I’m curious how much has to change code wise to get this to work. Or is there simply a single global variable that controls max tweet size (ignoring the fact that this is language specific).
Giving you more characters
281–290 of 493 posts
Re: Giving you more characters
#282Earlier 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.
Not string lengths, but definitely other things. For example, Oracle is notorious for only allowing 1000 columns per table:
https://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUE...
They bumped it up to 1000 from 255 a few years ago. It was a major engineering effort to support that. It's unlikely that they will be willing to do it again.
Re: Giving you more characters
#283That's a bold move by Twitter. I can't help but feel it is out of desperation
Ex-twitter eng here. Twitter has been debating this change internally for at least 5 years now. They were afraid to pull the trigger because no one inside knows why they've had the success that they've had and they're afraid to change too much (lest they pull a Digg).
This move isn't made out of desperation, but it's probably being done right now because they've nothing to lose by randomly trying things.
Re: Giving you more characters
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter is saving its courage for enabling nuclear war. https://twitter.com/biz/status/912526977361264640
Don't understand the criticism. If the world goes to nuclear war, it won't be because of a Tweet, it'll be because of a conflict going back to the 1950s, a lunatic dictator, and an elected maybe unstable authoritarian. You don't think those guys have lots of other ways of talking trash? Is the suggestion that banning Trump from Twitter will prevent nuclear war? That sounds like armchair virtue signaling of the highes…
Twitter enables the toddler in the White House.
Re: Giving you more characters
#285Twitter has had a net negative effect on discourse, media and, by extension, on society. More characters won't help.
Re: Giving you more characters
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 nig…
Not sure what you think you're improving since you still removed all the verse data of a poem.
He also removed the exif data
Re: Giving you more characters
#287Mastodon [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
I really wanted to like Mastodon, but their "default" instance is just too restrictive on speech. It's basically a tumblrina safe space network. I'm saying this as a mostly-liberal, not your average OMG LIBTARDS ARE SNOWFLAKES person.
If a social network, even a federated one, wants to gain traction, it needs to be a bit more open. Yeah, nazis are obnoxious assholes, but I'd rather have a network with them on it (and just ignore them) than have to constantly worry "am I saying the 'wrong thing'??" each time I post something.
I mean, the whole point of distribution seems to be that you can say what you want and it can't get shut down. Mastodon's ideals are at odds with its goals, IMO.
Re: Giving you more characters
#288Earlier 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…
Even more of a reason not to make this large, system breaking change.
Re: Giving you more characters
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Chinese character is much more dense than two roman letters. When I was texting in china during the SMS phase, I got around 16 or maybe 20 characters before it was broken into extra messages.
…huh? It should be able to fit 70 characters (70 UCS-2 characters is 140 bytes, which is the SMS message limit).
No way. Maybe someone Chinese knows the limit better, but I definitely couldn't send a 70 character message without it having been broken up into 3 or 4 texts.
Re: Giving you more characters
#290It 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 p…
Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint. The limit for Asian languages should have been adjusted downwards as early as Twitter launched (though I suppose that's actually somewhat hard to do from a technological viewpoint, as people might mix Western letters and Asian symbols). And then they point out that in Asian cou…
>"Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint."
I don't believe this is correct but rather 140 characters limit was chosen because SMS will break a message greater than 160 characters into two messages. 140 characters leaves 20 characters for a username.