Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

recode.net

61–70 of 305 posts

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#61
post #28
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 140 character limit is long past its purpose What was its purpose and why is it long past it?

SMS has a 160 character limit, and Twitter was originally supposed to be SMS driven. I personally don't know anyone who has ever Tweeted via SMS though, or whether that is still even possible.

I used it on an old Moto Razr for a while back in college when that was my daily driver. Address is still in my phone copied from SIM to SIM to Cloud (shortcode 40404).

On an old iPhone with just basic speech to text abilities I would sometimes use Bluetooth to "text twitter ..." and that worked. (Nowadays we got our Siris and Cortanas and direct app integration, but that "text twitter" is still sometimes a more reliable voice trigger than "tweet".)

I still often turn on SMS notifications for accounts I want to specifically hear from or events I'm attending.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#64
post #59

I like Twitter because it forces people to be concise. There are already plenty of places on the web where people can post long thoughtful articles or op-ed pieces.

It forces people to not write a complex English sentence, is what it does. You literally can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting. Which is annoying.

There's concision, and then there's nuking the concept of the paragraph.

I for one welcome our new longer-Tweet overlords.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#65
post #59

I like Twitter because it forces people to be concise. There are already plenty of places on the web where people can post long thoughtful articles or op-ed pieces.

But it doesn’t lead to any meaningful discussions.

I’ve tried using twitter for some time now, and you end up sounding a lot more angry when you spend the 20 minutes trying to get your thoughts into 140 characters, and you’ll have to use a horrendous amount of abbreviations.

There’s no space left for polite "hey, sorry, I disagree with your thoughts on [long name of a project], I’d think you could do [feature] better if you’d look at adopting [technology]", there’s only "[project’s feature] is bad, would be better with [technology]".

Especially when you try to use German, you write half a sentence and the box is full.

Same with imgur comments, I frequently end up writing "1/12" as prefix to my comments – at that point it’s useless.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#67
post #25

Presumably, post-140 Twitter will be pretty much the same as classical 140 twitter, but instead of 3/4 of all twerps ending with links to properties outside of Twitter, a huge chunk of those will link to more content inside of Twitter. The only major change in post-140 Twitter would be the death of the Andreessen-style twerpstorm.

> The only major change in post-140 Twitter would be the death of the Andreessen-style twerpstorm You'd think that's the case but I'm not so sure about that. The hidden secret of secret of Tweetstorms is that they take up the space of multiple tweets, which means that people can retweet more times (people do retweet entire Tweetstorms!) and occupy the entire space on their followers' timelines. Although, if you Tweet…

Also, I feel like "Tweetstorm" are also closer to the raw metal of how people actually think out loud (or at least anecdotally how I tend to think out loud), building from the last thought a small fragment at a time. To some extent that's what I appreciate about Twitter is sometimes capturing the raw point-to-point (scattered) thought process over blogs where one has a tendency to expand, revisit, and rewrite, obscuring the thought process but building a better narrative in the result.

I like the idea of going back, "merging tweets" into a collection, and then writing a narrative on top of it, connecting dots and building revisions that complete it as a "post". I guess kind of like Storify.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#68

Okay what's differentiating Twitter from fucking Facebook now? Only the facts that there's (currently) no policy against pseudonyms, bots and multiple accounts and that there's no useless crap games like Farmville.

Their new non-chronologically sorted timeline sure smells of Facebook to me, too.

Re: Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

#69
post #68

Okay what's differentiating Twitter from fucking Facebook now? Only the facts that there's (currently) no policy against pseudonyms, bots and multiple accounts and that there's no useless crap games like Farmville.

Their new non-chronologically sorted timeline sure smells of Facebook to me, too.

Yeah, thank God they didn't force that crap onto me, yet. If they'll do I have to switch clients -.-
Post reply on HN