Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Giving you more characters

blog.twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 493 posts

Re: Giving you more characters

#351

Post by visarga »

ianamartin wrote: post #201
1ris wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agree 100%. I've tried to really get into it many times. Maybe once a year or so, I'll tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to really 'get' twitter this time." The people I follow are some genuinely interesting people. And god writers. I subscribe to their blogs' RSS feeds. But engaging in that conversation with them is almost impossible if you don't already know them in person. I'm not terrible at saying things either. I t…

I've had a different experience with Deep Learning related Twitter - I can talk to anyone and they reply back to me: authors of papers, celebs (for example, Andrej Karpathy who heads Tesla's self driving car had the time to write a line to poor me).

Re: Giving you more characters

#352

Post by rakoo »

orthecreedence wrote: post #287
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

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…

Then you don't understand what distribution means. If you want to use mastodon you don't have to go to the main instance, you can go to another instance that allows what you want. Theresr httsp://instances.social to help you with that. Here's the result:

https://instances.social/list#lang=en&allowed=racism,hateSpe...

And if you really don't find an instance to your liking here, that means you should open one that is moderated exactly the way you want.

Re: Giving you more characters

#353

Post by Mithaldu »

benguild wrote: post #335
freyir wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sadly that is not going to be sufficient. Japanese uses very few context indicators and thus as a whole is a lot shorter.

Re: Giving you more characters

#354

Post by jussij »

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-…

The author of the poem has most certainly made sure not to go over the daily word limit.

These are the words actually spoken in the poem:

> I only used fifty-nine today. = 5

> I saved the rest for you. = 6

> I love you * (32 1/3) = 96 + 1 = 97

The remainder of the words are thoughts which don't add to the daily count.

Plus the author had already used 59 words earlier in the day.

So if we add it all up:

       5
       6
      97
      59
    ----
     167 words total 
    ----

Re: Giving you more characters

#355

Post by andy_ppp »

Gaelan wrote: post #310
justinator wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, and HN is still using tables within tables within tables (within...) for their text formatting. I'm sure someone here will defend that. looks at calendar Anyways, flying cars everyone! We're going to be the VC for flying cars !

My understanding is that YC doesn't want to break scrapers.

Then provide a json api

Re: Giving you more characters

#356

Post by mintplant »

ufo wrote: post #249
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

Do you need to have an account to lurk around a mastodon instance?

Mastoview is a tool for previewing Mastodon instances without signing up: http://www.unmung.com/mastoview

Re: Giving you more characters

#357

Post by asloma »

baddox wrote: post #226
cornstalks wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 80 character line limit is making it's return (for me it never left though).

Re: Giving you more characters

#358

Post by tajen »

glenstein wrote: post #272
jsnathan wrote: post #30

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…

I agree with you that the 140 is iconic and it's probably not a good idea to abandon it. What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures. That way you don't lose the iconic 140 characters thing, and you don't have any problem to solve by making weird compromises where the user n…

And reversely, it's incredibly creative for Trump to attempt to fit the entire USA diplomacy in 140 characters.

Re: Giving you more characters

#359

Post by ak39 »

Can someone explain this:

"But in English, a much higher percentage of Tweets have 140 characters (9%). Most Japanese Tweets are 15 characters while most English Tweets are 34"

Why is 34 characters considered most tweets when the chart shows 140 characters higher than "34"? As labeled, the hump is lower than spike at 140 characters.

What am I missing?

Edit: Is the author saying the mode is 34?

Re: Giving you more characters

#360

Post by Aeolun »

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…

140 characters might be one of them. There is honestly not a lot of difference in being limited to either 140 or 280 characters. In that you still cannot tell a whole story. But now you might run into the situation where you can't even finish your sentence a lot less, which is a positive in my opinion.
Post reply on HN