What a brain dead solution. The right thing to do would be to get rid of character limits altogether
But that would require Twitter to actually have a leader and product innovation, which it doesn't.
Twitter's character limit is part of the definition of the platform. It's a constraint of the type that can spark innovation and creativity. It encourages people to be brief, or else go to extra trouble to not be brief. It encourages individual messages to be quickly consumable. When interacting with Twitter, the character limit isn't just about the length of your messages, it's about the length of other people's messages.
This is part of why the emergent property that "languages that express more in fewer characters tend to use characters that count as more than 1/240" was not removed, and was instead seen as desirable. The real limit is a rough "how long does it take to process one tweet".
"get rid of character limits", in the context of Twitter, would not be product innovation, nor an especially good marketing move. It would substantially change the nature and character of Twitter. At the very least, it isn't obvious that it'd be a net positive. It would also remove a major point of differentiation.
This announced improvement is the net result of "how do we solve this problem while still having a character limit". It's a natural evolution, rather than a massive change to the landscape.
Twitter was a mistake.
Think about it.
It just pushed people to reduce the depth of the expression of their thoughts to the size of of a slogan.
What could possibly go wrong?
I will tell you what:
It incentivize laziness.
It makes people less patient.
It reduces our ability to argue, make a point.
It reduces the quality of the conversations in general.
You can't really clarify what you want to say in such a limited number of characters.
Is that what you really want?
I'm not going to argue here about whether Twitter's character limit produces better or worse discourse by any particular metric. My only point in the comment above was that the character limit remains a fundamental characteristic of Twitter, and removing that constraint would qualitatively change Twitter, in a way that "emoji now always count as 2" and "we're moving from 140 to 280 characters" did not.
Constraints can lead people to be more innovative and creative. That does not mean they universally do, only that they can. Removing such constraints is thus not an obvious improvement with zero potential downside.
I used to believe this too but I changed my mind eventually. Do you know what changed my mind? I was swimming in the Lac Leman in Geneva. I decided to go underwater and hold my breath for a while, I noticed that I couldn't stay that long while my brother who had his gear could look underwater for a long time and enjoy it way more. That's when it hit me. Constrains don't make you more creative per se. They only force you to create workarounds, but in the end that's all it is, workarounds not really a good breath of fresh air. Hopefully the analogy makes sense to you too.
I 100% agree that constraints can be great fuel for creativity. Innovation is not about examining all possibilities, is about finding the unexplored paths. Sometimes fewer options means you can more easily focus on discovery something new vs exploring what's already out there.
>My only point in the comment above was that the character limit remains a fundamental characteristic of Twitter, and removing that constraint would qualitatively change Twitter
I don't use twitter, so either way it doesn't matter much to me. But was twitter not created with this constraint due to the original intention that tweets could be posted by sms and were thus constrained by the format of sms itself and not actually an inherent and necessary part of the platform?
It seems like there's room for twitter to provide at least a method for long form content.
Maybe have it seperate from the actual twitter feed and let people use a normal size tweet to link to it?
People already seem to use it for longform content, providing a way for people to do it efficiently may provide a positive change. It would give people a reason to use twitter who otherwise might not because of the content limitations.
Even adding such a system, I imagine the bulk of tweets will still be the 280 character kind, but it would provide a built in method for that occasional time you want to write something longer.
I think it's good for some things and really terrible for others. Forcing brevity is often really useful for encouraging more succinct, clearer writing. But sometimes the inherent complexity in what you're trying to say can't be compressed down to 280 characters, and things get really bad.
I think twitter tends to be good for sharing relatively uncontroversial information, making jokes, quick "shower thought" type things, but really bad for anything that requires a deep conversation with someone else.
All Internet comments do the same thing. I put your own reply through a character counter and got 470, roughly 2 tweets.
Any transcript of an in person conversation would substantially dwarf all but the longest comments; even a minute of a typical podcast is enough to fill several pages worth of paragraphs.
That we all seek the simplest way to express a thought is not a bug, it is a feature. Audible speaking has tons of filler words and useless offshoots that do nothing to further the main concept being conveyed. We choose to write down sentences instead to minimize cruft and maximize content. Twitter just takes it a step further, and incentivizes the optimization of written text itself.
Clearly your idea is revolutionary and something twitter could not have possibly considered before.
Twitter should take the bold innovative, leadership showing, step of "getting rid of character limits" even though it goes against the core product design of twitter i.e. forcing smaller packets of thought per post.
Unicode, some emojis are comprised of two characters (two emojis) put together, thus are two characters. Often one is the main character, and the second is the variation code.
Thanks, I happen to know about the combinations (they're also called out in the article). But the multichar ones are combined with more than two. So if you can consider four to be two, why not simply consider four to be one.
Twitter should count all people as equal too.
Loosing account of been more opinionated than average seems to be crime.
Critical thinking seems to be bad in current climate.
19 comments
[ 0.85 ms ] story [ 72.2 ms ] threadThis is part of why the emergent property that "languages that express more in fewer characters tend to use characters that count as more than 1/240" was not removed, and was instead seen as desirable. The real limit is a rough "how long does it take to process one tweet".
"get rid of character limits", in the context of Twitter, would not be product innovation, nor an especially good marketing move. It would substantially change the nature and character of Twitter. At the very least, it isn't obvious that it'd be a net positive. It would also remove a major point of differentiation.
This announced improvement is the net result of "how do we solve this problem while still having a character limit". It's a natural evolution, rather than a massive change to the landscape.
Constraints can lead people to be more innovative and creative. That does not mean they universally do, only that they can. Removing such constraints is thus not an obvious improvement with zero potential downside.
I don't use twitter, so either way it doesn't matter much to me. But was twitter not created with this constraint due to the original intention that tweets could be posted by sms and were thus constrained by the format of sms itself and not actually an inherent and necessary part of the platform?
It seems like there's room for twitter to provide at least a method for long form content.
Maybe have it seperate from the actual twitter feed and let people use a normal size tweet to link to it?
People already seem to use it for longform content, providing a way for people to do it efficiently may provide a positive change. It would give people a reason to use twitter who otherwise might not because of the content limitations.
Even adding such a system, I imagine the bulk of tweets will still be the 280 character kind, but it would provide a built in method for that occasional time you want to write something longer.
I think twitter tends to be good for sharing relatively uncontroversial information, making jokes, quick "shower thought" type things, but really bad for anything that requires a deep conversation with someone else.
Any transcript of an in person conversation would substantially dwarf all but the longest comments; even a minute of a typical podcast is enough to fill several pages worth of paragraphs.
That we all seek the simplest way to express a thought is not a bug, it is a feature. Audible speaking has tons of filler words and useless offshoots that do nothing to further the main concept being conveyed. We choose to write down sentences instead to minimize cruft and maximize content. Twitter just takes it a step further, and incentivizes the optimization of written text itself.
Twitter should take the bold innovative, leadership showing, step of "getting rid of character limits" even though it goes against the core product design of twitter i.e. forcing smaller packets of thought per post.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42679712/why-does-the-re...