earn them any money.
/edit: 1) I feel german "grime twitter", a buch a trolls being extremists of all flavors insulting people with way too much ego is the best part. It's like 4chan, with less racism and slightly more grown up. And it is, as you can image, toxic garbage. And that's the best part in my view.
It’s written on your Twitter profile, FYI.
The people I follow are some genuinely interesting people. And god writers. I subscribe to their blogs' RSS feeds. But engaging in that conversation with them is almost impossible if you don't already know them in person.
I'm not terrible at saying things either. I think I have total fewer than 50 tweets and around 300 followers. 6 new followers per tweet seems like a pretty good rate of gaining attention. But I don't know anything about these people or how to engage with them. So I don't.
Frankly, I do assign part of the blame for the rise of the internet outrage machine to twitter conditioning people's behavior, no matter how unintentional.
The formulae is simple: find something you think is distasteful. Tweet about how it's evil or racist or sexist or communist or whatever bad thing you want to make sure people don't think you are. Sit back and watch all of the other people who don't want people to think they are that thing pick up their pitchforks and go to town against your target in the manner of something I can only describe as as mindless as a holy war. Now sit back, relax, and feel good: mission accomplished.
The same things happen on Facebook and Reddit. But it's more obviously absurd on twitter. Social issues are too complex to be dealt with effectively in 140 or even 280 letters. The best you can do is point a finger at someone or some thing and throw a label at it.
It really is garbage that's lowered the standards of discourse.
Again, I don't think tha was ever twitter's intent. But that's the effect it's had.
I understand the argument that various platforms we use are simply a reflection of society as it really exists and has always existed. And I disagree with it.
Every social interaction has a reward potential. Obtaining those rewards is what generally drives behavior. The modes of interaction that we have in person generally reward positive social interactions.
Both my parents are conservative, religious people working in a university environment. As I was growing up, they would have liberal and non-religious colleagues over for dinner because that was how university professors hung out after work 30 years ago.
Disagreements were polite, thoughtful, and lengthy. This was a positive interaction for both sides of the debate. You get to sit down with someone who strongly disagrees with your foundational principles, eat dinner, and walk away respecting the other people even though you disagree.
I'm not pining for the good old days or saying that technology is bad because human interaction promotes social behavior.
But the behavioral reward is there: don't act like a dick, and you're colleagues will respect you.
With twitter, on the other hand, the only behavioral reward available is attention--measured by likes and followers. And the easiest way to get that attention high is not through genuine, respectful, human interaction. The fastest way to being a twitter super star is anti social behavior: acting like a dick.
Humans will always take the path of least resistance to the greatest reward. Whether that's using sloppy logic and false equivocations to label some thing you don't like as evil or if it's embracing the evil label, magnifying it, and claiming it as a right, either way, it represents the lowest form of discourse. And twitter is the emperor of low discourse. Facebook and Reddit are just wannabes.
That's a lot of criticism for one of the world's largest communication platforms. You might ask if I have a solution to any of that.
I don't. I'm not sure it needs a solution. Maybe twitter should just embrace what it is and accept that.
Shit. I think that was more than 280 characters. Oh well. No one on twitter would read it anyway.
When I started Twitter, I started out with my school/college friends and some random tech blogs/site etc. My friends doesn't tweet a lot(Less people use Twitter in India compared to Facebook) or the sites that I follow mostly had crapy content, making my timeline looking awful. I stopped using Twitter. About a year before I came back to the platform, un-followed all of them and started following tech people. Mostly people from js/golang/python communities. Now my timeline has more quality content that I do not get time to read all of them(links to blogs etc). I do agree that at times there are some political opinions but not the majority so its okay.
Really? My timeline is nothing but fun, informative and new content I usually want to see. Of course there's the occasional annoying retweet or sponsored tweets.
You really need to follow only people who generally tweets what you're interested in and regularly trim people who seemed interesting but ended up annoying.
For me it is best used as a constant buzz of more or less interesting material that you can look at very very briefly every now and then (I check it less than once per day).
I don't go on Twitter to read in-depth analysis or discussion (though, as has been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Twitter has great potential for improving its ability to support real discussion). Twitter, for me, is a lot like the front page of reddit - I go to my Twitter feed to get an overview of what's going on. If I want to know more, I'm fine being linked to a blog post or article, or getting into a discussion elsewhere.
NB: Thinking about it more, I think my opinion stems from filling out one too many "describe your startup in n characters" forms...
I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc?
Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it.
I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 140 characters that matters, it's also all the other times when people don't feel social pressure to write up longer, perhaps more thoughtful messages, that's important here.
From what I heard, the SMS limit was actually a protocol limitation: it piggybacks on signaling messages, which have a small size limit (this is also why SMS can sometimes work even when everything else doesn't). Quoting from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS):
"Messages are sent with the MAP MO- and MT-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signaling protocol to precisely 140 bytes (140 bytes * 8 bits / byte = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet, the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS-2 alphabet. Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual short message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters."
It's worth noting that there is something to the # of characters a human can scan & understand without turning it's full focus to it.
25 for title 35 for line 1 35 for line 2 35 for display url
130 characters total.
The lesson above applies, incidentally, to pretty much everything twitter.
But good job on deliberately missing the point as a discussion strategy. That too, was very twitter of you.
It was related to the core of their value proposition when that was “microblogging that can be updated and recieved over SMS”. Now, its just legacy.
Imagine what this is going to do to president Trump. His short quips had a striking impact. He'll never again need to end a message with the one word sentence "JOBS!"
It's a small thing sure, but if you look at the differences between the popular social platforms, it's all about small differences. If Twitter loses that which distinguishes it from everyone else, that may give them an initial boost when it's a new feature, but then the novelty will wear off and maybe they will have lost what makes them unique.
I'd like to compare this to Hollywood. It feels like the kind of alteration a studio might come up with by relentlessly screen-testing a movie using test audiences. It's one way to guarantee a bland, non-specific result, that won't command any lasting mindshare.
Clearly moving from 140 characters to 280 characters isn't yet that just-like-everything-else end result, but it somehow feels like a step in that direction to me.
Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish. When the platform limits his words, that works in his favour - no nuance can be conveyed, his utterances are sharp, authentic sounding, plausible.
Give him 1000 words to make his case, and suddenly he's stuck. His thoughts were never that deep, and they don't stand up well to being expanded on - there wasn't any substance to begin with.
Twitter is what it is in large part because of that 140 character limit. It allows boofheads of all stripes to sound convincing, because the platform was tailor made for short blasts of hot air.
... now blurting out 1000 words of bileful rubbish instead of 100.
There's no idiot shortage on Twitter (or elsewhere), but I'll bet an overwhelming majority of the people who read your sentence above thought of the same person.
Wow. I tweet very infrequently, and agonize over exactly what to say and how to phrase it so that it is intelligible and interesting in 140 characters.
Then again, I only have a few hundred tweets and endeavor to make each one count.
The exact number 140 is legacy, but the super-brief "microblogging" format is vital.
There's a slight fallacy here: that no single blog site is as successful as Twitter does not mean blogs as a whole aren't, and therefore that you need the character limit to be successful. I don't have any hard data, but my anecdotal experience matches that: almost nobody I know uses Twitter, whereas every computer/smartphone user I know reads blog posts at least occasionally.
Nobody I know voted for Trump, but here he is president. HN readers and their close friends are nowhere near being a representative sample of internet users.
That way you don't lose the iconic 140 characters thing, and you don't have any problem to solve by making weird compromises where the user names or media URLs don't count toward the 140, blurring the lines of what 140 means and losing the "creativity loves constraints" factor.
Indeed, especially as people have been already doing this by sharing longer posts as pictures of text
So having a medium(or any other) blog that automatically posts links to twitter is the perfect solution to this, I think.
How is that elegant?
It helps give credence to the solution.
Or, phrased differently, they should make it harder to tweet longer messages.
I had similar thoughts when Snapchat started introducing their (now many) non-ephemeral features, but I was proved wrong at every turn.
Is it?
280 for alphabetic languages seems roughly equivalent.
日日是好日 (15 bytes)
Every day is a good day (23 bytes)
It's not just how one counts "characters;" some languages are written more compactly than others. I would not be surprised if Hebrew is also a bit more compact than English, as it is typically written without vowels.
https://vimeo.com/26946995
Why?
"I love you" is 3 words. 3 * 32.333333 = 97
Edit: Oops, I think I screwed up my math. It would be 22 times.
Edit: misquoted! worked in a record store too long. :)
EDIT2: It would work with the actual number of words in the poem (125) though, he would have to say "Eighteen and a third times". 59+11+18*3+1 = 125
OLD COMMENT: What do you mean? "Thirty-two and a third times" means exactly that, and not 22. He used 59 words that day, plus the eleven for the first part of the call, plus 32 times 3 ("I love you"), plus a third of "I love you", which is just one word. Makes 167.
A gift for you: https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmVARCKc4tqh82csydiAQ2JVmvvKeckm...
HN should just preserve all line-breaks so we don't have to hack around it.
(The above was written "No\nit\ndoesn't")
You may be referring to some sort of distinction here, but I'm just talking about newlines.
Don't blame the commenter. Blame HN for having broken <pre> blocks (or at least for consuming single line breaks otherwise).
"In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.
"When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way.
"Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you.
"When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe."
The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel
> In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.
> When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way.
> Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you.
> When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.
- The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel
Of course, the effect is best when the poem is laid out properly (which sometimes includes using indentation). But using slashes is better than alternatives like using commas (which is ambiguous, since a comma can mean a pause or clause boundary within a line)
Anyways, flying cars everyone! We're going to be the VC for flying cars!
These are the words actually spoken in the poem:
> I only used fifty-nine today. = 5
> I saved the rest for you. = 6
> I love you * (32 1/3) = 96 + 1 = 97
The remainder of the words are thoughts which don't add to the daily count.
Plus the author had already used 59 words earlier in the day.
So if we add it all up:
https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2016/05/25/1500-words/
for the record, jeffrey mcdaniel is also a fantastic performer, so if you get a chance to see him recite, don't sleep on it.
Actually I often do this with unknown callers, it usually confuse them especially when it's advertisement, they usually wait for someone to speak up, but at least it's easier way to save your breathe if someone who is calling you doesn't even know your name to ask "is mr. XY there?", then you can just hang up.
Like Gob Bluth made this decision to be a better CEO than Michael.
"Oh yeah Michael I'm taking your 140 characters and DOUBLING IT!"