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

391–400 of 493 posts

Re: Giving you more characters

#391

Post by subroutine »

ak39 wrote: post #359

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?

They might be binning the data to form those conclusions (because you are right, the graph does not support those statements). If they bin at each character +/- 5 characters it looks like 34 (+/-5) would be max.

Re: Giving you more characters

#392

Post by PhasmaFelis »

icebraining wrote: post #376
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nobody I know voted for Trump, but here he is president. HN readers and their close friends are nowhere near being a representative sample of internet users.

Re: Giving you more characters

#393

Post by kakarot »

rakoo wrote: post #352
orthecreedence wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The issue with such "free speech" instances not being the norm is that the instances which do allow "hate speech" are going to be clustered with unsavory individuals.

If toleration is not encouraged at the core, it is a useless service because I don't want to spend my time in a safe-zone where I have to preface anything I say with "I don't mean to offend, but I think..." any more than I want to hang out with a group of half fascists.

Re: Giving you more characters

#394

Post by refrigerator »

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…

> 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 had similar thoughts when Snapchat started introducing their (now many) non-ephemeral features, but I was proved wrong at every turn.

Re: Giving you more characters

#395

Post by icebraining »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #392
icebraining wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Nobody I know voted for Trump, but here he is president. HN readers and their close friends are nowhere near being a representative sample of internet users.

I get that, but I'd think HN users and their friends would be overrepresented in Twitter, not underrepresented.

Re: Giving you more characters

#396

Post by kakarot »

matunixe wrote: post #348
orthecreedence wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah GTFO nazi lover, you definitely not belong on Mastodon.

Took a look at your post history. It's rather negative and angry and projecting. This kind of anti-social speech is detrimental to a healty community and if you represent the average person on Mastodon then I will stay far away.

Re: Giving you more characters

#397

Post by macspoofing »

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…

>it's at the core of their value proposition

Is it?

Re: Giving you more characters

#398

Post by macspoofing »

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…

> 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.

How is that elegant?

Re: Giving you more characters

#399

Post by lloda »

A solution would be to give you a fixed space, then make the font smaller or narrower as you write more. It's a softer limit and it accommodates CJK because usually those characters are bigger.

Re: Giving you more characters

#400

Post by cesarb »

kristianc wrote: post #74
sorenjan wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use Twitter myself, but I think the reason behind the limit is that SMS can send 140 bytes in each message. When sending regular text messages a 7-bit alphabet is usually used, for 160 characters in total.

The SMS limit was decided when an engineer working for German Telecom decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences. Twitter based their limit on the SMS limit (140 + user address).

> decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences

From what I heard, the SMS limit was actually a protocol limitation: it piggybacks on signaling messages, which have a small size limit (this is also why SMS can sometimes work even when everything else doesn't). Quoting from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS):

"Messages are sent with the MAP MO- and MT-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signaling protocol to precisely 140 bytes (140 bytes * 8 bits / byte = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet, the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS-2 alphabet. Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual short message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters."

Post reply on HN