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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#331

Post by Jaruzel »

rconti wrote: post #325
onion2k wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making people stop and think, and sometimes abandon what they were going to say, is a really good aspect of Twitter.

Doesn't seem to be working, does it? I'm a fairly verbose person and nothing I ever want to say fits in 140 characters. And the stuff I see on twitter that DOES fit into 140, well, I'm typically better off not reading it. (222 characters)

Most of the time, it's not about the characters but more about the words. If you want to say more in only 140 characters you have to fit more words in, which means using shorter words... and that's why 99% of Twitter users sound like idiots, even though most of them probably are not.

Re: Giving you more characters

#332

Post by kylnew »

flexie wrote: post #309
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-…

Great poem. And what I like about HN is that the first dozens of comments on the poem are about technicalities like how it is displayed in the browser, the mathmatics of it etc., not its interpretation :-)

haha, full disclosure I took a screenshot of this comment because it epitomizes HN in a way that made my day

Re: Giving you more characters

#333

Post by subroutine »

partiallypro wrote: post #318
Illniyar wrote: post #317

Sometimes, things that look obvious and simple require a lot of work and research to build so that it will fit the product and won't damage the community and momentum. This isn't one of those times. Seriously, what in the world took so long.

I wish it would take longer, because frankly it's a dumb idea. It defeats the purpose of Twitter.

It’s also dumb when I have to read 3 tweets in a sequence by the same person trying to get a single point across, each one with a different set of comments, likes, and retweets.

Im not sure this will fix it though, maybe it will help. I feel like the same could be accomplished with an expando at whatever limit they set. That way when I browse twitter the tweet boxes are still the same size as originally, and if i want to read more I can tap the expand box button.

Re: Giving you more characters

#334

Post by nu11p01n73R »

1ris wrote: post #54
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…

I agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter. But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it. The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitte…

I think the quality of the content really depend on the people we end up following.

When I started Twitter, I started out with my school/college friends and some random tech blogs/site etc. My friends doesn't tweet a lot(Less people use Twitter in India compared to Facebook) or the sites that I follow mostly had crapy content, making my timeline looking awful. I stopped using Twitter. About a year before I came back to the platform, un-followed all of them and started following tech people. Mostly people from js/golang/python communities. Now my timeline has more quality content that I do not get time to read all of them(links to blogs etc). I do agree that at times there are some political opinions but not the majority so its okay.

Re: Giving you more characters

#335

Post by benguild »

freyir wrote: post #305
c3534l wrote: post #224

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 p…

They found out that Japanese Twitter users don’t run up against the character limit, and are less frustrated as a result. The point is to make everybody else less frustrated, not to make the Japanese as frustrated as everybody else.

Yeah, you can type a lot more in Japanese. Most characters stand for at least two US characters, which is most likely how they came up with the 2x decision.

Re: Giving you more characters

#336

Post by roryisok »

Another cool feature could be not enabling people to start nuclear war on the service.

This might get down voted as trolling, but the real trolling is going on between Donald Trump and North Korea. The fact that twitter continues to allow the racism, bigotry, sexism, antisemitism, climate change denial and warmongering of the most high profile account they have to go unchecked is ridiculously unethical. Instead of taking a stand against the erosion of Western ethical standards they're profiting from it

Re: Giving you more characters

#337

Post by astrange »

saghm wrote: post #262

Have they gone into any detail about how exactly they're going to enforce different limits for different languages? If it's by the localization of your browser/app, what's stopping someone from changing their language to English and then typing 280 Japanese characters? If it's by doing some sort of language recognition on the tweet, how will it deal with mixed content?

The code counts all CJK characters twice.

Re: Giving you more characters

#338

Post by trampi »

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-…

Thank you very much for sharing. Touching. Did not expect something like this in the comment section. You definitely made my day with this beautiful poem.

Re: Giving you more characters

#339

Post by ramphastidae »

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…

Yep. One step closer to FB.

Re: Giving you more characters

#340

Post by boyce »

JabrZer0 wrote: post #161
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 discus…

Pulse of the planet seems a bit high minded for a system for sending group sms
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