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

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

#201

Post by Zitrax » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 11:06 PM UTC

justJanne wrote: post #132

jasode wrote: post #4

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 t…

By the way, your statistics are for English. 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...

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.

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

#202

Post by lukethomas » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 11:10 PM UTC

Seems like the major benefits are:

1. 140 char tweets aren't indexed very well by search engines. Writing blog posts or 400+ char tweets? Way better. More indexable content. More user growth. Wall street is satisfied for a few months.

2. The notion of expressing yourself (or whatever you want to call blogging) is easy to explain (WordPress, Tumblr, Medium). I'd argue that it's much easier to explain blogging than Twitter. By introducing something less ambiguous it should help user growth.

As much as I would hate 10k char tweets, I can see why they are doing this.

Minor changes to the current product won't drive the growth they and Wall Street are looking for.

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

#203

Post by michaelmrose » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 11:11 PM UTC

bmm6o wrote: post #196

michaelmrose wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a non argument. Dismissing an argument out of hand as invalid because you say so adds nothing to the discussion. Feel free to expand that to an actual argument

All I'm saying is that the tired "count the characters of the comment that says tweets are too short to contain a complex thought and point out that it fits within a tweet" method of argumentation doesn't prove anything except an ability to count.

ok got it

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

#204

Post by pklausler » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 11:13 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #188

pklausler wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a new word that non-figuratively means "literally", then.

You don't need to throw out a word just because it's become an autoantonym[1]; many words are. To cleave; to hew; to screen; etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

My favorite: "oversight".

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

#205

Post by npizzolato » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 11:13 PM UTC

careersuicide wrote: post #81

kuschku wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I tend to agree with you, but then again I've never understood the appeal of Twitter. Do people get enough entertainment out of the "i love tacos lol" tweets to continue using it day after day? You could link to mildly interesting articles, but you can hardly say anything about it in 140 characters, so why use that medium to post/reply to articles?

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

#206

Post by smt88 » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 11:15 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #191

smt88 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's very risky to do something like that with someone else's words without consulting them. Imagine a satirical tweet with exactly the wrong "unnecessary" sentence removed. Suddenly your life is ruined because you said something that makes people angry.

It could render the summary live to the poster as they edit their post. Then, if you see a "bad" summary, you can go back to the drawing board. Not as nice as being able to write the summary yourself, but certainly an interesting single-player game.

My only concern is that we'd get into a frustrating game of clickbait, since the summary wouldn't necessarily have to reflect the content.

An example is the "Facebook is dead" link on HN recently. The article was about someone quitting Facebook, rather than an argument that Facebook is losing trendiness.

Now imagine a Twitter where every single tweet is similarly bait-y.

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

#207

Post by Raed667 » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 11:18 PM UTC

TweetDeck (before it was sabotaged by Twitter) used to have a cool feature like this where if you "tweet longer" you get a link attached to your tweet.

Twitter killed this years ago when it acquired TweetDeck.

This is funny because everything Twitter has been doing lately has been mostly done (and stripped down ever-since) in TweetDeck years ago!

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

#208

Post by logicallee » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 11:19 PM UTC

yeukhon wrote: post #187

logicallee wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I think you don't realize something very important about how people use twitter. Consider, what the typical number of blogs is that people around you might actually follow - (via RSS or some other means) in the sense that they're subscribed to it, new content appears from time to time, and when an entry appears they see it somewhere at the top of some feed? A feed they have to read through. I would guess the very…

I don't follow the hype and when I was an active user I would get frustrated with my tweet limiting to so few characters. here is what I had to do: 1. write tweet, fuck, over limit 2. abbrev words, fuck still low on limit 3. remove spaces, fuck still low on limit 4. remove words and punctuations, thinking "fuck so this is what search engine feels like when one stems words", not my tweet is so not English 5. fuck stil…

I guarantee you that your audience wasn't frustrated by the fact that you had to jump through those hoops. You think all those politicians and celebrities and thought leaders don't have trouble fitting things in 140 characters? I'm not being too verbose, but I've just written 292 here. :)

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

#209

Post by vellum » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 11:20 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #16

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 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.

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

#210

Post by steveklabnik » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 11:20 PM UTC

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.

From experience: don't underestimate network effects. "Twitter but like it used to be" still starts with nobody you're following on Twitter on it, and Twitter's TOC prevents you from importing them.