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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#371

Post by CM30 »

Honestly, I don't see why they shouldn't change to 280 characters. I mean, Mastodon instances allow 500 by default, Gab.ai allows 300 by default...

And neither find it takes away from the microblogging aspect one bit. Pretty sure a lot of other Twitter alternatives allow for messages of around those sizes too.

Yes, it means doing away with a bit of tradition. But generally, my experience there is that the tiny amount of characters has hurt more than its helped. So easy to lose necessary context in that space.

Re: Giving you more characters

#372

Post by Yizahi »

Oh, great, it only took them how many years to acknowledge the stupidity of char limit? Now they only need to throw their UI out of the window and make a proper intuitive tree style interface and they are golden.

Re: Giving you more characters

#373

Post by deepfriedbits »

tootie wrote: post #269
pg_bot wrote: post #97

I'm convinced there is no one at twitter that understands why they succeeded as a company. Their management team continually makes decisions that are reminiscent of shuffling around deck chairs on the titanic. I get the feeling that they only exist due to inertia which is a death sentence for most tech companies.

No one in silicon valley will say the reason, but it's blindingly obvious. It was dumb luck. Luck plays a part in every success and failure and Twitter was about 98% luck. There was and is no vision or strategy that explains this. No lessons to learn. Pure zeitgeist that is bound to crumble sometime after Trump leaves office.

Reminds me of Zuckerberg's famous quote about Twitter: "... a clown car that fell into a gold mine."

Re: Giving you more characters

#374

Post by roryisok »

edanm wrote: post #346
roryisok wrote: post #336

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 ta…

Are you kidding? You really think that Twitter should be censoring the president of the United States ? That is beyond ridiculous. His tweets are instantly newsworthy - would you object to CNN writing about them? And if you've gotten to the point where your political philosophy is to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, you've basically removed all possibility of ever understanding about half the peopl…

Surely there's a distinction to be made between a government censoring its citizens free-speech, and a private service allowing The most powerful man in the world to use its platform to excuse white-supremacists and increase tension between hostile nuclear powers?

Surely?

This is not censorship we're talking about, and it's not free-speech. It's about having a set of rules on your social network and enforcing those rules. Unfortunately, twitter seems to have none.

Re: Giving you more characters

#375

Post by edanm »

roryisok wrote: post #374
edanm wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding? You really think that Twitter should be censoring the president of the United States ? That is beyond ridiculous. His tweets are instantly newsworthy - would you object to CNN writing about them? And if you've gotten to the point where your political philosophy is to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, you've basically removed all possibility of ever understanding about half the peopl…

Surely there's a distinction to be made between a government censoring its citizens free-speech, and a private service allowing The most powerful man in the world to use its platform to excuse white-supremacists and increase tension between hostile nuclear powers? Surely? This is not censorship we're talking about, and it's not free-speech. It's about having a set of rules on your social network and enforcing those r…

There is a difference, which is why I didn't talk about the 1st amendment or government protected free speech, so you seem to not be replying to my actual comment.

All I'm saying is, if your rules imply that you need to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, then there's something wrong with your rules. Also, let's be clear on this - even if Twitter for some insane reason decided to censor President Trump, it's not like he has a lack of microphones around. As much as we techies love Twitter and other companies, there really are other solutions around, and I think POTUS specifically would be able to get his message out even without Twitter.

Re: Giving you more characters

#376

Post by icebraining »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #237
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.

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.

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.

There's a slight fallacy here: that no single blog site is as successful as Twitter does not mean blogs as a whole aren't, and therefore that you need the character limit to be successful. I don't have any hard data, but my anecdotal experience matches that: almost nobody I know uses Twitter, whereas every computer/smartphone user I know reads blog posts at least occasionally.

Re: Giving you more characters

#377

Post by Angostura »

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 for bring that to my attention. It's really rather lovely.

Re: Giving you more characters

#378

Post by rayalez »

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…

Articles with good titles/descriptions/images are already beautifully embedded as cards.

So having a medium(or any other) blog that automatically posts links to twitter is the perfect solution to this, I think.

Re: Giving you more characters

#379

Post by wingerlang »

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…

> It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other

Really? My timeline is nothing but fun, informative and new content I usually want to see. Of course there's the occasional annoying retweet or sponsored tweets.

You really need to follow only people who generally tweets what you're interested in and regularly trim people who seemed interesting but ended up annoying.

For me it is best used as a constant buzz of more or less interesting material that you can look at very very briefly every now and then (I check it less than once per day).

Re: Giving you more characters

#380

Post by cup-of-tea »

ubersync wrote: post #277
gegtik wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he used 97 words to say "I love you" 32.333 times, you're taking away 42, so he would also have to say "I love you" eighteen and a third times

But then, the poem will be 124 words (by changing "thirty two" to "eighteen"), so we will have to change 125 to 124. Then, he will be able to say "I love you" an exactly 18 times. So now we are 3 words shorter (by removing "and a third"). So it comes 121. With 121 words, he will be able to say "I love you" exactly 17 times. So, there you go. Change "one sixty seven" to "one twenty one", and "thirty two and a third ti…

It's actually "thirty-two" which, by the rules established in the poem, counts as one word only. It works with 125 words by chance. The author missed an opportunity for a neat hack.
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