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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

#271
post #126
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 exactly what Paddy Adams was talking about with Cards, and I agree strongly with both of you: https://medium.com/intercom-inside/why-cards-are-the-future-...

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

#272
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exactly what Paddy Adams was talking about with Cards, and I agree strongly with both of you: https://medium.com/intercom-inside/why-cards-are-the-future-...

- Cards seem quite similar to a carousel with maybe different movement options.

- Twitter character limit is already exceeded by people writing somewhere and posting the screenshotted image of the text, which is awful.

- 1/N.. N/N style can be expressed better by extended character limits, but that will decrease the number of tweets, which a public company may see as a deteriorating metric.

Unfortunately Twitter has more usability problems than char limit in the main timeline user interface.

- Viewing a conversation is pretty much confusing. You click on a tweet, it expands and it's not obvious how the conversation with a tree-branching structure proceeds

- "Read later" is needed independent of "Like"

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

#274
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…

So now tweets will be just like proper git commits :)

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

#275
I find it fascinating that almost every single significant product change Twitter has made has effectively been a result of end-users or third party developers attempting to fix the core product experience. - @mentions - Retweets - Mobile clients - periscope - Image effects

Now long-form tweets trying to fix the redicilous problems of having to screenshot text to fit your message in, agonizing over short URLs or character by character shortcuts just to get a tweet out.

Any significant innovations or leaps forward from Twitter that we're not what people have been trying to do?

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

#276
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask 99.9% of Sticher/Pocket Casts/Overcast/iTunes users what RSS is. They'll have no idea, and yet those apps rely on RSS to subscribe to podcasts. The application can obfuscate the underlying technology. You don't need to know what RSS is to use it every day and love it, just as you don't need to know about DNS, TCP/IP, or most other internet technologies to enjoy the web.

Ok, that makes sense, although the content creators for iTunes, etc, still often have to find out what RSS is. I'm still not sure what your point is - you said Twitter is trying to "be" RSS, but that's just the format, not the application. Twitter is not trying to aggregate content from elsewhere, either.

> "Twitter is not trying to aggregate content from elsewhere, either."

Maybe not directly, but they sure make it easy for third party sites to have "Share this article via Twitter" buttons.

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

#277
post #209

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…

Uncompressing can be a major mental burden too. I'd rather read a real sentence instead of a 140 character string with various opaque shortenings.

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

#278
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…

Also, this fixes an existing usability and accessibility nightmare of Twitter. People already post longer texts, just either split into multiple tweets (a horrible distraction if you don’t want to see it and incredibly hard to read if you do) or as screenshots (throwing accessibility completely out of the window – also not as nice an experience whenever reception is flaky).

I honestly see this more of a fix. All these horrible ways of using Twitter which are already commonplace will no longer be necessary. I don’t think it will fundamentally change how Twitter is used. People already use it in that way.

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

#279
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 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 would be much nicer.

If people want to use twitter in that way than it's not the right place for them, there are already similar platform out there. Twitter's core and unique feature is micro blogging platform and i think it's never loose that unique feature.

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