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Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

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Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#181
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, there's a lot of value in forcing people to be concise. That said, it also privileges readily-echoes soundbytes over discussion. This has the side effect of wrecking discussion.

Easy solution: charge users per character. I would happily pay.

People would switch to a free social network, guaranteed. Twitter already has a huge problem maintaining loyalty, and creating a class system -- where people who can/will pay actually get more of the stage -- would piss a lot of people off.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#182

Jack Dorsey just posted a longtweet-as-image which implies that the story is true: https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248 His comments about searching/highlighting imply that this feature might be like Medium.

I think Twitter is going to do it. I agree with his tweet: > Given how much the best users of twitter hate the idea of a 10k char limit for tweets, it will definitely happen. :( So as long as it's going to do it, can I request that it support Markdown? Medium doesn't really support it other than through an API.

typo above. not his tweet but this tweet (which BTW would look better in MD

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#183

To the people thinking 10,000 characters means suddenly everyone will write blog posts instead of tweets... Have you ever tried blogging? Writing blog posts is insanely hard and time consuming. You'd be an outlier if you could write one good blog post a day. It's not like every tweet is suddenly going to be an essay. More likely tweets will just be slightly longer (200 characters or something) and then there will be…

You don't necessarily have to write them yourself. You can just copy and paste from different sources multiple times a day.

IIRC Twitter already enforces a max-height on tweets (ever since they allowed line breaks). People may indeed copy/paste but it won't add to the visual noise in timelines, and relatively few people will click through anyway.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#184

To the people thinking 10,000 characters means suddenly everyone will write blog posts instead of tweets... Have you ever tried blogging? Writing blog posts is insanely hard and time consuming. You'd be an outlier if you could write one good blog post a day. It's not like every tweet is suddenly going to be an essay. More likely tweets will just be slightly longer (200 characters or something) and then there will be…

You don't necessarily have to write them yourself. You can just copy and paste from different sources multiple times a day.

Wait, are you telling me I can copy paste content on the Internet and get credit for it?

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#185
Unless they're going to create some sort of limit on how much Twitter mobs can dogpile people, doxx them, and call their employers to get them fired, no thanks. You'd have to be crazy to post on Twitter and take those risks, no matter how anodyne you think you're being in your tweets.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#186
post #33

Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest. To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet wou…

I don't think it will be a big improvement - I think it will become Medium Nano. Which is bad, because Medium and Wordpress (etc) already own that space, and a nano version adds nothing useful. 140c is great for one-liners and linkbait, which is - apparently - the main reason people read Twitter. If it turns into a micro-blogging stream of extended self-expression, I think a lot of people won't have time for that.

> Medium Nano

Tumblr?

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#187

To the people thinking 10,000 characters means suddenly everyone will write blog posts instead of tweets... Have you ever tried blogging? Writing blog posts is insanely hard and time consuming. You'd be an outlier if you could write one good blog post a day. It's not like every tweet is suddenly going to be an essay. More likely tweets will just be slightly longer (200 characters or something) and then there will be…

So, I think you don't realize something very important about how people use twitter. Consider, what the typical number of blogs is that people around you might actually follow - (via RSS or some other means) in the sense that they're subscribed to it, new content appears from time to time, and when an entry appears they see it somewhere at the top of some feed? A feed they have to read through. I would guess the very…

I don't follow the hype and when I was an active user I would get frustrated with my tweet limiting to so few characters.

here is what I had to do:

1. write tweet, fuck, over limit

2. abbrev words, fuck still low on limit

3. remove spaces, fuck still low on limit

4. remove words and punctuations, thinking "fuck so this is what search engine feels like when one stems words", not my tweet is so not English

5. fuck still over limit or incomplete, tweet the first thought, comment on the new tweet with the rest of my story.

But why this model? FB has a limit few thousands char limits for status but in practice, only few lines will ever written on most FB statuses. People who manage to write a complete story on FB status have something meaningful to write about.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Literally" is not incorrect. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally "Literally" can mean "virtually," or "figuratively."

We need a new word that non-figuratively means "literally", then.

You don't need to throw out a word just because it's become an autoantonym[1]; many words are. To cleave; to hew; to screen; etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actually we get the implementation, but it is bad UX practise. it adds friction to the reading experience and will increase the quantity of tweets with truncated text within the first 140 chars. Twitter poorly handles this already with its URL preview cards. from a UX side, it's bad no matter how much spin Twitter will bring.

Bad UX practice according to whom? I was initially really against this, but parent comment brings a compelling argument: people are already using the service to say more than 140chars worth of stuff. The current methods to do it result in a far worse user experience than the tried and true "Read More" button would. That said, I'm skeptical of it just in terms of product definition. Like Instagram adding portrait/land…

Personally, I love aspect ratios on Insta. It's a far better posting experience. As far as browsing, it's pretty much the same as before, I'd say. I haven't noticed anything, other than fewer awkwardly letterboxed images.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#190

To the people thinking 10,000 characters means suddenly everyone will write blog posts instead of tweets... Have you ever tried blogging? Writing blog posts is insanely hard and time consuming. You'd be an outlier if you could write one good blog post a day. It's not like every tweet is suddenly going to be an essay. More likely tweets will just be slightly longer (200 characters or something) and then there will be…

I disagree. But I guess we'll see. I think it will radically change the nature of Twitter. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I don't see anything wrong with tweet storms or text-in-images. And I think forcing people to be concise is terrific.

The key will be how much Twitter discourages going past 140 (or whatever the visible limit is).

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