Live data from Hacker News

Giving you more characters

blog.twitter.com

231–240 of 493 posts

Re: Giving you more characters

#231
post #163

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…

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

HN users should have reading comprehension.

Re: Giving you more characters

#233

> 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?

Well, their idea is to increase the amount of communication _per tweet_.

Re: Giving you more characters

#234
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.

As a government, the need for instantaneous communication is pretty much confined to secure channels. The need to respond immediately was a sloped we slipped down by racing to the bottom.

Re: Giving you more characters

#236

@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 am sure that after a well deserved break from such amazingly hard work, they'll tackle the next increase in characters. Their solution makes it look so easy, but it isn't. /s Does "Hail Mary ..." fit in 280 characters?

As a Catholic nerd, I had to check. Yes. :)

    echo -n 'Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.' \
    | wc -c

    210

Re: Giving you more characters

#237

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.

Twitter with no character limit is just a blog site. There are plenty of blog sites, none of them close to as successful as Twitter. The character limit is key to holding on to the modern zero-attention-span user.

The exact number 140 is legacy, but the super-brief "microblogging" format is vital.

Re: Giving you more characters

#238
post #192

A few years ago I suggested Twitter should roll out an optional $1-per-month plan to let users tweet 280 characters.¹ If 10% of their MAU sign up, this would up their revenue by 17% (extra $400M yearly.) ¹ http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month...

You do realize the credit card processing fee on a $1 purchase is ~$0.40?

Re: Giving you more characters

#239
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.

Trump leveraged a TV show and a Twitter account into the presidency beating two most powerful American political dynasties in the process. Why would you believe that his current tweets are caused by lack of self control?

Re: Giving you more characters

#240
I’m glad Twitter is changing things up. Technically this means doubling everything (database, cache, etc) which I imagine was an undertaking.

But...

Is this really what’s preventing Twitter from growing? I don’t think so.

I use twitter for both personal and company reasons and I can see how it’d help the latter. I don’t see how it helps the former. To me, the whole purpose of the feed is to get the “gist”. 280 characters is wayyy more than that.

I wish they spent their efforts on improving/building useful things (including better targeting for ads) or bring back the tweet counts.

So congrats, but to me it’s a sign things aren’t chirping anymore.

Post reply on HN