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Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

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Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#61

Post by buro9 »

madsushi wrote: post #60
buro9 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit!

Being able to edit something that someone has already retweeted seems ripe for abuse.

Essentially a tweet ID should be a pointer to "latest version", but with historical versions preserved and available at the same visibility level as the parent (typically public) and a small indicator would show that it has been edited and the history is available.

But all of those, "Damn I made a typo or dumb spelling (thx mobile keyboard) and yet it has been replied to or re-tweeted already"... all of that is solved by edit with visible history.

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#62

Post by mattl »

return0 wrote: post #58
qq66 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to blame them for that, though. They made a blog with a 140-character limit and it became one of the most valuable companies in the world. Who knows what it will become if they fiddle with anything?

It wasn't really a blog though, right? Maybe it began as "a real-time blog aggregator, where blogs only have titles". I believe nowadays it's the network effect that keeps them, not the technology itself.

Microblog, but sure..

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#63

Post by HappyTypist »

nicky0 wrote: post #54
stephenitis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe I was more commenting on the behavior of the period and @ ".@" to a average user I think the understanding the intention and the ability to quickly pick up this feature/behavorial cue is a toughie.

What is your suggested fix?

Visual indication on the compose tab with popover that explains the concept.

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#64

Post by kstrauser »

buro9 wrote: post #61
madsushi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to edit something that someone has already retweeted seems ripe for abuse.

Essentially a tweet ID should be a pointer to "latest version", but with historical versions preserved and available at the same visibility level as the parent (typically public) and a small indicator would show that it has been edited and the history is available. But all of those, "Damn I made a typo or dumb spelling (thx mobile keyboard) and yet it has been replied to or re-tweeted already"... all of that is solve…

I think it's still ripe for abuse.

Case 1:

I write "I love cats!" You RT it. I edit it to "I am Al Queda." The FBI visits you.

Case 2:

I write "I am Al Queda." I edit it to "I love cats!" before you see it. You like cats, too, so you RT it. The FBI has a slow feed, so they see that you endorsed my Al Queda membership. They pay you a visit.

---

From a systems point of view, when your whole stack is designed around immutability (so you can serve archives of past tweets from append-only CDNs, for example) it may be nigh impossible to add editing.

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#65

Post by riffic »

Good, they should have done this a long time ago.

It always would have been trivial to remove URLs from the data and throw it into metadata, where character limits do not matter.

Shame it took 2446 days for this basic idea to come to fruition:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804977

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#66

Post by krschultz »

buro9 wrote: post #48
donohoe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. We've told them this directly for years. Whats next?

Edit!

Edit seems much harder to implement. This basically adds some metadata to the Tweet model instead of embedding it within the body text. That's a change and it needs to be implemented all over, but it is pretty backwards compatible.

It seems that one of the fundamental assumptions is that Tweets are immutable. Changing that could break all kinds of things and would probably their systems significantly more complicated.

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#67

Post by ben_jones »

buro9 wrote: post #61
madsushi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to edit something that someone has already retweeted seems ripe for abuse.

Essentially a tweet ID should be a pointer to "latest version", but with historical versions preserved and available at the same visibility level as the parent (typically public) and a small indicator would show that it has been edited and the history is available. But all of those, "Damn I made a typo or dumb spelling (thx mobile keyboard) and yet it has been replied to or re-tweeted already"... all of that is solve…

Just imagine the gargantuan changes that could be necessary for small tweaks like that. Twitter was built on RoR originally, so it was probably a pretty standard relational model, then they did massive scaling for huge read/write loads, then they did massive scaling for real time features, god knows how hard it would be just to add a foreign key. I really, really, want to take a day and just go through all their engineering blogs after only glimpsing a few..

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#68

Post by halomru »

mavrc wrote: post #27
ldong wrote: post #4

The beauty of twitter is to tweet with concise messages. I'd be disappointed if this 140 characters restriction got removed.

I find it quite frustrating. I can easily say what I want on other platforms because I can write what I need to without worrying about every single word. Twitter makes me stop and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and finally get something that fits in 140 and makes sense for the most part after the third read if you understand me and all the context surrounding the thing I said. I suppose it's at least partially gener…

Finding the core of an idea always takes more time than writing a wall of text. But in a world where a message is read much more often than it's written it makes no sense to offload this cost onto the reader.

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#69

Post by chris_wot »

mattl wrote: post #62
return0 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't really a blog though, right? Maybe it began as "a real-time blog aggregator, where blogs only have titles". I believe nowadays it's the network effect that keeps them, not the technology itself.

Microblog, but sure..

Whilst Twitter has someone tweet the occasional gem, it's genuinely few and far between. I honestly feel that the format was great when it was only really programmers who used it (and even then I'm not so sure...) but limiting people to 140 characters, even discounting images and links, means most people can't convey views on most complex issues.

I have an unpopular view, but I'm firmly of the belief that all Twitter did was amplify the voice of celebrities - most of whom have not much to really say, made it easier for abusive speech to be targeted towards individuals and amplified moral outrage. Facebook has as well, but nowhere near as badly as Twitter.

Ironically, sometimes it's been for the better. But for every https://twitter.com/RabbiJason/status/728404847381204993 there is a https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/24046226568028979...

Sometimes you even get something like this:

https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313417655879102464

Edit: like I say, it's an unpopular view! If only someone would tell me why my view is wrong or unreasonable. In 140 characters...

Edit 2: It's suddenly occurred to me that if someone was able to give a highly convincing argument in favour of Twitter's ability to convey all complex arguments and views and did so with a lengthy response, but there was no way of distilling the message to 140 characters... would that invalidate it?

Re: Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit

#70

Post by mgiannopoulos »

krschultz wrote: post #66
buro9 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit!

Edit seems much harder to implement. This basically adds some metadata to the Tweet model instead of embedding it within the body text. That's a change and it needs to be implemented all over, but it is pretty backwards compatible. It seems that one of the fundamental assumptions is that Tweets are immutable. Changing that could break all kinds of things and would probably their systems significantly more complicated…

Even Facebook has an edit feature for a long time now with a revision history of posts/comments. No issues of abuse. This isn't rocket science.
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