Does anyone else get the impression that Twitter has no idea what to do with their service, let alone how most people use it?
Adding verbosity is the last thing the service needs.
Giving you more characters
451–460 of 493 posts
Re: Giving you more characters
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their iconic 140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform. They don’t: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-button/
One of those options was announced publicly with an official blog post and one of them was slipped into an app unannounced likely as part of a/b testing. Maybe they eventually implement both, but at this moment their preference between the two is clear.
> One of those options was announced publicly with an official blog post and one of them was slipped into an app unannounced likely as part of a/b testing.
Both of them are currently being tested on a limited group of users; but that’s true only one got a blog post.
Re: Giving you more characters
#453It 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…
Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint. The limit for Asian languages should have been adjusted downwards as early as Twitter launched (though I suppose that's actually somewhat hard to do from a technological viewpoint, as people might mix Western letters and Asian symbols). And then they point out that in Asian cou…
The 140 character limit was chosen based on sending 8bit SMS messages. If it was chosen from an English speaking viewpoint, they could have chosen to base it on GSM 7bit SMS, which would allow 160 characters.
Was the default SMS 8bit in the US at the time or?
Asian languages would require UCS2 encoded SMS messages, which can contain 70 characters as far as I remember.
Re: Giving you more characters
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint. The limit for Asian languages should have been adjusted downwards as early as Twitter launched (though I suppose that's actually somewhat hard to do from a technological viewpoint, as people might mix Western letters and Asian symbols). And then they point out that in Asian cou…
>"Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint." I don't believe this is correct but rather 140 characters limit was chosen because SMS will break a message greater than 160 characters into two messages. 140 characters leaves 20 characters for a username.
140 characters is an 8 bit SMS message. 160 characters is a 7 bit SMS message.
You can also send a UCS2 encoded SMS, which can contain 70 characters.
Re: Giving you more characters
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. How is that elegant?
People often using the word "elegant" when they actually mean "my preferred." It helps give credence to the solution.
It's hell'a more elegant than https://twithelper.com/long-text-to-image-converter
Re: Giving you more characters
#456Lots 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.
For me that writing process was the most fun. Trying to get an idea to fit in 140 characters and still be grammatically correct is a pleasant challenge. Expanding the character limit may make that easier and therefore less fun - or maybe it'll just give more characters to edit and rearrange.
They gave the statistic that 9% of tweets were at the character limit. That's the wrong statistic though. What they need to check is something like "met or exceeded the limit during composition" because I'd suppose that more tweets are affected by the limit than only 9%. Most of those affected tweets are simply pared down to less than 140 characters.
Re: Giving you more characters
#457Earlier 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…
You could try not having half the things that come out of your mouth be easily construed as offensive, I guess? Seriously, I'm on mastodon.social and I've never once felt a need to preface anything like that.
Re: Giving you more characters
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It also correlates to the # of characters Google allows in it's headlines. It's worth noting that there is something to the # of characters a human can scan & understand without turning it's full focus to it.
For what it's worth, your message required a lot more attention from me than it would have, if you had used the word "number" rather than the strange glyph "#". I guess you were doing this with some sort of meta humour because the story is about twitter, but the point was inversed. Your attempt to abbreviate things to make them more legible, made them less so.
The lesson above applies, incidentally, to pretty much everything twitter.
Re: Giving you more characters
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also correlates to the # of characters Google allows in it's headlines. It's worth noting that there is something to the # of characters a human can scan & understand without turning it's full focus to it.
For what it's worth, your message required a lot more attention from me than it would have, if you had used the word "number" rather than the strange glyph "#". I guess you were doing this with some sort of meta humour because the story is about twitter, but the point was inversed. Your attempt to abbreviate things to make them more legible, made them less so. The lesson above applies, incidentally, to pretty much ev…
I'm sorry to inconvenience your day.
Re: Giving you more characters
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also correlates to the # of characters Google allows in it's headlines. It's worth noting that there is something to the # of characters a human can scan & understand without turning it's full focus to it.
Can you explain what you mean by this? If you're talking about the 'title' of each search result, it looks like it's capped at a way lower number of characters than that.
The total number of characters in an ad is 130(ish).
25 for title 35 for line 1 35 for line 2 35 for display url
130 characters total.