Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 196 posts

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

#91

Post by npizzolato »

halomru wrote: post #68
mavrc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He said, in 209 characters.

You need to remove all nuance to fit any reasonably complex idea in 140 characters . And so we're left with soundbites and absolutes, the backbone of all good discussions!

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

#92

Post by jsmeaton »

chris_wot wrote: post #69
mattl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it depends who you choose to follow. Twitter can be different things to different people. I've never been a big fan of Twitter myself, but I follow about a dozen programmers and a few sporting brands and I get some value from that.

Your argument of Twitter being better when only programmers used it doesn't really apply if you only follow programmers, does it?

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

#93

Post by [deleted] »

chris_wot wrote: post #69
mattl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#94

Post by chris_wot »

jsmeaton wrote: post #92
chris_wot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it depends who you choose to follow. Twitter can be different things to different people. I've never been a big fan of Twitter myself, but I follow about a dozen programmers and a few sporting brands and I get some value from that. Your argument of Twitter being better when only programmers used it doesn't really apply if you only follow programmers, does it?

> Your argument of Twitter being better when only programmers used it doesn't really apply if you only follow programmers, does it?

That's a fair point.

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

#95

Post by joshkpeterson »

chris_wot wrote: post #69
mattl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Twitter can be fun

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

#97

Post by toomuchtodo »

teej wrote: post #78
ben_jones wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engi…

Honestly, if they only designed to scale and did not anticipate iterating on the product, they deserve to fail. My guess is that this not a trivial change but worth the effort.

No one deserves to fail because of challenges they couldn't have anticipated in the future.

We call that "learning".

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

#98

Post by downandout »

askafriend wrote: post #11

The fact that it took this long for them to make such an obvious change speaks to how afraid they are (were?) to challenge core assumptions about the product.

Imo, it shows that, like many of us, they don't really understand why Twitter became so popular. That being the case, they don't know what they can and cannot safely change.

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

#99

Post by dec0dedab0de »

mgiannopoulos wrote: post #70
krschultz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook has had abuse from pages that got likes, and then later changed their title and purpose.

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

#100

Post by gregmac »

chris_wot wrote: post #69
mattl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Definitely twitter is entirely about who you follow. I tried it out early on, saw no value, and ignored it for a year or two, until a friend convinced me it has some value, and there are two uses I find.

I follow several programmers (some internet famous, some merely who I've found from using a project they worked on or someone else's retweet), and through that, find it interesting to get a glimpse at what other people are doing or finding challenging, or see when there's buzz around some new technology in my space.

The other thing I find it useful for is local updates in my (relatively small) city. Traffic updates, road closures, police activity, events, etc. The local public works and city hall accounts are surprisingly active and often useful. I also follow a handful of restaurants nearby the office: they often tweet lunch specials.

I follow exactly zero mainstream celebrities, never look at 'Moments', 'trending', etc -- I find those things full of crap I simply don't care about at all.

Post reply on HN