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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#221

Post by ocdtrekkie »

iaw wrote: post #82
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!

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...

Indeed. If you recall when Trump announced his transgender ban on the military, he had a ten minute delay between part one and the actual subject of the message.

"After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow....."

During those ten minutes, even folks at the Pentagon were wondering if Trump was about to announce a strike on a foreign power or something of that gravity... and surely folks in other countries' governments were wondering the same.

A cut-off tweet could, indeed, lead someone to believe a strike is imminent.

Re: Giving you more characters

#222

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #168
bsaul wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This is not the behaviour of a leader of a first world nation or for that matter, an adult.

This is factually incorrect.

Re: Giving you more characters

#224

Post by c3534l »

It would seem to me that the solution to the problem described in the blog would be to reduce the number of characters allowed for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese users. The whole appeal of twitter, I thought, was if you said what you wanted to say the system forced you to reconsider how you said it until you got down to the bare essence of what you were trying to convey. I'd be in favor of a maximum number of tweets per day, too.

Re: Giving you more characters

#225

Post by anonfunction »

> We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).

If the only justification they had was that three languages can convey more information than the rest why not reduce the characters for the three "cramming" languages?

Re: Giving you more characters

#226

Post by baddox »

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,…

Now I feel silly after having just read the parent comment on mobile by constantly scrolling left and right.

Re: Giving you more characters

#228

Post by saghm »

NamTaf wrote: post #211
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't ever let a poet see this comment Why?

My guess is that sixty-seven has four syllables, twenty-five has three.

In the first verse, there doesn't seem to be any pattern to the lengths (in syllables) of the lines; 10, 7, 8, 8, 12, 8. I'm not sure the meter would really be damaged that much by reducing the last line by one syllable.

Re: Giving you more characters

#229

Post by vacri »

always_good wrote: post #212
vacri wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN preserves linebreaks. It's the paragraph formatting that gets in the way of poetry like the above.

No it doesn't (The above was written "No\nit\ndoesn't") You may be referring to some sort of distinction here, but I'm just talking about newlines.

No, just a brainfart. I was thinking of something else. Sorry.

Re: Giving you more characters

#230

Post by akkartik »

squarecog wrote: post #200
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.

(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 (Sour…

Wow, sounds like Y2K.
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