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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#471

Post by okr »

squarecog wrote: post #200
okr wrote: post #131

Earlier 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…

And i can imagine, when they just doubled the amount of possible characters, they just correlate these tweet buckets now. Like, maybe each tweet already had space for attributes/opcodes, so one can express things like "deleted". Maybe there is another attribute now: "has successors". And in the API one just return many tweets as one. In that way, one does not have to rewrite history. But who knows!

Re: Giving you more characters

#472

Post by saghm »

dannyw wrote: post #365
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?

They could do something like this: 280 character limit. 1 Japanese character counts as 2 characters. If you have the Japanese locale, the limit is still visually displayed at 140, and your displayed count is halved (and rounded down).

Is punctuation or whitespace commonly used in Japanese tweets? If so, that seems like it would make the limit somewhat variable

Re: Giving you more characters

#473

Post by daveFNbuck »

wpietri wrote: post #434
daveFNbuck wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was responding to the idea that a higher word count defeats the purpose of Twitter. Japan shows that Twitter can be successful under a higher limit.

It shows that it can be successful if you use it like it's used in Japan . It does not show that it can be successful when it is used like English speakers use it. Twitter is unusual in that it is a pretty spare tool. They've added a number of small features in support of how people were seen to be using it. But what mainly defines it is the ways people use it, not the tool itself.

Meanwhile Facebook has added tons of features that no one wanted based on pure speculation and they've done much better. People will change how they use Twitter as Twitter changes. If that weren't true, no one would care about this.

Re: Giving you more characters

#474

Post by kardos »

jussij wrote: post #354
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 ----…

Surely they set the word limit afterwards, yes?

Re: Giving you more characters

#475

Post by gytdev »

jussij wrote: post #354
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 ----…

This. This is the reason I love HN :)

Re: Giving you more characters

#476

Post by veidr »

beachy wrote: post #162
jsnathan wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Concur. Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish. When the platform limits his words, that works in his favour - no nuance can be conveyed, his utterances are sharp, authentic sounding, plausible. Give him 1000 words to make his case, and suddenly he's stuck. His thoughts were never that deep, and they don't stand up well to being expanded on - there wasn't any substance to begin with. Twitter is wha…

> Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish.

There's no idiot shortage on Twitter (or elsewhere), but I'll bet an overwhelming majority of the people who read your sentence above thought of the same person.

Re: Giving you more characters

#477

Post by rmc »

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…

> but their "default" instance is just too restrictive on speech. It's basically a tumblrina safe space network

To some people, that's a selling point!

And if you don't like it, join another instance!

Re: Giving you more characters

#478

Post by rmc »

kakarot wrote: post #393
rakoo wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Hang on, I don't follow. Are you saying that free speech = hate speech = things from unsavory individuals?

Re: Giving you more characters

#480

Post by therealpanda »

jussij wrote: post #354
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 ----…

He saved all his 167 words for the girl but she didn't.
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