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Giving you more characters

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Re: Giving you more characters

#431

Post by VectorLock »

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…

Most of the original design intent that made Twitter great has been washed away by employee turnover.

Re: Giving you more characters

#432

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

SquareWheel wrote: post #69

Lots 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.

Maybe that's because you're trying to say something meaningful on a platform designed to limit expression to meaningless quips?

Re: Giving you more characters

#433

Post by phailhaus »

betterunix2 wrote: post #175
phailhaus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know...the 140 character limit forced you to be creative in how you condensed your thoughts, but it also provided an easy-to-consume stream of content for readers. My fear is that by doubling the limit, that stream is going to take more effort to consume and lose its differentiation from Facebook.

数千字で書く方が、二十六字だけで書く方より効率的だ。(26 characters) Writing with thousands of characters is more efficient than writing with just 26. (82 characters) I admit my Japanese is not so great, and the comparison is somewhat unfair because of the subtleties of counting the characters. Still, the point here is that Twitter is more constrained in some languages than in others. If people are not having the problem you described in China…

Maybe. I already saw someone post a heated reply to one of Trump's tweets, and the 280 character limit made it read more like a mini-essay. Seeing a whole feed of that would make me even less likely to read Twitter, because it would look just like Facebook.

Re: Giving you more characters

#434

Post by wpietri »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #428
wpietri wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Giving you more characters

#435

Post by sctb »

matunixe wrote: post #348
orthecreedence wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah GTFO nazi lover, you definitely not belong on Mastodon.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Giving you more characters

#436

Post by korzun »

> We see that a small percent of Tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters (only 0.4%). But in English, a much higher percentage of Tweets have 140 characters (9%).

Took them 17 years to figure that one out?

> We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter

Okay

Re: Giving you more characters

#437

Post by SomeHacker44 »

jsnathan wrote: post #86
dragonwriter wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition It was related to the core of their value proposition when that was “microblogging that can be updated and recieved over SMS”. Now, its just legacy.

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…

"...with little forethought".

Wow. I tweet very infrequently, and agonize over exactly what to say and how to phrase it so that it is intelligible and interesting in 140 characters.

Then again, I only have a few hundred tweets and endeavor to make each one count.

Re: Giving you more characters

#438

Post by glenstein »

rayalez wrote: post #378
glenstein wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Articles with good titles/descriptions/images are already beautifully embedded as cards. So having a medium(or any other) blog that automatically posts links to twitter is the perfect solution to this, I think.

I was even thinking things like links to Twitlonger and Pastebin could be used for embedded text, the same way twitter knows how to handle imgur & youtube links and embed their content with tweets.

Re: Giving you more characters

#439

Post by odbol_ »

It's weird that their justification is that other languages can fit more words in than you can in English. But then they increase the character count.

Wouldn't it make more sense to switch to a word limit, instead of a character limit?

Re: Giving you more characters

#440

Post by DanBC »

odbol_ wrote: post #439

It's weird that their justification is that other languages can fit more words in than you can in English. But then they increase the character count. Wouldn't it make more sense to switch to a word limit, instead of a character limit?

> Wouldn't it make more sense to switch to a word limit, instead of a character limit?

CanYouImagineTheCamelCaseNightmareThatWouldCause?

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