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Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
- jgrahamc 11y agoI think they should have a weekly character limit and let users use those characters as they want. That way you get a limit to prevent just reams and reams of characters in tweets, but allow flexibility with how you tweet.
- brk 11y agoI like this idea, or let users filter by what they want to see. 200 character, 500 character, 5000 character. It still seems like twitter is trying to find their niche. The 140 character limit is long past its purpose, but it's also kind of a defining characteristic of twitter. It forces brief comments and an easy-skim timeline, at the expense of real conversation or information exchange.
- sail 11y ago> The 140 character limit is long past its purpose What was its purpose and why is it long past it?
- Ao7bei3s 11y agoIt's purpose was to make tweets fit into SMS. It's past its purpose because noone uses Twitter via SMS and people routinely circumvent it with text in images and multi-part tweets anyway.
- Filligree 11y agoIt's what fits in an SMS.
- chimeracoder 11y ago> What was its purpose and why is it long past it? To allow people to use Twitter over SMS. SMS are 160 characters, so a 140 character tweet leaves room for a 20 character header to allow for metadata and actions. You can still use Twitter this way, which is why (as of relatively recently) you couldn't post a tweet that began with the word "Get", even from the web interface.
- nly 11y agoSMS 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.
- WorldMaker 11y agoI 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.
- mrbill 11y agoTwitter was originally SMS-based and 140 characters fit in a normal SMS message.
- killerdhmo 11y agoTWITTER Twitter Basics: Why 140-Characters, And How to Write More We’re all used to the 140-character limit by now, but do you know how it started? Here’s a little history lesson for anyone wondering why they’ve got to condense their thoughts into 140-characters or less – and how to get around the limit without turning off your followers. The origins of the 140-character limit Once upon a time, long long ago… a group of young programmers whipped up a program that could send SMS to and from a small group of recipients. This blossomed into Twitter, a web- and mobile- based messaging system that lets users send short messages – known as tweets – to one another. So why the 140-character limit? Twitter was (and still is) a service that relied heavily on mobile-messaging. Sure, you can send and receive tweets on your computer, but a huge draw of Twitter in the early days was its ability to be accessed from mobile phones. And since the worldwide standard length of SMS (or text messages on phones) is 160-characters, the founders of Twitter thought it wise to stay within that bounds so as not to inundate people’s phones with 3 or 4 staggered, delayed, or even partially missing 4-part messages. 140-characters was chosen as a good length, leaving 20 characters for the username of the sender. This way, anyone receiving a tweet via SMS would get the whole tweet in a single text message, with nothing spilling over into a second or third message that pops up minutes later. http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/twitter-basics-why-140-characters-and-how-to-write-more/442608 http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/twitter-basics-why-140-cha...
- minimaxir 11y agoWhy would Twitter implement a feature that makes you use the the service less after you've hit a quota?
- jgrahamc 11y agoSo they can charge premium users for more characters.
- dabeeeenster 11y agoThe entire premise is based on quota!
- _RPM 11y agoLess use of the service by users would mean less advertising seen by their customers. So, the parent's idea would not make business sense.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- binarymax 11y agoToo overcomplicated, but I do agree with your grandchild post suggestion of charging money for more chars!
- jasode 11y agoWell... some back-of-the-envelope math. Assuming average characters-per-word of 4.5[1] and also add 1 for space/punctuation for a word unit of 5.5: 10000/5.5 = 1818 words. 1800 words @ 250 wpm average reading speed is ~7 minutes. A 10,000 char (7 minute article) expansion looks to me like a "micro-blogging" platform rather than "tweeting". I'm guessing it all goes back to Twitter trying many things to become bigger than traditional Twitter. Hence the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513237 (It goes without saying that not every "mega" tweet will use all 10,000 chars.) [1]https://www.google.com/search?q=average+characters+per+word https://www.google.com/search?q=average+characters+per+word
- AndrewKemendo 11y agoFWIW Twitter was always considered a "micro-blogging" platform. Perhaps that's what you meant. http://www.extremetech.com/internet/79260-four-microblogging-sites-reviewed http://www.extremetech.com/internet/79260-four-microblogging...
- justJanne 11y agoBy the way, your statistics are for English. For German, where we have 14.3 characters per word on average[1], we get: 10'000/14.8 = 676 words. 676 words @ 250 wpm is 2 Minutes 42 Seconds. A 2½ Minute article is very short, like a short comment in a newspaper, and would fit very well into a microblogging site. [1] http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/durchschnittliche-laenge-eines-deutschen-wortes http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/durchschnitt...
- derefr 11y agoI would think max wpm should go down as word-length increases, no?
- Zitrax 11y agoWouldn't average characters per sentence be a slightly better measure? In German and other Germanic languages it's common with compounded words, thus word XY seem long but would in English just be written as X Y.
- enginn 11y agoYou see this now, whole paragraphs of a noteworthy book punctuating a timeline, people taking screenshots of text, or otherwise cluttering up my Twitter with textual soundbites in the guise of a JPEG a.) These are not very accessible b.) I am too lazy to transcribe / OCR these c.) It defeats the purpose of Twitter d.) It would be far more handy to have big text blobs like this in a Tweet's JSON schema Something like { textBlob: '...book quotes galore...'} b.) Images as text are a huge waste of resources. A lot of bandwidth could be saved by persuading tweeps to use a text-blob instead of an image (Free bandwidth people, that's what we all want is it not?!)
- dilap 11y agoBut imposing those extra costs to being verbose encourages people to be concise, unless they REALLY need the extra words. Make the words cheap, and twitter will turn into just another prolix platform in a sea of noise.
- derefr 11y agoNot if there are tools that abstract away all the difficulty. Type 10K chars into a box; hit post; magically the first 140 show up as a text and the rest as an image.
- dilap 11y agoNo, you've got my point backwards: Absent external effects, it's easier to write a long message than write concisely. Twitter in its current form imposes an artificial cost on long messages, which encourages you to do the extra work to write something short. Remove that cost, and you'll get more lazy, long messages. That's my theory, anyway.
- MarkPNeyer 11y agothe 160 character limit on twitter helped me learn to speak more concisely. I've had an account since 2009, but didn't start using it until 2014. It was work at first - I didn't "get" it - but i stuck with it, and gradually i enjoyed it more. All my tweets went through to faceebok, where they recieved more positive feedback than my typical facebook posts. People can read 160 characters of text quickly, and enjoy it. Long paragraphs, not so much.
- rjohnk 11y agoIf this happens, Twitter will cease to be Twitter. In keeping with the bird analogy, messages will be that annoying parakeet in the pet store rather than spring time finches.
- adevine 11y agoI originally agreed with you, but after thinking about it I think the devil is in the details of how this is released. That is, Twitter's uniqueness is that it is geared towards short, real-time "bursts of consciousness", but people with lots of followers still occasionally put out long "blogs in tweet form" with multiple tweets. If Twitter keeps the focus on the short bursts, but still has a separate way to do "Twitter blogs" or whatever, I think it could work. If Twitter just unconditionally changes all Tweets to 10k it seems like it would kill what makes Twitter unique in the first place.
- jdmichal 11y agoCompletely non-sequitur fact, but maybe fun from a "hacker" perspective: Most parakeet cages I've seen in bird stores have a bell-in-a-ball type toy. Try picking it up and ringing it sometime. For some reason, all the parakeets will stop chattering as long as the bell is ringing.
- zuron7 11y agoI think they should increase their character limit linearly with time. Kinda like Gmail storage back in the day. Twitter wouldn't be twitter without short messages. Or maybe allow users to skip the limit once a day.
- venomsnake 11y agoWe already have that - it is called tumblr. Also the social media outragists will have slightly harder time pulling things out of context - think about all the other media which income comes from producing outrage over tweets ...
- bad_user 11y agoTwitter's limit is too low, but it does have a certain appeal, and I'm following a lot of smart people that express a lot in 140 chars. Would be happy if this limit was raised to 250 chars. But raising to 10,000 chars would probably kill Twitter for me.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Cakez0r 11y agoI don't think the size of tweets will have much of an effect on load. I imagine the bulk of the cost is in processing a request, rather than the size of it.
- minimaxir 11y agoThe amount of data/bandwidth used in 10K characters is far, far less than the amount used for videos/GIFs which anyone can upload now.
- ElijahLynn 11y agoYeah, my first thought was "The Death of Twitter has been announced". Although, I left Twitter for G+ quite a while ago precisely because of the character limit.
- troycarlson 11y agoIf G+ serves as a valid alternative to Twitter for your needs then you were using Twitter differently than most. Twitter's value is in its network, not the ability to share longform content, and G+ can't touch Twitter as a social network.
- ElijahLynn 11y agoYeah, it was super bittersweet and still is. My developer circle is mostly on Twitter, which I still interact with from time to time, to see what is going on in that circle. I just hate trying to micromanage my words and grammar sooo much.
- joshstrange 11y agoMeh, I doubt it would bring me back. 90% of my friends are on FB and the lack of a limit (or one I've ever hit) is quite nice. I'm able to write out full sentences with much less ambiguity or "text-speak" and while FB isn't my favourite company ever I'm going to go where my friends are at the end of the day. I don't write pages and pages or even multiple paragraphs most of the time but 1-2 sentences is normally not enough to express a full thought and because of that Twitter just doesn't work for me.
- tptacek 11y agoPresumably, 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.
- minimaxir 11y ago> 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 Tweetstorm when a 10k character limit exist, the shenanigans would be obvious. Anyone who pulled this would instantly get an unfollow from me, of course.
- WorldMaker 11y agoAlso, 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.
- andreasklinger 11y agoFrom what i understand they wont remove 140 tweets but will introduce their own variation of "posts". Every media distribution site atm seems to try to also own the content. Twitter's value isnt that you have to write short messages but that others can scan dozens of ideas/tweets of multiple people in a very short time. They wont take that away. Most likely you will even have to attach a 1400 tweet to the post.
- boomzilla 11y agoThe Twitter engineering team is probably hating this decision. I bet a lot of their infrastructure is built around the assumption that tweet.txt is short :) This has huge implication on the data schema, caching, search, etc.
- acjohnson55 11y agoIf that's the case, that's their own fault. Seriously. As an engineer, you can hardcode your assumptions or make them parametric. I get that 140 chars has been a core part of the Twitter identity, and maybe there are some infrastructural aspects that have to be hardcoded to optimize for that. But if they've got `140`s sprinkled all over their code base because that was the assumption of the day, god help them.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- twlng 11y agoAh... we built http://www.twlng.com http://www.twlng.com as a way to work around the Twitter limit. Without the ability to format the longer text, 'Tweets' will just end up being unreadable.
- dangoor 11y agoOther commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest. To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet would be much nicer. If they implement the feature like that, which is implied in the article, this would be a big improvement to Twitter in my opinion.
- teaneedz 11y agoactually we get the implementation, but it is bad UX practise. it adds friction to the reading experience and will increase the quantity of tweets with truncated text within the first 140 chars. Twitter poorly handles this already with its URL preview cards. from a UX side, it's bad no matter how much spin Twitter will bring.
- ethanbond 11y agoBad UX practice according to whom? I was initially really against this, but parent comment brings a compelling argument: people are already using the service to say more than 140chars worth of stuff. The current methods to do it result in a far worse user experience than the tried and true "Read More" button would. That said, I'm skeptical of it just in terms of product definition. Like Instagram adding portrait/landscape photos, more than 140 characters to a tweet does nothing but obscure what exactly the product is and how you're supposed to use it (even if people circumvent that anyhow).
- teaneedz 11y agoI agree ethanbond with your 3rd para. It will muddle the product definition even further. It's rather telling to me that Twitter is willing to AB this without concern for its image or userbase - one that is mostly providing negative sentiment. UX is something many businesses seem to really struggle with. If unnecessary friction is added, it really should cause stakeholders and designers to pause. The "read more" CTA will lead to more truncated tweets within the first 140 chars, something that is visually unappealing and breaks the reading experience by forcing a manual action. The workarounds you describe are not used by everyone and I'd wager that most users simply keep their posts within the 140 char limit rather than pict-tweet or storm a longer convo. Yes it forces brevity, but that is the Twitter identity which supports the product's skimmability usefulness. Give users a read more option, and many will post a few extra chars just because they don't have to put much thought into their wording now. Short term: usage goes up. Long term: quality decreases as Twitter becomes just another Facebook or Medium. It will be worse than Medium though because the audience Twitter is going after is more generic. I've always argued that Twitter's userbase is more influential and valuable because of its forced brevity and fact that it was unique. I already avoid truncated tweets and want to read long-form content elsewhere. So, I won't be using Twitter more. Maybe others will, but again, I'd wager that Twitter is simply sliding down a path that will be ultimately more harmful for its long term sustainability.
- sgdesign 11y agoA good solution would be having a 10000 character limit, but formatting under-140 tweets differently so they stand out more. This would encourage people to keep things short, while giving them a way to publish longer posts if they really want to.
- elevensies 11y agoI think they should allow each account to be increased to 280 for $280/year.
- potatolicious 11y agoI must be the only one who thinks this is a good idea (not the 10,000-char limit in specific, but something much higher than 140-char). Some of the most interesting ideas I've seen on Twitter were in tweetstorms, which is a pretty nasty and ugly hack itself. Proponents of the 140-char limit usually cite some notion of terseness and thought-density, but I see more half-formed ideas and deliberate grammar/spelling mangling to make things fit. That's not terseness, that's gray-matter-powered lossy compression. But I'm also one of those crazy people who uses Facebook like others use Twitter - I don't write whole essays but 140 chars is like thinking through a straw. (Side note: I also have a pet theory that Twitter's problems with epic shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or less)
- forgetsusername 11y ago>I also have a pet theory that Twitter's problems with epic shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or less I'm pretty sure those arguments and "shit-storms" are occurring everywhere there is written text on the internet, regardless of character limitations.
- potatolicious 11y agoSure, though I feel like it's worse on Twitter than in most places for a few reasons: it's really easy to retweet and disseminate someone's post, and the public nature of accounts/tweets makes it very easy to dogpile. On Facebook you might get some flak from your uncle, on a forum you might get into a tussle with another poster, but there are natural limits to the severity and the scale. On Twitter many of these limits are stripped away - it's very easy, and very common, to retweet someone "look at this fucking idiot" and invite your circles to pile on, many of whom will have never heard of the offender before. This is also how harassment and abuse on Twitter is worse than other platforms - on Facebook you might get into a flamewar with your uncle and face awkward family dinners for a while, but on Twitter a dogpile is millions of users large, and you're statistically guaranteed to get a few people with legitimate screws loose in that bunch who might actually SWAT you or stalk you or otherwise take things way, way too far. Add this to the fact that Twitter's length limits discourage nuance and encourage soundbites and you get IMO the worst intersection of soundbite culture, outrage culture, and massive built-in virality.
- mrb 11y agoIf Twitter is finally willing to increase the limit, maybe they should consider options to monetize it. Like my suggestion from years ago that they should sell a $1 per month subscription for users wanting to double their limit: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=65 http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=65
- izzydata 11y ago140 seems pretty short, but 10000 seems very excessive. Why not something closer to the hundreds. 500 maybe?
- nikolay 11y agoI can't believe that there are so many backers of the old limit! Don't you guys hate that you have to always compromise on punctuation, select shorter (but less precise) synonyms, and other just to fit into the story that Twitter was trying to push all this time, but which wasn't the reality (of people using Twitter via SMS)? Okay, now, Twitter goes to another extreme - from too short, to too long. I'm fine with shorter message, but 140 is way too short. Modern phones combine SMSs into a bigger blob. Use that and just make a limit of 5 SMSs or something along these lines.
- teaneedz 11y agoit's what gave Twitter it's identity and allowed me to discover valuable information quickly. sticking a read more button to expand a tweet is just lazy and bad UX but worse, alters the fundamental usefulness of Twitter for me. it basically breaks the reading experience while introducing a host of issues and unnecessary friction. I'll surely alter my usage as well. I post way less now because of all of this AB testing and lack of product leadership.
- prawn 11y agoI actually really enjoy the process of having to re-write my thoughts to have them fit. Reminds me what is crucial and what is superfluous. (139 chars)
- rconti 11y agou r so rite! 140 char limit limits my thoughts 2 that which is critical. without it id waste tons of space expressing my brilliant thoughts (140chars) (speaking of crap formatting, I still can't get used to HN comment formatting.. apparently no way to make a line feed or a list, at least, none that's documented) But seriously, it's ironic that Twitter limits tweets to 140char but the site and mobile app are some of the worst wastes of screen real estate I've ever seen. I keep trying to find it of some value but I just can't do it. Either nothing shows up in my feed, or I follow "must follow" people and get to hear them go on about random crap I don't care about. My real actual Twitter mobile app feed currently looks like this: * retweet * promoted tweet * while you were away (1) * while you were away (2) * while you were away (3) * while you were away (4) * while you were away (5) * actual tweet in proper chronological order (1) * actual tweet in proper chronological order (2) * people you may want to follow (1) * people you may want to follow (2) * people you may want to follow (3) I had to scroll down 4 entire (iPhone 6) screenfuls of tweets before I got to the chronologic list of recent tweets I actually want to see, and even then, saw only 2 of them before the next chunk of junk! The light grey bar on a light grey background is poor delineation between sections, as well. It blows my mind that a mostly-text medium with such a strict character limit manages to have vastly worse information density than Facebook. I use them differently, too, of course. Facebook feels more personal; I'm friends with real-life friends, and am a member of some groups for fun. Most of the updates feel personal to me. Twitter I use to follow "important figures" and some friends.. but no friends tweet, and the important figures never say anything interesting.. or at least, if they do, I can't get to it, because the UI is such garbage.
- zobzu 11y agoThe 140 limit is the reason I like twitter. It forces conciseness and some kind of quality. 10k blog posts with 140 charsbof content to decipher.... No thanks. Showing the first 140 only with a "read more" button does not fix that. Rip twitter
- ddingus 11y agoThis is going to kill Twitter for me. A few more characters is likely a good move. 256 seems nice. But, I don't use Twitter for long form content. I do use Twitter as a way for people to get me interested in long form, or to raise awareness of something. If my feed gets clogged with long form, I'm moving on. Too much info, wrong use case. Seems to me Twitter could gather a lot more value out reconsideration of how hostile they have been to the ecosystem that grew up around Twitter.
- ThomPete 11y agoFinally! I have been wanting them to remove that for a long time now. Twitters biggest problem is that they are a protocol router more than a destination. And so while people use it to find content they consume this content somewhere else out of reach for twitters add engine. Now that people will start writing on twitter this will mean a lot more time is spent on twitter consuming content on twitter and reading ads on twitter. With this they get to keep the protocol part while keeping users longer on their platform to consume content.
- riebschlager 11y agoWhat you see as Twitter's biggest problem, I see as one of its greatest strengths. We already have five-craptillion blogging platforms and I feel this change would morph Twitter into yet another one. I can understand the motivation, but I'm not a fan of social networks tendency to be THE PLACE WHERE YOU DO EVERYTHING NOW.
- ThomPete 11y agoI am talking about Twitters biggest problems from the point of whether it will survive you talk about it from the point of whether it's a better product experience.
- teaneedz 11y agoit's a short-term fix. also, the details will likely introduce UX issues when so many others could have been addressed. this, along with a non-reverse chronological timeline is a product pivot with lots of risk. maybe it'll work out, but I'll use it less. I'd rather invest in time elsewhere based on where Twitter is headed.
- srameshc 11y agoIt would be an interesting experiment to watch. It can take Twitter much ahead or it will break Twitter completely.
- webwanderings 11y agoFacebook is a walled-garden, Twitter is not. The humans in the middle of these two giants, are all confused. Meanwhile, Twitter needs to figure out how they are preventing spammers and spam-bots from infiltrating the environment where humans supposed to tread...only if, they wish humans to use their service.
- chjohasbrouck 11y agoRestricting users to 140 characters wasn't just a good idea because of SMS character limits, it also forced users to create content that had a far greater chance of being shareable. The traditional blogging platforms that came before Twitter generally failed as broad-base social media platforms because of the walls of text people would write. If you're an average person, nobody wants to read your wall of text about some childhood experience, but people might be interested in your one-liners about news, celebrities, friends, etc. I think the changes that are causing them to consider a 10,000-character limit are: 1. A larger percentage of Twitter traffic is celebrities/marketers, and people trying to connect with celebrities/marketers (not friends connecting with friends). Character limits don't matter for this traffic because quality/virality is either guaranteed (celebrities/marketers) or irrelevant (consumers trying to connect to celebrities/marketers). 2. It's difficult to sell text as short-form shareable content now that everyone's sharing images, gifs, and really short videos. If the text isn't going to be shareable, they might as well lift the character limit and expand its utility as a general feature. Personally I like the idea. The way I use Twitter is to see what public figures and organizations are saying publicly, so a higher character limit is 100% upside for me.
- OoTheNigerian 11y agoWe built http://writerack.com http://writerack.com to help take care of this problem. It is puzzling why Twitter refuses to encourage 3rd party applications to do peripheral things while they still get the data. That way, they focus on the core experience for most of their users. 10 000 and it becomes a poor attempt at medium. 140 characters allows text to be like images where you can skim. Occasionally, you see tweetstorms and decide if you want to "view more" Anyway, it's their turf. Do check out http://writerack.com http://writerack.com and have fun with it until it is no longer useful :)
- NTDF9 11y agoSo what's the difference between twitter and tumblr then?
- colmvp 11y agoI 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.
- Bud 11y agoIt 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.
- bad_user 11y agoThe length of your entire message: 285 chars Length of "You can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting": 56 chars (took "literally" out, because that's incorrect).
- DanBC 11y agoIs that "you can't", or "you can't"?
- Bud 11y agoIt's "one can't".
- Bud 11y agoYes, thank you for the char-counting. I'm aware that my comment was not the height of profundity, nor was it particularly long. However, I do occasionally post more interesting things, and some of them need to be longer, because they discuss a complex issue or cite many facts. My comment was not intended to, in itself, justify the need for a longer Tweet length.
- tomswartz07 11y agohttp://reddit.com/r/iamverysmart http://reddit.com/r/iamverysmart
- cpeterso 11y agoTwitter could charge 1¢ for each character over 140. That will encourage people to (still) be concise, but also monetize people (or companies) that want to say more.
- caleb_gl 11y agogenius, sad, and probably realistic.
- fideloper 11y agoI'd love to see a limit of like 2-3 long-form tweets per 24 hour period.
- JayHost 11y agoHow about the long form tweets get turned into pictures so no rules are broken and TLDR is obvious? Otherwise limit of 1 like pinned tweet.
- pjc50 11y agoI'd rather the reverse: people already post pictures-of-text, and because twitter like to scale to fit with no way of seeing 1:1 zoom other than the browser's "View Image" feature, it can often be unreadable. Maybe they could OCR the images.
- evanpw 11y agoThe best suggestion I've seen is 1¢ for the 141st character, 2¢ for the 142nd, 4¢ for the 143rd, etc. Going slightly over 140 costs a trivial amount, but it would be stupidly expensive to tweet anything really long. EDIT: I found where I stole this idea from: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6207.html http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6207.html
- michaelmrose 11y agoNobody would pay for this. They would just continue writing blog posts and linking them on twitter
- Zikes 11y agoThis entire article is ~954 characters, less than 1/10th of the proposed 10,000 maximum.
- mschuster91 11y agoOkay 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.
- Zikes 11y agoTheir new non-chronologically sorted timeline sure smells of Facebook to me, too.
- mschuster91 11y agoYeah, thank God they didn't force that crap onto me, yet. If they'll do I have to switch clients -.-
- slig 11y agoWhat difference would the client make? The feed comes from the API, even in the official client [1]. [1] Few years ago I'm sure it was like that, they might've changed to a private API since.
- mschuster91 11y agoA client could periodically poll for new tweets and sort them by timestamp.
- ppod 11y agoI think that the crucial difference between twitter and facebook is not the length of the posts, but the fact that twitter is broadcast, or "publish-subscribe", while facebook is semi-private through reciprocal permission (by default).
- AlwaysBCoding 11y agoAnd the publish/subscribe model being a possibly superior alternative to a two-way opt-in friendship model, is probably the reason for twitter's success not the 140 characters. So by keeping the subscription model but allowing for longer content, I think it's a win-win.
- nlh 11y agoI feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the spirit of Twitter's original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but there's a "see more" button/icon/etc. that expands the tweet to longer form. That would seem to solve both issues -- short-and-sweet for those that want it, and longer as necessary. (Note this idea has been baked for approximately 15 seconds, so I'm sure I'm missing quite a bit.)
- JoshTriplett 11y ago> I feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the spirit of Twitter's original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but there's a "see more" button/icon/etc. that expands the tweet to longer form. That would also provide a better first-party equivalent to services like TwitLonger, as well as the common practice of posting a snippet and a longer text-as-image.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoI'd like it if they added text attachments, like you can currently attach images or videos. This way the core tweet itself is still 140 characters. It'd be a nicer version of images full of text.
- DIVx0 11y agoThis would just lead to 'click-bait' tweets.
- theseatoms 11y agoI can only see this being beneficial to the platform and/or ecosystem if they restrict the default displayed size of tweets, requiring users to click-through to read more.
- cdnsteve 11y agoThe problem isn't character limit. The problem is missing interesting Tweets. My timeline is flooded with new tweets. Better flagging to read later, algorithms that say you might find this most interesting, filtering would be welcome and are needed.
- dacox 11y agoI still don't really understand Twitter. I have an account and have followed ~50 people and organizations I find interesting, and all I see is floods of re-tweets of people I have no interest in.
- prawn 11y agoThey don't think you are following enough people. Tough luck if you disagree. Nail for their coffin, IMO.
- Wingman4l7 11y agoYou have to turn off retweets manually for every single account you follow, unfortunately.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago> Better flagging to read later Can you expand on that? Do the tweets contain links, or do they just pack enough meaning into 140 characters that you'd like to think about it for some time before replying? Personally, I think that anything that needs to be bookmarked later like that belongs in an RSS feed.
- CrowFly 11y agoI feel bad for Twitter because they have a popular product that's hard to monetize. That being said, I wonder if any of the Twitter execs who think of this stuff actually use Twitter.
- JayHost 11y agoIn this case monetization = taking advantage of the user. I don't feel bad. I like twitter. I don't want to be the product. That said they started emailing me profiles that I viewed and didn't follow which feels invasive.
- hyperdunc 11y agoI don't feel sorry for them. Twitter is a great idea and valuable platform. It would be better implemented in a decentralized way - perhaps with it's own protocol. By running it as a business and they're trying to force a square peg into a round hole and slowly undermining its value.
- teaneedz 11y ago2016 is the year Twitter jumped the shark. https://ello.co/teanee/post/0M0OKQLGuxdtXpjHKXAq1w https://ello.co/teanee/post/0M0OKQLGuxdtXpjHKXAq1w
- npunt 11y agoLink also says 2016 is Ello's year. Trolling, irony, or sincere? You decide!
- teaneedz 11y agosorry ;) I guess I came across as trollish, but I really loved Twitter and it's difficult to see it on its current path. There were so many historical and important industry news items I learned first on Twitter. Twitter owns the in-the-moment. However, I'm passionate about UX and see something really cool being built at Ello. I've dealt with all the platforms and Ello to me is very unique. Deep down, I want Twitter to still succeed, but I see too many bad product decisions coming from a company that lacks clarity and UX passion.
- Laaw 11y agoI've begun wondering if there's a market for recreating original technologies that have evolved beyond their original intent. For example, a new site that allowed you to broadcast up to 140 character messages.
- pjc50 11y agoI keep joking to people that I want to start rotatedfloralheartbullet.com (.com), a social network where you're only allowed one character, but you have the whole unicode space to choose from.
- hellbanner 11y agohttps://this.cm/ https://this.cm/ allows only 1 post a day (FB style social network).
- cpeterso 11y agoEvan Williams founded Blogger (no character limit) and then Twitter (140-character limit). After rotatedfloralheartbullet.com's one-character limit, the logical conclusion is Bitter with one-bit posts. :)
- Laaw 11y ago1
- SapphireSun 11y agoSo you just post like buttons and people click them or share them?
- pmlnr 11y agoYou might want to check out Reacji: https://indiewebcamp.com/reacji https://indiewebcamp.com/reacji
- steveklabnik 11y agoFrom experience: don't underestimate network effects. "Twitter but like it used to be" still starts with nobody you're following on Twitter on it, and Twitter's TOC prevents you from importing them.
- homulilly 11y agoIncreasing the limit beyond the current arbitrary 140 character limit is good, but 10000 characters is a bit much. I'd rather see a small increase (maybe 160, 200?) and removing links and @'s from the count.
- resca79 11y agoTwitter is considering to allow message longest that 140, but I don't think that the problem is the character limit for the kind of interaction of twitter users. There are other problems not so big but that make the user experience not fluent for a simple app like Twitter. Writing posts with more that 140 can potentially get many FB users, nevertheless TW should take care of the its current users. I notice many incoherences of the web app, for instance the top menu, on left where pop/up and navigation are mixed. Second, the mobile app is very wired I receive notifications about message or followers that appears on my notification tabs randomly. In conclusion, I love TW and I'm not a FB user, but I'm honest my twitter timeline is a bunch of Ads and I follow Twitter just because I love the concept of it.
- _pmf_ 11y ago#unexpected #amazing #surprise #dorseydoesit #humanitysaved Seriously: Jack Dorsey is definitely worth his 100 millions if he can come up with innovations like this; raising the number of character? Holy shmoly, what a genius! A veritable dare devil!
- yzh 11y agoHow about not setting limit to any length, but using a text summary generator to reduce the tl;dr version to 140 characters?
- tedajax 11y agoGood. My biggest issue with Twitter's 140 character limit is it removes all opportunity for nuance. Within 140 characters you can just barely voice and opinion or thought in the most basic terms. Yes you can split your thoughts into multiple tweets but people will typically only focus on the first tweet that really expresses the basis of an idea and that's what will get shared the most. Allowing more wordy and nuanced tweets probably won't solve the social media over reactions that seem to flare up, but maybe it'll help if people aren't forced to awkwardly clarify their positions with a bunch of tweets that have to be read from the bottom up.
- mrpoptart 11y agobrevity is the soul of wit
- cableshaft 11y agoNot even a legend like George Carlin was witty 100% of the time.
- tomjen3 11y agoMany people make that argument. I find that it is a matter of how you normally write; not the value of it.
- kfrzcode 11y agoI support this.
- AlwaysBCoding 11y agoTo the people thinking 10,000 characters means suddenly everyone will write blog posts instead of tweets... Have you ever tried blogging? Writing blog posts is insanely hard and time consuming. You'd be an outlier if you could write one good blog post a day. It's not like every tweet is suddenly going to be an essay. More likely tweets will just be slightly longer (200 characters or something) and then there will be the occasional longer post. This is great because the hacks we were using beforehand (tweetstorms, replying to yourself, posting images of text) were all ridiculous for such a basic use case.
- upofadown 11y agoPeople won't write long blog posts. Instead they will get drunk and write long LiveJournal posts.
- logicallee 11y agoSo, I think you don't realize something very important about how people use twitter. Consider, what the typical number of blogs is that people around you might actually follow - (via RSS or some other means) in the sense that they're subscribed to it, new content appears from time to time, and when an entry appears they see it somewhere at the top of some feed? A feed they have to read through. I would guess the very high end of what might be considered typical would be 50-70 or something. That is a lot of blogs. Now let's compare with twitter. Three years ago, the average twitter user followed 100 accounts.[1] Here is an example of an article giving 55 "must-follow" twitter accounts [2] - a simple article, saying, hey, subscribe to these 55 sources. Can you imagine someone giving you a list of 55 blogs that you simply have to subscribe to, regardless of who you are or what your interests are - for everyone? That to be in touch with the world, you must follow at least these 55 blogs? I can certainly imagine it for tech! But, for everyone? The percentage of world leaders who use twitter is: 80%[3] - outside of the highly reduced format, do you think people care about politics that much? Obama has 68M followers. How many do you think would stick around after even a couple of extended posts? How interesting do you think every last politician is? Because that 68M compares to the total monthly reach of New York Times and all its web presence of on the order of 50 million people. Are people really that interested in not just one, but every last politician's every last statement, than in this highly distilled and reduced form? Twitter works because of the character limit. That's what allows the average user to follow well over a hundred accounts. It's that simple. - [1] this figure was really hard to find, don't know why. http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-statistics-by-the-numbers-153151584.html http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-statistics-by-the-numbers-1531... [2] http://greatist.com/happiness/must-follow-twitter-accounts http://greatist.com/happiness/must-follow-twitter-accounts [3] http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/march-2013-by-the-numbers-a-few-amazing-twitter-stats/2/ http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/march-2013-by-the-num...
- viraptor 11y agoThere's quite a few ideas that were created because of the limit. For example Micro SF (https://twitter.com/microsff https://twitter.com/microsff). Constraints can fuel creativity, it would be sad to see this go.
- limeyy 11y agoI wonder how much theyll charge with their gnip rip-off company for us to query these long tweets.
- grillvogel 11y agothis is awful, and its really funny to me that all the people complaining about the 140 character limit are doing so via long unfocused babbling rants
- auvi 11y agoThe first thing I thought of while reading the title was: is it April 1 already?
- cpeterso 11y agoHow deep is the 140-character limit hard-coded or assumed throughout Twitter's codebase and beyond? How much would break if the Twitter front-end simply stopped limiting submissions to 140 characters? There is Twitter's web front-end, the server backend, Twitter's native apps, third-party clients, feed reading scripts, …
- obiefernandez 11y agothis will be the real beginning of the end for twitter. stupid
- Houshalter 11y agoI've never used twitter and don't understand the appeal at all. How can anything worthwhile be said in 150 characters? Even this comment comes in at 171 characters, jesus.
- a3n 11y agoIf 140 characters was brilliant, than 10K characters is unbelievably brilliant.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoI'd really like to be able to edit Tweets.
- Estragon 11y agoIf they do this, I might start to see some value in twitter. The 140-character limit has a strong anti-intellectual effect on the discourse there.
- Estragon 11y agoIf they do this, I might start to see some value in twitter. The 140-character limit has a strong anti-intellectual effect on the discourse there.
- Animats 11y agoMicrosoft Word used to have a summarization engine. You could specify a maximum length, and it would remove sentences, in a surprisingly intelligent way, to get to that length. Twitter readers now need such a feature. Just because someone sends huge tweets doesn't mean they have to be displayed.
- smt88 11y agoI think it's very risky to do something like that with someone else's words without consulting them. Imagine a satirical tweet with exactly the wrong "unnecessary" sentence removed. Suddenly your life is ruined because you said something that makes people angry.
- derefr 11y agoIt could render the summary live to the poster as they edit their post. Then, if you see a "bad" summary, you can go back to the drawing board. Not as nice as being able to write the summary yourself, but certainly an interesting single-player game.
- smt88 11y agoMy only concern is that we'd get into a frustrating game of clickbait, since the summary wouldn't necessarily have to reflect the content. An example is the "Facebook is dead" link on HN recently. The article was about someone quitting Facebook, rather than an argument that Facebook is losing trendiness. Now imagine a Twitter where every single tweet is similarly bait-y.
- ksk 11y agoI have a semi-serious business idea for Twitter. They should charge verified/celebrity users a huge amount to be able to fill in whatever number they want in the followers box. If you're advertising on twitter, you will know the actual number so you're not paying extra. It\ would reduce or eliminate the services that "help" with inflating your follower count, and vain people who care about this stuff get to see a large number next to their name.
- Wingman4l7 11y agoMakes a lot more sense to just "fix" what they've already got -- stop counting @ mentions, hashtags, and URLs as characters. If URLs didn't count, that'd mean the death of URL shorteners, which would mean no more link rot.
- gregmac 11y agoYeah, I'd like to see this ... so long as they #limitTheNumber of #hashtags and @mentions you use #so #you #cant #cheatthesystem.
- Wingman4l7 11y agoPeople will always try to cheat, they're doing it now with [continued 1/2] -style tweet-chaining. Counting @ mentions means that any reply is immediately handicapped (although, for a broadcasting-style platform, maybe that was the whole point).
- minimaxir 11y agoJack Dorsey just posted a longtweet-as-image which implies that the story is true: https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248 https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248 His comments about searching/highlighting imply that this feature might be like Medium.
- teaneedz 11y agoI think Twitter is going to do it. I agree with his tweet: > Given how much the best users of twitter hate the idea of a 10k char limit for tweets, it will definitely happen. :( So as long as it's going to do it, can I request that it support Markdown? Medium doesn't really support it other than through an API.
- teaneedz 11y agotypo above. not his tweet but this tweet (which BTW would look better in MD
- digitalneal 11y agoMight be interesting if they 'gamified' this character limit. Your limit increases the more engagement you have. Or maybe everyone starts off with 10k but the limit decreases based on engagement. Might be a way to reward people who create interesting content. Although I'm sure someone at fiverr would be offering a service to counteract that idea via bots seconds afterwards.
- 13thLetter 11y agoUnless they're going to create some sort of limit on how much Twitter mobs can dogpile people, doxx them, and call their employers to get them fired, no thanks. You'd have to be crazy to post on Twitter and take those risks, no matter how anodyne you think you're being in your tweets.
- pinaceae 11y agooh yes, the spam it allow will be beautiful. twitter spam has been of limited value due to the constraints. would be more useful to move links, @mentions, etc. out of the character limit. but hey, if they do it, it opens the opportunity for another unicorn that will be the snapchat of twitter.
- lukethomas 11y agoSeems like the major benefits are: 1. 140 char tweets aren't indexed very well by search engines. Writing blog posts or 400+ char tweets? Way better. More indexable content. More user growth. Wall street is satisfied for a few months. 2. The notion of expressing yourself (or whatever you want to call blogging) is easy to explain (WordPress, Tumblr, Medium). I'd argue that it's much easier to explain blogging than Twitter. By introducing something less ambiguous it should help user growth. As much as I would hate 10k char tweets, I can see why they are doing this. Minor changes to the current product won't drive the growth they and Wall Street are looking for.
- Raed667 11y agoTweetDeck (before it was sabotaged by Twitter) used to have a cool feature like this where if you "tweet longer" you get a link attached to your tweet. Twitter killed this years ago when it acquired TweetDeck. This is funny because everything Twitter has been doing lately has been mostly done (and stripped down ever-since) in TweetDeck years ago!
- hackuser 11y agoThis sounds like Weibo, a very popular service in China. There is some history of such a thing being very succcessful. However, I've never used Weibo. Can any describe the differences between Weibo and longer-form Twitter, and talk about Weibo's strengths and weaknesses?
- williesleg 11y agoholy cow that would be some long winded shtuff there.
- return0 11y ago- Tweets are not titles. Soon they 'll have "Click here to read my thoughts on X" / "Click here to read my response to Y" situation. That's not twitter, it's RSS. - Content creators/websites that use twitter to funnel users to their websites will not use this feature. - Tweetstorms can be solved much more elegantly (e.g. click to expand "continuation tweets") - A tweet is a single sentence. Human brains have limits.
- sidcool 11y agoSo the microblogging phenomenon is over?
- vishalzone2002 11y agoi think this is the death of link shortners
- dmingod666 11y agoReminds me of a company that was doing innovation in radio and figured out a way to beam still images with the radio waves. Only problem is they were on their way to re-inventing TV if they did a little more innovation.. All that's needed now is markdown or html support...
- return0 11y agoTwitter should add the option to put the long-form articles behind a paywall, pay the author and withhold a fee. Solves their monetization problem in one go.
- sherifmansour 11y agoI find it fascinating that almost every single significant product change Twitter has made has effectively been a result of end-users or third party developers attempting to fix the core product experience. - @mentions - Retweets - Mobile clients - periscope - Image effects Now long-form tweets trying to fix the redicilous problems of having to screenshot text to fit your message in, agonizing over short URLs or character by character shortcuts just to get a tweet out. Any significant innovations or leaps forward from Twitter that we're not what people have been trying to do?
- rodionos 11y agoThey might extend the message limit to 10K characters, but they won't be able to stretch their users' attention span which is probably is bound by 2 or 3 sentences anyway.
- Pxtl 11y agoIt sounds more like you'll be able to attach a long-form text document to a tweet just like you can attach a photo. The tweet itself, as presented in the normal view, is still constrained in length.
- irremediable 11y agoYeah, this isn't even that new -- currently people get the same effect by posting images of text. Allowing them to attach text is a logical improvement.
- SixSigma 11y agoThey were at 23.15 On Dec 31st Opened at 22.64 on Jan 4th, going as low as 22.19 Opened at 22.79 on the 5th and closed 21.90 I think this rumour was irrelevant to the price change
- ohyes 11y agoWoah, woah, woah! 10,000? If anything tweets are too long! They should reduce the size if anything. 16 characters and a selfie should suffice for all inter human communication. If we increase the character limit how does it foster innovation in the realm of human to human interaction? I mean, they might as well be old school print media at this point, slightly democratized to allow celebridiots to poorly market themselves and occasionally post something offensive which will create media outrage. How will news anchors have segments where they "read people's tweets"? We don't have a segment called "Anderson Cooper reads the New York Times." They're direct competitors! It's crazy! It makes no sense, Twitter has gone too far this time! People will just keep typing their stupid thoughts to fill the tweet up to the stupid limit because they have to be entertaining in long format. I don't have time for that shit!