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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#291

Post by supergreg »

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.

I just rotated my phone.

Re: Giving you more characters

#292

Post by edoceo »

chris_wot wrote: post #284
aaron-lebo wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't understand the criticism. If the world goes to nuclear war, it won't be because of a Tweet, it'll be because of a conflict going back to the 1950s, a lunatic dictator, and an elected maybe unstable authoritarian. You don't think those guys have lots of other ways of talking trash? Is the suggestion that banning Trump from Twitter will prevent nuclear war? That sounds like armchair virtue signaling of the highes…

Twitter enables the toddler in the White House.

Current issues in USA politics are larger than just a toddler on twitter. Source: disappointed American

Re: Giving you more characters

#294

Post by lern_too_spel »

coloneltcb wrote: post #88

worth noting that the 160 char limit on SMS was a product of thoughtful design, and user-centric deliberation, not arbitrary: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-... I wish Twitter had the same commitment. Or at least hired product people who used the service.

According to your article, 160 characters was a product of technical limitations later justified by postcard and Telex research, not the other way around as you claim.

Re: Giving you more characters

#295

Post by mrb »

brianwawok wrote: post #238
mrb wrote: post #192

A few years ago I suggested Twitter should roll out an optional $1-per-month plan to let users tweet 280 characters.¹ If 10% of their MAU sign up, this would up their revenue by 17% (extra $400M yearly.) ¹ http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month...

You do realize the credit card processing fee on a $1 purchase is ~$0.40?

Batch the monthly payments into one $12 yearly payment.

Re: Giving you more characters

#296

Post by giarc »

robtaylor wrote: post #50

@Jack said "Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!" https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824 How many people did it take to come up with double a char limit, and how is that 'thoughtful' or 'solving' anything? Total guff. The start of the end of twitter hashtag hottake.

In moments like these, I'm reminded of the scene in the Simpsons where the cartoon director asks the writers to come up with a name for the cool new dog character. He says "Come up with something catchy, like Poochy". He leaves the room and the writers say "Everyone good with Poochy?".

When I think of it, this 140 -> 280 might have been the same. But when I think harder, I can picture a bunch of engineers debating over this for many weeks.

Re: Giving you more characters

#297

Post by supergreg »

imron wrote: post #268
always_good wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because HN doesn't preserve line-breaks and `>` doesn't do anything. You'd have to double-space the entire poem which is just silly. HN should just preserve all line-breaks so we don't have to hack around it.

Or it could do what Markdown does and preserve line-breaks that end in double spaces.

Invisible markup doesn't look like a good idea.

Re: Giving you more characters

#298

Post by seriff »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #181
robtaylor wrote: post #50

@Jack said "Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!" https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824 How many people did it take to come up with double a char limit, and how is that 'thoughtful' or 'solving' anything? Total guff. The start of the end of twitter hashtag hottake.

Someone needs to make an Apple-style video of a Twitter employee talking about this latest breakthrough in human communication. Oh, and they have to use the word "courage"

“It just fits” (TM)

Re: Giving you more characters

#299

Post by rtpg »

c3534l wrote: post #224

It would seem to me that the solution to the problem described in the blog would be to reduce the number of characters allowed for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese users. The whole appeal of twitter, I thought, was if you said what you wanted to say the system forced you to reconsider how you said it until you got down to the bare essence of what you were trying to convey. I'd be in favor of a maximum number of tweets p…

A lot of Japanese people use Twitter quite effectively as a micro-blog. This is harder in English because of the character counts. So it could be that "Japanese-style twitter" is the true product vision, and it's not working in English The original 140-character constraint was an external restriction from formatting, it could be that 280-characters is, in fact, the "right" number of characters for the service they want.

So many people complain about the overly-terse nature of tweets. This can help tackle this and get to a better product.

Re: Giving you more characters

#300

Post by jpalomaki »

c3534l wrote: post #224

It would seem to me that the solution to the problem described in the blog would be to reduce the number of characters allowed for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese users. The whole appeal of twitter, I thought, was if you said what you wanted to say the system forced you to reconsider how you said it until you got down to the bare essence of what you were trying to convey. I'd be in favor of a maximum number of tweets p…

Doing this distillation seemed to be too much trouble for many users. You see people splitting things to multiple tweets, using images or simply posting links.

Trying to for example summarise interesting stuff you seen online to 140 chars is hard. Every increment in the character count makes it a bit easier. 140 to 280 has much larger effect that say 280 to 420, so I don't see slippery sloap here.

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