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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

#211

Post by throwupper247 »

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…

The way i know it from imgur comments it's not that bad. There the comments are not nessecarily sorted by time. What's the issue? It still discourages longer rants because every write up- and download cycle forces a short wait.

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

#212

Post by wf »

prawn wrote: post #126
dangoor wrote: post #33

Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest. To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet wou…

One thing I've wanted to see tried with Twitter is the idea that you have your typical stream of tweets (vertical), but that any tweet can have depth (by swiping horizontally). Your "my thoughts" example would indicate "1/8" automatically, updating as it was created. Means that someone can read as usual, or delve for the full series of tweets. They could provide an indication to the writer of what percentage of peopl…

This is a really cool idea. It's a really simple solution to the same problem that would be really beautiful and easy to use on mobile especially. It doesn't quite reach the same depth, but I think it's a good way to start.

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

#213

Post by kuschku »

Zitrax wrote: post #201
justJanne wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably, but then, on Twitter, people abbreviate words in english or leave them out in ways that aren’t possible in German.

It’s hard when you need 3 or 4 tweets for a simple sentence explaining why Sony DCP projectors used to be easier for piracy than competing products.

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

#214

Post by massysett »

nsns wrote: post #164
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."

nice, so it literally means its opposite as well.

This sort of usage destroys the entire word. If one word has two opposing meanings it's ambiguous to ever use it at all. Language rot via imprecision.

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

#215

Post by hackuser »

This sounds like Weibo, a very popular service in China. There is some history of such a thing being very succcessful.

However, I've never used Weibo. Can any describe the differences between Weibo and longer-form Twitter, and talk about Weibo's strengths and weaknesses?

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

#216

Post by brudgers »

altern8 wrote: post #170
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.

I think the term of art in this case is "retweet".

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

#217

Post by dabernathy89 »

smt88 wrote: post #157
dangoor wrote: post #33

Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest. To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet wou…

> Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest. So Twitter wants to be RSS with better discovery. If there were discovery and UX for blogs like there is for podcasts (Pocketcasts, Overcast, etc.), then Twitter wouldn't even have a leg up on RSS at all. I've often dreamed of a decentralized "Twitt…

Ask 99.9% of Twitter users what RSS is, and I think you'll have an idea of the "leg up" that Twitter has.

* Not to mention, even if folks knew what RSS was, they don't necessarily want to host their own blog.

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

#218

Post by rconti »

prawn wrote: post #134
nikolay wrote: post #44

I can't believe that there are so many backers of the old limit! Don't you guys hate that you have to always compromise on punctuation, select shorter (but less precise) synonyms, and other just to fit into the story that Twitter was trying to push all this time, but which wasn't the reality (of people using Twitter via SMS)? Okay, now, Twitter goes to another extreme - from too short, to too long. I'm fine with shor…

I actually really enjoy the process of having to re-write my thoughts to have them fit. Reminds me what is crucial and what is superfluous. (139 chars)

u r so rite! 140 char limit limits my thoughts 2 that which is critical. without it id waste tons of space expressing my brilliant thoughts (140chars)

(speaking of crap formatting, I still can't get used to HN comment formatting.. apparently no way to make a line feed or a list, at least, none that's documented)

But seriously, it's ironic that Twitter limits tweets to 140char but the site and mobile app are some of the worst wastes of screen real estate I've ever seen. I keep trying to find it of some value but I just can't do it. Either nothing shows up in my feed, or I follow "must follow" people and get to hear them go on about random crap I don't care about. My real actual Twitter mobile app feed currently looks like this:

* retweet

* promoted tweet

* while you were away (1)

* while you were away (2)

* while you were away (3)

* while you were away (4)

* while you were away (5)

* actual tweet in proper chronological order (1)

* actual tweet in proper chronological order (2)

* people you may want to follow (1)

* people you may want to follow (2)

* people you may want to follow (3)

I had to scroll down 4 entire (iPhone 6) screenfuls of tweets before I got to the chronologic list of recent tweets I actually want to see, and even then, saw only 2 of them before the next chunk of junk! The light grey bar on a light grey background is poor delineation between sections, as well. It blows my mind that a mostly-text medium with such a strict character limit manages to have vastly worse information density than Facebook.

I use them differently, too, of course. Facebook feels more personal; I'm friends with real-life friends, and am a member of some groups for fun. Most of the updates feel personal to me.

Twitter I use to follow "important figures" and some friends.. but no friends tweet, and the important figures never say anything interesting.. or at least, if they do, I can't get to it, because the UI is such garbage.

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

#219

Post by rconti »

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…

And yet Facebook has vastly better information density on their desktop and mobile sites than Twitter manages. (see my comment elsewhere on this comment thread)

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

#220

Post by recursive »

ksk wrote: post #160

I have a semi-serious business idea for Twitter. They should charge verified/celebrity users a huge amount to be able to fill in whatever number they want in the followers box. If you're advertising on twitter, you will know the actual number so you're not paying extra. It\ would reduce or eliminate the services that "help" with inflating your follower count, and vain people who care about this stuff get to see a lar…

That would make followers even more meaningless.
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