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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#421

Post by amelius »

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…

Better solution is to let users solve a complicated CAPTCHA when they want to tweet longer messages. That way, there is no social pressure to make long tweets (no reasonable person can pressure you to solve boring CAPTCHAs), while it's still there if you need it.

Or, phrased differently, they should make it harder to tweet longer messages.

Re: Giving you more characters

#422

Post by rhencke »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #315
rhencke wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> During those ten minutes, even folks at the Pentagon were wondering if Trump was about to announce a strike on a foreign power Do you have a source you could provide for this?

It looks like Buzzfeed is the source of the claim here (everywhere I go, the Buzzfeed article's copy is what's cited), and they didn't provide a source for it that's easy to follow up: https://gizmodo.com/the-pentagon-worried-trump-was-about-to-... I'll leave it to your judgment whether or not you think Buzzfeed's journalistic quality was up to par that day or not. (It varies.)

Thanks for following up with that - I appreciate it.

Re: Giving you more characters

#423

Post by partiallypro »

subroutine wrote: post #333
partiallypro wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it would take longer, because frankly it's a dumb idea. It defeats the purpose of Twitter.

It’s also dumb when I have to read 3 tweets in a sequence by the same person trying to get a single point across, each one with a different set of comments, likes, and retweets. Im not sure this will fix it though, maybe it will help. I feel like the same could be accomplished with an expando at whatever limit they set. That way when I browse twitter the tweet boxes are still the same size as originally, and if i wan…

They could fix this by fixing how they thread tweets. Currently they thread tweets, but it's grouped in a weird way and sometimes someone that isn't the person that threaded them is in the middle of the thread. Also, instead of making people manually put (1/x) they could just create a counter and put them in sequential order treating any time the author only replies to themselves (which is how you thread) as the thread, but any reply to someone not themselves as outside of the thread. I'm sure that's complex, but I believe it could be done with some logic.

Re: Giving you more characters

#424

Post by DonHopkins »

This is as earth shattering as when Macromedia Director went from 24 layers to 48 layers!!!

Yet Director still didn't have enough layers to make an animated map of all 50 United States of America (or a car insurance turkey with 50 clickable tail feathers). So we got Flash!

Re: Giving you more characters

#425

Post by rakoo »

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…

I totally agree with you that such instances may (and probably will) be "split" from the bigger federation, but that's the whole point of distribution. At that point we'll see multiple networks, each with their own rules and tolerance, and that is how federation thrives.

Re: Giving you more characters

#426

Post by kelvin0 »

Well glad to see Twitter is finally tackling humanity's woes. I'm sorry for the vitriol, but what kind of value is this adding to anyone's life? It seems to me like another way of having the hunched-over-zombies-with-lit-faces spend even more time 'connecting' with other humans.

Re: Giving you more characters

#427

Post by slouch »

jochung wrote: post #416
sgk284 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twitter lover, here. My feed contains hardly anyone I've met IRL and is mostly a cable TV replacement and RSS reader supplement.

Re: Giving you more characters

#428

Post by daveFNbuck »

wpietri wrote: post #388
daveFNbuck wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Twitter is much more popular in Japan, where the higher information density of the written language effectively gave them this feature from the start.

Twitter is used very differently in Japan than elsewhere, and in ways that seem tightly bound to aspects of Japanese culture. I'd be very careful about assuming that higher word count is really the key difference.

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.

Re: Giving you more characters

#429

Post by numerum-bestiae »

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.

Materialistic (HN app) sorts formatting out pretty well, at least the comments.

Re: Giving you more characters

#430

Post by numerum-bestiae »

Grue3 wrote: post #342
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…

You're missing the fact that Twitter's engagement is way higher in East Asian countries and that's because they can pretty much use Twitter as a normal blog. On the other hand in the countries with very long words (like Hungary and Finland) Twitter is not very popular. It's been clear for a while and I'm surprised they haven't implemented this sooner.

Must be true, as a native speaker of Croatian, I find most Tweets in English understandable, not in Croatian, however. People tend to send 4 or 5 tweets instead.
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