8 ms·

In my opinion this is a bad precedent. Call it a non sequitur but what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets? I mea

by mahouse 11y ago

In my opinion this is a bad precedent. Call it a non sequitur but what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets? I mean, the thing I liked the most of Twitter was how simple it was, but they have started adding so many things to it (especially GIFs, Twitter Cards and videos that auto-play) that it will eventually be Facebook! And yes I am very concerned of something like that because Twitter is my social network of choice since 2008 for a reason!

ProAm 11y ago
I think they are going to eventually drop the limit for tweets and rebrand into a mico-blogging platform with a built in user base.. There will still be a character limit probably in the mid hundreds, but it will help them monetize.
- ryanSrich 11y ago
  I don't use tumblr but someone told me that tubmlr is very similar to what you just described (sans the char limit) - from your point of view, why would twitter do this?
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Let's say photos and links were separate attachments. That way you could say just as much without having to compensate for the URL, even if it was condensed.
- kachnuv_ocasek 11y ago
  If they do, I (and I believe at least a dozen other people) will seriously consider terminating my presence on Twitter. I'm mostly a passive user anyway, and the recent (well, 2-3 years time frame) changes, such as moving pictures and "sponsored tweets" have been quite annoying. The forced conciseness of the tweets is the only thing that keeps me from pushing the button. Now, I know I sound like a grumpy old cat, but when some things change, they eventually end up being nothing like the original. Just compare that with Reddit or Hacker News, for instance. The basic laws (and even visuals, in the case of HN) have been the same for some years now, yet the community is thriving.
- chipotle_coyote 11y ago
  I don't think that's likely to be their direction; as another commenter observed, that's largely what Tumblr is, and Tumblr is pretty good at it. I expect Twitter's monetization efforts to move in the opposite direction, in a sense. Many Twitter users follow many more people than they have followers, which turns it into more of a broadcast medium than an interactive medium. Given that they're firmly committed to advertising as a primary revenue model, I'd expect them to be working furiously on recommendation engines to surface new content: not just users you might want to follow, but specific tweets (and Vines and Periscope videos and etc.). That, in turn, can be applied to native advertising.
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
I disagree, having felt a while that Twitter's user experience was beginning to unnecessarily calcify. It's one thing to remove DM post limits, or (someday I hope) make photos and links a separate part of the tweet object instead of elbowing in on the 140 character limit - but it would be something else entirely to force a Facebook-style ranking algorithm. As long as they don't force users to adopt their way or the highway with every update, you can keep using Twitter as you like it, while others can forge their own experience.
- mahouse 11y ago
  > As long as they don't force users to adopt their way or the highway with every update, you can keep using Twitter as you like it, while others can forge their own experience. Of course they do. They axed 3rd party clients.
smacktoward 11y ago
> what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets? Then we can all celebrate the end of an arbitrary and obsolete limitation? The justifications for the 140-character limit have always been: 1) It was necessary in order to make Twitter-via-SMS work 2) It forces users to create better Tweets by removing the option to be long-winded Twitter-via-SMS was compelling when the only other way to use the service was their original Web interface, but now that Twitter support is baked into umpty gazillion apps and devices there's no reason to limit the rest of the service just to cater to it. And even if you agree that shorter Tweets are always better Tweets (I would argue that point, but that's another discussion), why does Twitter need to enforce that at the application level? If shorter Tweets are better Tweets, that should be a law that enforces itself as people follow those who keep it short and sweet and unfollow those who don't, no? Why not just let people post what they want to post, and trust the users of Twitter to know what they like?
- comex 11y ago
  Why do subreddits (and to some extent this site) have moderators rather than letting people post what they want to post, and trusting them to upvote what they like? One might argue they shouldn't, but certainly many people see value in it.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    A subreddit is a shared resource, and moderation is useful because going based on popular opinion has various flaws, like the fact that the people more likely to vote are also more likely to be crazy. A Twitter stream isn't a shared resource so that doesn't apply. If a bunch of dickheads come into a subreddit they can really ruin it. But I choose who goes into my Twitter stream, so dickheads can't get in, and if they manage to trick me then I can just remove them. In essence, on Twitter, each subscriber is moderator of their own little subreddit of one.
    - comex 11y ago
      True, "dickheads" invading subreddits and upvoting each other, or more generally new people coming in whose preferences may differ from the existing community, is one way the voting algorithm can fail to naturally enforce quality, but it's not the only one. As I see it, most (existing) users of a given subreddit appreciate the improvement in quality that results from moderation, yet when some of the lazier instincts of those same people are pooled by mass low-effort voting, funny or memetic or clickbait or flamebait but ultimately low-quality posts tend to rise. For example, on this site, posts whose titles contain "NSA" and some other keyboards are or were penalized in the ranking, because people here, including many of the most famous users on the site, just love to read and talk about the NSA - which isn't itself bad, but since it's so easy and compelling to instinctively hit the upvote arrow on such posts, it tends to get too common and repetitive, so the algorithm taps (tapped?) the brakes. (At least, that's my interpretation of the reason.) As another example, /r/smashbros is a big subreddit for the Super Smash Bros. competitive community, and it's often happened that the moderators banned X type of posts (comics, non-competitive gifs) because a lot of people were complaining about it and there seemed to be consensus against - but that didn't mean the posts didn't get upvotes. You could chalk that up to a difference between the vocal minority and the many lurkers, but I don't think that's the full story. Admittedly, I've strayed pretty far from the sort of things that can happen on Twitter. After all, it's not like any feature of the site would discourage me from following 100 people who all constantly post about the NSA, and voting is different from posting. But I think there's a similar general principle when it comes to length, the one important form of "moderation" the site actually has: a user might get annoyed at the overall phenomenon of the length of the posts in their timeline, but it's difficult to exert social pressure on everyone to keep length down, and really easy to feel like one cannot say what one wants in 140 characters, whether or not this is true, if one is not actually forced to make it fit. Also, the aforementioned general case of splits in the community does apply to Twitter. You can unfollow dickheads, but if lots of popular users are in the subgroup that actually prefers long posts, those users who prefer short ones will have a hard time keeping their streams "clean" without feeling like they're missing out. Of course, if one considers the Internet as a whole, one could say that following long-post users is the equivalent of participating in social websites that allow long posts, but unlike the discrete universes of different sites, or even of different subreddits (in the sense that a given post or comment goes only to a single subreddit), Twitter's network allows, and indeed is designed for, cliques to partially overlap and mix, making it harder to establish different "spaces" with different rules, social customs, culture.
scrollaway 11y ago
The 140 character limit is a fun design choice, but it's worth noting that it appeals to a very specific kind of demographic. The kind that loves forming an opinion without spending more than 2-3 seconds on the material. It's fun to think of the amount of flame wars, the amount of out of context quoting, of (purposefully or accidentally) misinterpreted tweets etc which all stem from "the limit". Actually, scratch that, it's not fun at all. It's a waste of time on the scale of hundreds of millions of people. I squeal whenever I see someone start talking about various serious or interesting issues and their post ends in "[1/19]" or some such. Bloody hell, this isn't the format, and there's always a tweet in there which is a fantastic flamebait... when taken outside of its context. shudders
- MikeKusold 11y ago
  It was more than a fun design choice. When twitter first launched, smartphone weren't as ubiquitous as they are now. They chose the 140 character limit so that tweets could be sent via SMS.
- derefr 11y ago
  I think you make a good point, and then contradict it. "The limit" itself isn't responsible for the flamewars et al; it just attracted the demographic. The demographic itself is inherently prone to the flamewars. If you took the limit away, but kept the userbase, they'd still skim-judge people and speak mostly in epigram.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    That's interesting, why do you think I contradict that?
- kuschku 11y ago
  I know a lot of people at my university who plain out refuse to use twitter. Take German, a language where even simple sentences end up being above the limit. Everyone who wants to say long things either ends up posting only medium.com links on twitter, or ends up not using twitter at all. Take now Chinese, or Japanese, languages with Ideograms, where you can fit a whole word into a single character, like 象. The limit leads to a completely different demographic depending on language.
byuu 11y ago
> what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets? I get that the charm of Twitter to many is brevity. But it might do wonders for intelligent discourse. Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), dumbed-down vocabulary and hashtags over substance. It may have been fine when it was just your friends chatting about what was going on during the weekend; but it's especially egregious when it's politicians or scientists trying to condense important subjects into 140-characters, which then get regurgitated on the nightly news. Like we're all a bunch of 14-year olds texting each other. Even worse is when this extreme brevity leads to entirely avoidable misunderstandings. I think it'd really help if Twitter were based on word count instead of character count (and didn't count articles), so people could at least write like adults. And if you really need more than a sentence or two, then allow for a long-form text box that'd turn into a clickable "More ..." link after the summary message. Those that don't want to read much can simply ignore such links, and unfollow repeat offenders. Another fun side effect of this character rule: you can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of eight.)
- derefr 11y ago
  > You can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of eight.) Can you really? I thought the "140 character" restriction was due to the "160 bytes in an SMS" restriction, and therefore using multibyte unicode characters consumed multiple "characters."
  - varjag 11y ago
    Yes you absolutely can. Similarly, with Russian you'd convey a quarter less information than in English tweet, as the words are stupidly long.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    You can try it for yourself. Go to twitter.com and put 象 into the box. The number of remaining characters only goes down by one. I don't know why that is, because I'm pretty sure you're right that the tweet length limit comes from SMS limits. But these days the 140 limit seems to be in terms of Unicode code points, not bytes.
homulilly 11y ago
I kind of hope they do. I'd like a relatively short limit but 140 is a bad number. It's not optimized for any kind of communication, it's optimized for putting ads in sms messages.
nickbauman 11y ago
If they're "smart" about it, they'll increase the character limit by 10 or so every fiscal quarter. So they can say they're innovating.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Twitter could go freemium: charge 1¢ per character over 140. :)
iMark 11y ago
It's natural evolution of Twitter's position. The value of Twitter stems from its stream. The 140 character limit is entirely arbitrary. Increasing it too much may have detrimental effects, but increasing it gradually shouldn't cause much harm.
superuser2 11y ago
>what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets 8-part Tweets (or larger) are extremely common. Like it or not, people use Twitter as a blog engine. Making it a less shitty blog engine might be a good thing.
Osmium 11y ago
> Call it a non sequitur but what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets? Arguably, it'd be a great move for Twitter to launch a (possibly Tumblr-esque) blogging platform under an adjacent-but-related brand (e.g. comments on the articles could be tweets). Keep Twitter exactly as it is, but expand Twitter's reach by offering long-form content too.
lux 11y ago
I disagree. IMO private messages shouldn't have the same limitation, and I think Twitter would actually benefit from carefully increasing public limits in two or three ways: * Don't count attached images and single links towards the character limit (attaching an image leaves you with less than 140 characters) * Don't count tweeting directly at someone towards the limit (additional @'s should count) * Don't count the first hashtag towards it either These changes would allow you to reply to someone, include the chat's hashtag, and include a single link or image, while still having 140 characters to express an idea. It wouldn't lead to massive clutter or abuse, but it would make public conversations less about the limits and abbreviations, which do hinder readability, and more about the content. It can get really hard to express anything other than overly simplified, individual concepts in a chat, or reference external links, without eating up a substantial amount of the current character limit.

by mahouse 11y ago

ProAm 11y ago

I think they are going to eventually drop the limit for tweets and rebrand into a mico-blogging platform with a built in user base.. There will still be a character limit probably in the mid hundreds, but it will help them monetize.

ryanSrich 11y ago
I don't use tumblr but someone told me that tubmlr is very similar to what you just described (sans the char limit) - from your point of view, why would twitter do this?
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Let's say photos and links were separate attachments. That way you could say just as much without having to compensate for the URL, even if it was condensed.
kachnuv_ocasek 11y ago
If they do, I (and I believe at least a dozen other people) will seriously consider terminating my presence on Twitter. I'm mostly a passive user anyway, and the recent (well, 2-3 years time frame) changes, such as moving pictures and "sponsored tweets" have been quite annoying. The forced conciseness of the tweets is the only thing that keeps me from pushing the button. Now, I know I sound like a grumpy old cat, but when some things change, they eventually end up being nothing like the original. Just compare that with Reddit or Hacker News, for instance. The basic laws (and even visuals, in the case of HN) have been the same for some years now, yet the community is thriving.
chipotle_coyote 11y ago
I don't think that's likely to be their direction; as another commenter observed, that's largely what Tumblr is, and Tumblr is pretty good at it. I expect Twitter's monetization efforts to move in the opposite direction, in a sense. Many Twitter users follow many more people than they have followers, which turns it into more of a broadcast medium than an interactive medium. Given that they're firmly committed to advertising as a primary revenue model, I'd expect them to be working furiously on recommendation engines to surface new content: not just users you might want to follow, but specific tweets (and Vines and Periscope videos and etc.). That, in turn, can be applied to native advertising.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

I disagree, having felt a while that Twitter's user experience was beginning to unnecessarily calcify. It's one thing to remove DM post limits, or (someday I hope) make photos and links a separate part of the tweet object instead of elbowing in on the 140 character limit - but it would be something else entirely to force a Facebook-style ranking algorithm. As long as they don't force users to adopt their way or the highway with every update, you can keep using Twitter as you like it, while others can forge their own experience.

mahouse 11y ago
> As long as they don't force users to adopt their way or the highway with every update, you can keep using Twitter as you like it, while others can forge their own experience. Of course they do. They axed 3rd party clients.

smacktoward 11y ago

> what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets? Then we can all celebrate the end of an arbitrary and obsolete limitation? The justifications for the 140-character limit have always been: 1) It was necessary in order to make Twitter-via-SMS work 2) It forces users to create better Tweets by removing the option to be long-winded Twitter-via-SMS was compelling when the only other way to use the service was their original Web interface, but now that Twitter support is baked into umpty gazillion apps and devices there's no reason to limit the rest of the service just to cater to it. And even if you agree that shorter Tweets are always better Tweets (I would argue that point, but that's another discussion), why does Twitter need to enforce that at the application level? If shorter Tweets are better Tweets, that should be a law that enforces itself as people follow those who keep it short and sweet and unfollow those who don't, no? Why not just let people post what they want to post, and trust the users of Twitter to know what they like?

comex 11y ago
Why do subreddits (and to some extent this site) have moderators rather than letting people post what they want to post, and trusting them to upvote what they like? One might argue they shouldn't, but certainly many people see value in it.
- mikeash 11y ago
  A subreddit is a shared resource, and moderation is useful because going based on popular opinion has various flaws, like the fact that the people more likely to vote are also more likely to be crazy. A Twitter stream isn't a shared resource so that doesn't apply. If a bunch of dickheads come into a subreddit they can really ruin it. But I choose who goes into my Twitter stream, so dickheads can't get in, and if they manage to trick me then I can just remove them. In essence, on Twitter, each subscriber is moderator of their own little subreddit of one.
  - comex 11y ago
    True, "dickheads" invading subreddits and upvoting each other, or more generally new people coming in whose preferences may differ from the existing community, is one way the voting algorithm can fail to naturally enforce quality, but it's not the only one. As I see it, most (existing) users of a given subreddit appreciate the improvement in quality that results from moderation, yet when some of the lazier instincts of those same people are pooled by mass low-effort voting, funny or memetic or clickbait or flamebait but ultimately low-quality posts tend to rise. For example, on this site, posts whose titles contain "NSA" and some other keyboards are or were penalized in the ranking, because people here, including many of the most famous users on the site, just love to read and talk about the NSA - which isn't itself bad, but since it's so easy and compelling to instinctively hit the upvote arrow on such posts, it tends to get too common and repetitive, so the algorithm taps (tapped?) the brakes. (At least, that's my interpretation of the reason.) As another example, /r/smashbros is a big subreddit for the Super Smash Bros. competitive community, and it's often happened that the moderators banned X type of posts (comics, non-competitive gifs) because a lot of people were complaining about it and there seemed to be consensus against - but that didn't mean the posts didn't get upvotes. You could chalk that up to a difference between the vocal minority and the many lurkers, but I don't think that's the full story. Admittedly, I've strayed pretty far from the sort of things that can happen on Twitter. After all, it's not like any feature of the site would discourage me from following 100 people who all constantly post about the NSA, and voting is different from posting. But I think there's a similar general principle when it comes to length, the one important form of "moderation" the site actually has: a user might get annoyed at the overall phenomenon of the length of the posts in their timeline, but it's difficult to exert social pressure on everyone to keep length down, and really easy to feel like one cannot say what one wants in 140 characters, whether or not this is true, if one is not actually forced to make it fit. Also, the aforementioned general case of splits in the community does apply to Twitter. You can unfollow dickheads, but if lots of popular users are in the subgroup that actually prefers long posts, those users who prefer short ones will have a hard time keeping their streams "clean" without feeling like they're missing out. Of course, if one considers the Internet as a whole, one could say that following long-post users is the equivalent of participating in social websites that allow long posts, but unlike the discrete universes of different sites, or even of different subreddits (in the sense that a given post or comment goes only to a single subreddit), Twitter's network allows, and indeed is designed for, cliques to partially overlap and mix, making it harder to establish different "spaces" with different rules, social customs, culture.

scrollaway 11y ago

The 140 character limit is a fun design choice, but it's worth noting that it appeals to a very specific kind of demographic. The kind that loves forming an opinion without spending more than 2-3 seconds on the material. It's fun to think of the amount of flame wars, the amount of out of context quoting, of (purposefully or accidentally) misinterpreted tweets etc which all stem from "the limit". Actually, scratch that, it's not fun at all. It's a waste of time on the scale of hundreds of millions of people. I squeal whenever I see someone start talking about various serious or interesting issues and their post ends in "[1/19]" or some such. Bloody hell, this isn't the format, and there's always a tweet in there which is a fantastic flamebait... when taken outside of its context. shudders

MikeKusold 11y ago
It was more than a fun design choice. When twitter first launched, smartphone weren't as ubiquitous as they are now. They chose the 140 character limit so that tweets could be sent via SMS.
derefr 11y ago
I think you make a good point, and then contradict it. "The limit" itself isn't responsible for the flamewars et al; it just attracted the demographic. The demographic itself is inherently prone to the flamewars. If you took the limit away, but kept the userbase, they'd still skim-judge people and speak mostly in epigram.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  That's interesting, why do you think I contradict that?
kuschku 11y ago
I know a lot of people at my university who plain out refuse to use twitter. Take German, a language where even simple sentences end up being above the limit. Everyone who wants to say long things either ends up posting only medium.com links on twitter, or ends up not using twitter at all. Take now Chinese, or Japanese, languages with Ideograms, where you can fit a whole word into a single character, like 象. The limit leads to a completely different demographic depending on language.

byuu 11y ago

> what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets? I get that the charm of Twitter to many is brevity. But it might do wonders for intelligent discourse. Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), dumbed-down vocabulary and hashtags over substance. It may have been fine when it was just your friends chatting about what was going on during the weekend; but it's especially egregious when it's politicians or scientists trying to condense important subjects into 140-characters, which then get regurgitated on the nightly news. Like we're all a bunch of 14-year olds texting each other. Even worse is when this extreme brevity leads to entirely avoidable misunderstandings. I think it'd really help if Twitter were based on word count instead of character count (and didn't count articles), so people could at least write like adults. And if you really need more than a sentence or two, then allow for a long-form text box that'd turn into a clickable "More ..." link after the summary message. Those that don't want to read much can simply ignore such links, and unfollow repeat offenders. Another fun side effect of this character rule: you can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of eight.)

derefr 11y ago
> You can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of eight.) Can you really? I thought the "140 character" restriction was due to the "160 bytes in an SMS" restriction, and therefore using multibyte unicode characters consumed multiple "characters."
- varjag 11y ago
  Yes you absolutely can. Similarly, with Russian you'd convey a quarter less information than in English tweet, as the words are stupidly long.
- mikeash 11y ago
  You can try it for yourself. Go to twitter.com and put 象 into the box. The number of remaining characters only goes down by one. I don't know why that is, because I'm pretty sure you're right that the tweet length limit comes from SMS limits. But these days the 140 limit seems to be in terms of Unicode code points, not bytes.

homulilly 11y ago

I kind of hope they do. I'd like a relatively short limit but 140 is a bad number. It's not optimized for any kind of communication, it's optimized for putting ads in sms messages.

nickbauman 11y ago

If they're "smart" about it, they'll increase the character limit by 10 or so every fiscal quarter. So they can say they're innovating.

cpeterso 11y ago
Twitter could go freemium: charge 1¢ per character over 140. :)

iMark 11y ago

It's natural evolution of Twitter's position. The value of Twitter stems from its stream. The 140 character limit is entirely arbitrary. Increasing it too much may have detrimental effects, but increasing it gradually shouldn't cause much harm.

superuser2 11y ago

>what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets 8-part Tweets (or larger) are extremely common. Like it or not, people use Twitter as a blog engine. Making it a less shitty blog engine might be a good thing.

Osmium 11y ago

> Call it a non sequitur but what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets? Arguably, it'd be a great move for Twitter to launch a (possibly Tumblr-esque) blogging platform under an adjacent-but-related brand (e.g. comments on the articles could be tweets). Keep Twitter exactly as it is, but expand Twitter's reach by offering long-form content too.

lux 11y ago

I disagree. IMO private messages shouldn't have the same limitation, and I think Twitter would actually benefit from carefully increasing public limits in two or three ways: * Don't count attached images and single links towards the character limit (attaching an image leaves you with less than 140 characters) * Don't count tweeting directly at someone towards the limit (additional @'s should count) * Don't count the first hashtag towards it either These changes would allow you to reply to someone, include the chat's hashtag, and include a single link or image, while still having 140 characters to express an idea. It wouldn't lead to massive clutter or abuse, but it would make public conversations less about the limits and abbreviations, which do hinder readability, and more about the content. It can get really hard to express anything other than overly simplified, individual concepts in a chat, or reference external links, without eating up a substantial amount of the current character limit.