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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#191

Post by notatoad »

andr wrote: post #141

The irony is that both Biz's [1] and Jack's [2] tweets announcing the change could convey the same message with a third of the characters. In fact, they'd be better written. The need to carefully think, rethink, edit, and reedit your tweets so they fit in the limit lead to much higher quality. [1] https://twitter.com/biz/status/912783936123691009 [2] https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824

example of how it could be better written in 140: https://twitter.com/brianrbarone/status/912788388150960130

Re: Giving you more characters

#193

Post by jlgaddis »

continuational wrote: post #164
okr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You must be really new to databases.

Re: Giving you more characters

#194

Post by _qbjt »

mintplant wrote: post #44

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

It doesn't just feel like an anachronism, it is one. The cap was chosen to conform to the 160 character limit of SMS (140 characters in the tweet and 20 characters for your Twitter handle).

Re: Giving you more characters

#195

Post by slg »

hk__2 wrote: post #92
slg wrote: post #47

It is clear that people want to use Twitter to say things longer than 140 characters as the rise in popularity of long threaded Tweets would attest. It is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their iconic 140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform.

> It is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their iconic 140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform. They don’t: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-button/

One of those options was announced publicly with an official blog post and one of them was slipped into an app unannounced likely as part of a/b testing. Maybe they eventually implement both, but at this moment their preference between the two is clear.

Re: Giving you more characters

#196

Post by pitaj »

cornstalks wrote: post #122
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-…

For those (like me) on mobile who can't read this (well): "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,…

People could just use > like the internet has for ages:

> 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-nine today. I saved the rest for you.

> When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.

- The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel

Re: Giving you more characters

#197

Post by kemerover »

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…

It is a parody account.

Re: Giving you more characters

#198

Post by api_or_ipa »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #72
bostonpete wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's kind of weird that it doesn't. You could so easily change the "sixty-seven" to "twenty-five".

the passage has 125 words using `wc -w`.

Re: Giving you more characters

#199

Post by aaron-lebo »

kemerover wrote: post #197
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…

It is a parody account.

Never implied otherwise. My point was that the CEO's post announcing such a feature has multiple garbage comments from the same individual at the very top. That it's a parody account just makes it worse.

Re: Giving you more characters

#200

Post by squarecog »

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.

(ex-twitter engineer) I left before this project got started, and do not have any insider info on how they did it. Given what I know about the number of places tweet length assumptions were built into, it must have been a large, cross-team effort. It likely required thoughtful problem-solving.

Take, for example, search. An early iteration of Twitter search relied on this limit to pack term positions into 8 bits (Source: https://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/publications/Busch_etal...). 280 > 256, so if this was still around, the whole approach had to be rebuilt, and the indexes recreated. That's ... non-trivial. And that's just one subsystem.

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