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Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

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

#161

Post by teaneedz »

ethanbond wrote: post #144
teaneedz wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bad UX practice according to whom? 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/land…

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.

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

#162

Post by lhnz »

Bud wrote: post #64
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.

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.

You can express complex thought in short equations (and in fact it is often preferable), so why would it be the case that it couldn't be expressed in just 140 characters? It doesn't make sense.

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

#163

Post by Wingman4l7 »

dacox wrote: post #93
cdnsteve wrote: post #89

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.

I still don't really understand Twitter. I have an account and have followed ~50 people and organizations I find interesting, and all I see is floods of re-tweets of people I have no interest in.

You have to turn off retweets manually for every single account you follow, unfortunately.

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

#164

Post by nsns »

theseatoms wrote: post #83
bad_user wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

nice, so it literally means its opposite as well.

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

#166

Post by pjc50 »

Laaw wrote: post #131

I've begun wondering if there's a market for recreating original technologies that have evolved beyond their original intent. For example, a new site that allowed you to broadcast up to 140 character messages.

I keep joking to people that I want to start rotatedfloralheartbullet.com (.com), a social network where you're only allowed one character, but you have the whole unicode space to choose from.

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

#167

Post by nsns »

tertius wrote: post #98
theseatoms wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Literally" is not incorrect. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally "Literally" can mean "virtually," or "figuratively."

Yes and this is unfortunate but modern.

Only if you'd assume the fallacy that an enunciation could ever be "literal" in its meaning. I'd argue this actually points at a structural undecidability which is essential to language.

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

#168

Post by gregmac »

Wingman4l7 wrote: post #165

Makes a lot more sense to just "fix" what they've already got -- stop counting @ mentions, hashtags, and URLs as characters. If URLs didn't count, that'd mean the death of URL shorteners, which would mean no more link rot.

Yeah, I'd like to see this ... so long as they #limitTheNumber of #hashtags and @mentions you use #so #you #cant #cheatthesystem.

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

#169

Post by pjc50 »

JayHost wrote: post #102
fideloper wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see a limit of like 2-3 long-form tweets per 24 hour period.

How about the long form tweets get turned into pictures so no rules are broken and TLDR is obvious? Otherwise limit of 1 like pinned tweet.

I'd rather the reverse: people already post pictures-of-text, and because twitter like to scale to fit with no way of seeing 1:1 zoom other than the browser's "View Image" feature, it can often be unreadable. Maybe they could OCR the images.

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

#170

Post by altern8 »

AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #142

To the people thinking 10,000 characters means suddenly everyone will write blog posts instead of tweets... Have you ever tried blogging? Writing blog posts is insanely hard and time consuming. You'd be an outlier if you could write one good blog post a day. It's not like every tweet is suddenly going to be an essay. More likely tweets will just be slightly longer (200 characters or something) and then there will be…

You don't necessarily have to write them yourself. You can just copy and paste from different sources multiple times a day.
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