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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#161

Post by JabrZer0 »

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…

This seems to be an unpopular opinion for some reason, but I don't think the core of what you're saying is wrong. There was an article on HN a few weeks ago about how Twitter was originally meant to be the "pulse of the planet". Part of what made it feel like that, for me at least, has always been the ability to get a quick snapshot of what someone has to say.

I don't go on Twitter to read in-depth analysis or discussion (though, as has been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Twitter has great potential for improving its ability to support real discussion). Twitter, for me, is a lot like the front page of reddit - I go to my Twitter feed to get an overview of what's going on. If I want to know more, I'm fine being linked to a blog post or article, or getting into a discussion elsewhere.

NB: Thinking about it more, I think my opinion stems from filling out one too many "describe your startup in n characters" forms...

Re: Giving you more characters

#162

Post by beachy »

jsnathan wrote: post #86
dragonwriter wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I feel like the core value proposition is something like "public expressions that can be consumed quickly and produced with little forethought". I think it's important that Twitter gives you the excuse to be less precise: there isn't enough space. It's a small thing sure, but if you look at the differences between the popular social platforms, it's all about small differences. If Twitter loses that which distinguishe…

Concur.

Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish. When the platform limits his words, that works in his favour - no nuance can be conveyed, his utterances are sharp, authentic sounding, plausible.

Give him 1000 words to make his case, and suddenly he's stuck. His thoughts were never that deep, and they don't stand up well to being expanded on - there wasn't any substance to begin with.

Twitter is what it is in large part because of that 140 character limit. It allows boofheads of all stripes to sound convincing, because the platform was tailor made for short blasts of hot air.

Re: Giving you more characters

#163

Post by baby »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #66
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 h…

You should probably edit or delete your comment. It reads like FUD against neil degrasse tyson

Re: Giving you more characters

#164

Post by continuational »

okr wrote: post #131
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.

I can think of many reasons, why a limit is somehow hardcoded/assumed throughout the entire system including the history and probably a lot of optimizations around it. You can not think of any? In databases you also have limits, like character limits, like 16k for a varchar or something. Or memcaches with bucket sizes and so on. It is not just changing a number, i can imagine.

There are databases with arbitrary limits on strings? That strikes me as really poor design.

Re: Giving you more characters

#165

Post by baby »

madeofpalk wrote: post #78

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!

madeofpalk 59 minutes ago | undown [-]

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!

Re: Giving you more characters

#166

Post by whywhywhywhy »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #66
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 h…

Worst thing Twitter ever did was teach you what people you once respected are really like.

Can't believe I ever looked up to him.

Re: Giving you more characters

#167

Post by UberActivist »

madeofpalk wrote: post #96
mintplant wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could point people to https://mastodon.social , the "flagship" instance, or directly to any other instance's homepage. There's something of a word-of-mouth aspect here, in that instances targeted toward particular communities can be more attractive to people within those communities than general-purpose social networks. There's an instance chooser wizard at https://instances.social/ , but I can see someone lookin…

> Mastodon > Mastodon hosted on mastodon.social Umm what? > What is mastodon.social? > mastodon.social is the "flagship" instance, belonging to the Mastodon project. ...sure.

I poked the owner and he updated mastodon.social to say this and be more clear...

> What is mastodon.social?

> This page describes the mastodon.social instance - wondering what Mastodon is? Check out joinmastodon.org instead! In essence, Mastodon is a decentralized, open source social network. This is just one part of the network, run by the main developers of the project It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!

Re: Giving you more characters

#168

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

bsaul wrote: post #134
iaw wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Don't think it's a trump thing , or even something specific to the US. I remember a few years ago, our french prime minister tweeted his condolences to the victim of a terror attack in France.

I think it's fairly reasonable to tweet condolences or important news. Twitter is widely used and as a government you probably want to spread information as quickly as possible.

Tweets are probably made along side more traditional forms of communication.

But Trump is just something else. The sheer lack of self control. This is not the behaviour of a leader of a first world nation or for that matter, an adult.

Re: Giving you more characters

#169

Post by acdha »

coldtea wrote: post #93
madeofpalk wrote: post #78

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!

Because otherwise the role of Twitter is thwarting nazis and preventing nuclear war?

Because their service is being used to further negative outcomes. Their job isn’t directly stopping Nazis any more than a bar owner’s primary job is stopping drunk drivers but that doesn’t mean they aren’t fueling the problems, especially given their tendency to skimp on actually enforcing their TOS.

Re: Giving you more characters

#170

Post by sprafa »

Nightshaxx wrote: post #147
aaron-lebo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

"Your platform has been co-opted and manipulated, turned into a megaphone for hate and propaganda." Yet here you are using it..... Why do people really think that x or y company is to blame for minority opinions getting so much traction on the internet. The very definition of public speaking/communication is that it gives small individuals big voices, no matter how big or small of a following they have. They cannot b…

You can get so close to that line without crossing it though, plus policing 300 million users is hard enough.

The problem is that both extreme fascism and communism might actually be a very tempting response to everyday problems to a lot of people, which means that the only reason we haven't had issues with either ideology is we had a media who complied with the censorship of both those viewpoints. Online anyone can say anything and promote anything, which means people who have problems that aren't being solved by their current leaders can easily turn to ideologies which we had all previously agreed to censor out of normal discourse.

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