Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#81

Post by careersuicide » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #65

colmvp wrote: post #59

I like Twitter because it forces people to be concise. There are already plenty of places on the web where people can post long thoughtful articles or op-ed pieces.

But it doesn’t lead to any meaningful discussions. I’ve tried using twitter for some time now, and you end up sounding a lot more angry when you spend the 20 minutes trying to get your thoughts into 140 characters, and you’ll have to use a horrendous amount of abbreviations. There’s no space left for polite "hey, sorry, I disagree with your thoughts on [long name of a project], I’d think you could do [feature] better…

I'm going to go out on what might be something of a limb and suggest that perhaps Twitter is not the place for meaningful discussions, or even, discussion in general.

Obviously there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter, but I generally don't follow people who do more than post inane status updates like "i love tacos lol" or links to mildly interesting news articles. For me at least, that's all I want Twitter to be, and it does that admirably. If I want discourse theres room for that pretty much anywhere else on the Internet.

I suspect the majority of the problems people have with Twitter stem from expecting it to be something that it just fundamentally isn't and can't be. If you use Twitter with a desire for serious engagement with others you're almost always going to be disappointed. If you treat it as a place to put silly 140 character messages out into the world whenever you feel like it then it's much more fun. And weirdly, much more useful.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#82

Post by ppod » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #66

Okay what's differentiating Twitter from fucking Facebook now? Only the facts that there's (currently) no policy against pseudonyms, bots and multiple accounts and that there's no useless crap games like Farmville.

I think that the crucial difference between twitter and facebook is not the length of the posts, but the fact that twitter is broadcast, or "publish-subscribe", while facebook is semi-private through reciprocal permission (by default).

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#83

Post by theseatoms » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #73

Bud wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It forces people to not write a complex English sentence, is what it does. You literally can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting. Which is annoying. There's concision, and then there's nuking the concept of the paragraph. I for one welcome our new longer-Tweet overlords.

The length of your entire message: 285 chars Length of " You can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting ": 56 chars (took " literally " out, because that's incorrect).

"Literally" is not incorrect.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

"Literally" can mean "virtually," or "figuratively."

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#84

Post by nlh » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 7:42 PM UTC

I feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the spirit of Twitter's original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but there's a "see more" button/icon/etc. that expands the tweet to longer form.

That would seem to solve both issues -- short-and-sweet for those that want it, and longer as necessary.

(Note this idea has been baked for approximately 15 seconds, so I'm sure I'm missing quite a bit.)

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#85

Post by JoshTriplett » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 7:44 PM UTC

nlh wrote: post #84

I feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the spirit of Twitter's original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but there's a "see more" button/icon/etc. that expands the tweet to longer form. That would seem to solve both issues -- short-and-sweet for those that want it, and longer as necessary. (Note this idea h…

> I feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the spirit of Twitter's original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but there's a "see more" button/icon/etc. that expands the tweet to longer form.

That would also provide a better first-party equivalent to services like TwitLonger, as well as the common practice of posting a snippet and a longer text-as-image.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#86

Post by theseatoms » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 7:44 PM UTC

I can only see this being beneficial to the platform and/or ecosystem if they restrict the default displayed size of tweets, requiring users to click-through to read more.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#87

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 7:49 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #85

nlh wrote: post #84

I feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the spirit of Twitter's original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but there's a "see more" button/icon/etc. that expands the tweet to longer form. That would seem to solve both issues -- short-and-sweet for those that want it, and longer as necessary. (Note this idea h…

> I feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the spirit of Twitter's original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but there's a "see more" button/icon/etc. that expands the tweet to longer form. That would also provide a better first-party equivalent to services like TwitLonger, as well as the common practice of p…

I'd like it if they added text attachments, like you can currently attach images or videos. This way the core tweet itself is still 140 characters. It'd be a nicer version of images full of text.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#88

Post by slig » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #69

Zikes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their new non-chronologically sorted timeline sure smells of Facebook to me, too.

Yeah, thank God they didn't force that crap onto me, yet. If they'll do I have to switch clients -.-

What difference would the client make? The feed comes from the API, even in the official client [1].

[1] Few years ago I'm sure it was like that, they might've changed to a private API since.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#89

Post by cdnsteve » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 7:54 PM UTC

The problem isn't character limit.

The problem is missing interesting Tweets. My timeline is flooded with new tweets. Better flagging to read later, algorithms that say you might find this most interesting, filtering would be welcome and are needed.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#90

Post by CrowFly » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 7:55 PM UTC

I feel bad for Twitter because they have a popular product that's hard to monetize. That being said, I wonder if any of the Twitter execs who think of this stuff actually use Twitter.