51–60 of 493 posts
In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-…
I'm not sure what to make of this. I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc? Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it. I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 14…
Remember that the 140 count was based on SMS (160 total, giving 20 for the handle and a colon). It wasn't a randomly picked number.
The analysis was really interesting. I wonder if there's cultural bias as well - i.e. English speakers tend to be more verbose because we have a need to speak more
> Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain. When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's blog. The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy. Then…
But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it. The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitter is aswell a tool to share simplistic ideas with people that already agree with you.
If the content is better, it's pictures of text and 12 tweets in a row. Right now it seems you have to fight the platform if you want to post something good. Not sure if 280 solves it, but it might become more useful, as it still restricts verboseness.
And the aim of twitter should be to be usefull, rather than twitter. As being twitter does not earn them any money.
/edit: 1) I feel german "grime twitter", a buch a trolls being extremists of all flavors insulting people with way too much ego is the best part. It's like 4chan, with less racism and slightly more grown up. And it is, as you can image, toxic garbage. And that's the best part in my view.
Mastodon [0] has a default character limit of 500, which individual instances can turn up or down as they see fit (Mastodon is a federated network). Hundreds of thousands of people use it and the social dynamics work just fine, or even better, with the additional breathing room for expression. To me Twitter's attachment to such a low cap feels like an anachronism. [0] https://joinmastodon.org
... sparing all your readers that reading time. The whole post doesn't mention reading time once. Doesn't that matter too?
In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-…
Mastodon [0] has a default character limit of 500, which individual instances can turn up or down as they see fit (Mastodon is a federated network). Hundreds of thousands of people use it and the social dynamics work just fine, or even better, with the additional breathing room for expression. To me Twitter's attachment to such a low cap feels like an anachronism. [0] https://joinmastodon.org
Visiting that site requires clicking "Get Started" which then directs you to a list of instances, from which you choose a server and sign up (not sure because in the age of 140 chars don't have the attention span to follow through). Without doing that there's no content short of a bunch of reasons why Mastodon is open and free, but the average user doesn't care about that. It's kind of preaching to the choir which means that the choir is gonna dominate it.
Maybe the goal isn't mass adoption, or maybe adoption would be a long term result of smaller communities getting popular, but wish it'd just get to the product a lot quicker than it does.
I'm not sure what to make of this. I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc? Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it. I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 14…
Remember that the 140 count was based on SMS (160 total, giving 20 for the handle and a colon). It wasn't a randomly picked number.