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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#61

Post by orblivion »

dragonwriter wrote: post #43
jsnathan wrote: post #30

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…

> the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition It was related to the core of their value proposition when that was “microblogging that can be updated and recieved over SMS”. Now, its just legacy.

Things fall into place by accident. I'd say there's no telling what would happen.

Imagine what this is going to do to president Trump. His short quips had a striking impact. He'll never again need to end a message with the one word sentence "JOBS!"

Re: Giving you more characters

#62

Post by iagooar »

I like it. Will reduce the amount of 1 out of X tweets from the same person. It will allow tweets to become quite a bit more expressive, without becoming Facebook-like novels. And hey, when Twitter doesn't try new stuff, people complain. When Twitter does, they complain as well.

PS: This post would perfectly fit in a next-gen tweet ;)

Re: Giving you more characters

#63

Post by bradjohnson »

nothis wrote: post #24

Any reason not to simplify that measure and make it 280 chars for all? They might not use it in Japan but what's the point of limiting them if they apparently don't use the space anyway?

Forcing brevity is the whole point of twitter. They've found that they are limiting the English twitter with 140 characters, but 140 characters seems to be working well for Japanese.

Re: Giving you more characters

#64

Post by cwkoss »

billmalarky wrote: post #22

Seems like one possible solution is to increase the character limit, but also increase the "pain" a user has to go through to use the additional characters (my ghetto solution would be to use a captcha to unlock the higher char limit). That way people would only use the additional chars if they really needed them, reducing noise from otherwise unnecessarily long tweets.

"Watch this 30-second ad to expand your character limit by 30 characters for this tweet!"

Re: Giving you more characters

#65

Post by bostonpete »

ppod wrote: post #33

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 was disappointed to find this poem didn't have exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words.

Re: Giving you more characters

#66

Post by aaron-lebo »

robtaylor wrote: post #50

@Jack said "Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!" https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824 How many people did it take to come up with double a char limit, and how is that 'thoughtful' or 'solving' anything? Total guff. The start of the end of twitter hashtag hottake.

Hey man, Jack's been putting in 23 hour days for the last seven years to make this happen. Not cool to mock his effort.

But seriously that Tweet shows the usefulness. For them not to have tried it until now shows how scared they are to make any real changes. 1) Guess 2) this 3) doesn't 4) fix 5) this 6) nonsense? Those comments are absolute youtube quality cancer though. Goddamn tragedy that this is the pinnacle of human discourse right now.

These are the first five replies to that tweet:

Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 1h1 hour ago Replying to @jack

I will reserve my full response until I get 280 characters but this is a slap in the face to everyone harmed by your lax governance 1 reply 15 retweets 109 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 57m57 minutes ago

Your platform has been co-opted and manipulated, turned into a megaphone for hate and propaganda. 3 replies 20 retweets 154 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 56m56 minutes ago

Your response? Remove the last filter forcing careful selection of words. This makes Twitter boring without making room for real thought. 4 replies 14 retweets 107 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 55m55 minutes ago

And yet again, another surface-level tweak that fails to deal with the rot inside this community. 1 reply 10 retweets 82 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 54m54 minutes ago

You have failed signally in your responsibilities to your users, investors, and frankly to all of humanity. Thanks, Jack.

What a weird platform.

Re: Giving you more characters

#69

Post by SquareWheel »

Lots of cynicism around here. For me, the 140 character limit really was very frustrating. I tweet rarely, but when I do I often spend 2-3 minutes trying to fit the message into the character limit. Often I just abandon it completely because there's no way to make it fit without having to send multiple messages.

This change seems completely reasonable to me, if not a bit delayed.

Re: Giving you more characters

#70

Post by hk__2 »

1ris wrote: post #54
fairpx wrote: post #23

> 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…

I agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter. 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) Twitte…

> I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure)

It’s written on your Twitter profile, FYI.

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