Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is that YC doesn't want to break scrapers.
Then provide a json api
There is a Firebase API used by most HN apps. I recommend the Materialistic app if you are on Android.
Giving you more characters
411–420 of 493 posts
Re: Giving you more characters
#412It 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…
> 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 ... and stripping away context and nuance, and ultimately providing such a paucity that people these days have trouble recognising context and nuance. Twitter's played a major hand in the damage to people's attention spans and ability to interpret communications effectively. Recognising subte…
> Twitter's played a major hand in the damage to people's attention spans and ability to interpret communications effectively.
That, right there, is going to need a hefty wallop of [citation needed].
Re: Giving you more characters
#413Lots of cynicism around here. For me, the 140 character limit really was very frustrating. I tweet rarely, but when I do I often spend 2-3 minutes trying to fit the message into the character limit. Often I just abandon it completely because there's no way to make it fit without having to send multiple messages. This change seems completely reasonable to me, if not a bit delayed.
Making people stop and think, and sometimes abandon what they were going to say, is a really good aspect of Twitter.
That doesn't work, Twitter is swamped with very talkative persons.
Re: Giving you more characters
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
In my experience, the tech crowd is pretty average when it comes to social media (ab)use.
Re: Giving you more characters
#415Another 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…
> You really think that Twitter should be censoring the president of the United States?
Given his output that frequently and flagrantly breaks their TOC? Yes. And I'd go further - they should permaban him for the things he's repeatedly said over the last 5 years.
Re: Giving you more characters
#416That's a bold move by Twitter. I can't help but feel it is out of desperation
Ex-twitter eng here. Twitter has been debating this change internally for at least 5 years now. They were afraid to pull the trigger because no one inside knows why they've had the success that they've had and they're afraid to change too much (lest they pull a Digg). This move isn't made out of desperation, but it's probably being done right now because they've nothing to lose by randomly trying things.
Isn't it obvious? Twitter is a dopamine pump combined with a misunderstanding machine that has gamified the cult of personality.
Familiar readers feel a reward for their constant interpretive skimming of aborted thoughts, outsiders project the worst kind of interpretation to feel superior, as it automatically turns everything you post into a shareable post card with your face on it.
Re: Giving you more characters
#417I'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…
Remember that the 140 count was based on SMS (160 total, giving 20 for the handle and a colon). It wasn't a randomly picked number.
[deleted]
Re: Giving you more characters
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ... and stripping away context and nuance, and ultimately providing such a paucity that people these days have trouble recognising context and nuance. Twitter's played a major hand in the damage to people's attention spans and ability to interpret communications effectively. Recognising subte…
> Twitter's played a major hand in the damage to people's attention spans and ability to interpret communications effectively. That, right there, is going to need a hefty wallop of [citation needed].
> [citation needed]
- vacri, 6 hours ago.
Re: Giving you more characters
#419Earlier 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…
Boofheads LOL
Re: Giving you more characters
#420It's a trick to get Trump to double the rate at which he incriminates himself!
I hope he doesn't start twice as many wars.
If he takes to it, then Twitter could gradually raise the limit bit by bit, like you train a cat to shit in the toilet by slowly moving its litter box [1], and eventually he'll be tweeting in full paragraphs of complete (if not coherent) sentences.