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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#152
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.

At first I didnt understand why either, but looking at poem more and thinking about if I were writing it; I think he did it so he could use the "Thirty two and a third" line. It's much more dramatic and stimulating ("...I love you, I...") than just saying "twenty-five times".

Edit: Oops, I think I screwed up my math. It would be 22 times.

Edit: misquoted! worked in a record store too long. :)

Re: Giving you more characters

#153
post #82

Twitter seems to have the worst luck/timing when it comes to 'new features'. Last time it was Users: Please help get rid of these nazis Twitter: ROUND PROFILE PICS! this time its Users: Please help prevent nuclear war Twitter: HOW ABOUT LONGER TWEETS!

I can't believe I'm writing this, but given the current modes of political communication in the US longer tweets may prevent nuclear war...

They could do their bit in preventing nuclear war by banning a couple of users.

Re: Giving you more characters

#154
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-…

Please don't use code blocks for anything but code; they're unreadable on mobile.

I see this more and more. Why is there a recent trend to use codeblocks instead of > ? Is there a popular platform where codeblocks are quotes?

Re: Giving you more characters

#155

We don't need 140 characters. They could solve this a dozen other ways including: * Not counting links as characters. * Not including images as characters. * Improving tweet-storm capabilities. * Improve threading + response mechanisms. This is the easiest + worst improvement they could do. I hope it's not permanent.

* Improving tweet-storm capabilities. That's what they just did. * Not counting links as characters. Oh, think of the spam.

Literally just don't follow spam accounts?

Re: Giving you more characters

#156

We don't need 140 characters. They could solve this a dozen other ways including: * Not counting links as characters. * Not including images as characters. * Improving tweet-storm capabilities. * Improve threading + response mechanisms. This is the easiest + worst improvement they could do. I hope it's not permanent.

* Links are 20 characters, flat (could be less, but users would spam 100+ links). * Images aren't counted (unless they come from links). * @handles were moved out of the text for replies. * Threads have improved a lot over the past year. * Thread composer is apparently on it's way.

Just don't follow spam accounts? Not that hard...

Re: Giving you more characters

#157
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't use code blocks for anything but code; they're unreadable on mobile.

I see this more and more. Why is there a recent trend to use codeblocks instead of > ? Is there a popular platform where codeblocks are quotes?

Because HN doesn't preserve line-breaks and `>` doesn't do anything. You'd have to double-space the entire poem which is just silly.

HN should just preserve all line-breaks so we don't have to hack around it.

Re: Giving you more characters

#158
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SMS limit was decided when an engineer working for German Telecom decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences. Twitter based their limit on the SMS limit (140 + user address).

Excluding the username from the 140 character limit was only changed this year: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-character-limit

That's not what is meant. Twitter was originally an SMS service, which would text you whenever someone you followed posted a tweet. In order for you to be able to tell who had posted each tweet, the message had to contain the poster's username. This is distinct from the username of whoever they were replying to.

Re: Giving you more characters

#159
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-…

Please don't use code blocks for anything but code; they're unreadable on mobile.

In this case, it makes sense because the author was trying to preserve the line breaks in the original poem, which give cadence to the writing and are integral to the work.

Don't blame the commenter. Blame HN for having broken

 blocks (or at least for consuming single line breaks otherwise).

Re: Giving you more characters

#160
post #29

Good. Twitter needs to keep moving forward. There have been several features that feel like the core of their platform, but based on their revenue growth, they may be holding them back. Personally, eh, 280-length tweets feel weird and long and I don't see the need, but I'll probably get over it. If they can change how Twitter is used open up new audiences and conversations, this is good. They are trying something big…

The character limit is a core aspect of what makes consuming content on Twitter so engaging vs. other platforms. Will this change improve engagement number or ad revenue? I sincerely doubt it. An actual useful change would be versioning functionality so that users can edit tweets to correct typos or factual errors while not erasing the record.

Twitter will not implement the ability to edit tweets. tweet text being immutable is one of their data model core tenets:

https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-...

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