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Jack Dorsey addresses Twitter's character limit
- mydpy 11y agoUh, what? Why would you address this almost a decade after launching? Why would you call out people who post images to get around the limitation? Seems like grasping for straws to me...
- mmatants 11y agoThe reason to mention image posting is specifically to say that they want the UX to be like a text attachment rather than just a wall of text on someone's feed. Which is a much smaller disruption to existing experience. On that note, the fact that images are being used to show text content on Twitter right now is laughingly unfair to folks who use a screen reader, given how much we value HTML for its presentation flexibility.
- mydpy 11y agoRe: screen readers, this obsession with image and video on the web is infuriating. All I want to do is consume text, especially for news. Why is this so much to ask for?
- onewaystreet 11y ago> Why would you address this almost a decade after launching Twitter has changed CEOs four times since it was founded. It's never been a company with any kind of long-term vision or strategy.
- mydpy 11y agoWhich is hilariously fitting.
- Alupis 11y agoIt's kind of ironic Jack Dorsey used an image of text (containing several paragraphs) to explain why the 140 character limit is a "good" thing for Twitter.
- grok2 11y agoSeems like he was trying to convey a message -- being a bit meta about the problem with the character limitation perhaps?
- onewaystreet 11y agoIt's not ironic, it's his point. The same people complaining about having more characters have been using images of text to get around the 140 character limit. Their complaining doesn't make sense.
- dublinben 11y ago>The same people complaining about having more characters have been using images of text to get around the 140 character limit. Are they? This claim seems highly unlikely. Do you know of any specific critics of this new policy who have posted such images?
- zobzu 11y agoand reading his message was annoying because too long. it could have fitted in 3 short sentences (of, granted, potentially up to 250 chars)
- randycupertino 11y agoor they just post multiple tweets all in a row if they run out of space in the 140 characters.
- bjt 11y agoLike you, I read Dorsey's post unable to tell whether he was for increasing the limit (and using the image to prove his point) or against increasing the limit (and oblivious to the contradiction). Thus illustrating another big limitation of Twitter: the difficulty of understanding the context of a single tweet.
- jvehent 11y agoThis should have been a blog post.
- steve-howard 11y agoI think it's more of a tongue-in-cheek self reference. "We've spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it." The spellcheck underline at the end was probably not just carelessness, though I don't follow the whims of tech royalty very carefully. The fact that I had to tab back and forth to type up the quote drives his point home for me.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sigmar 11y agoSeems like a pretty strong suggestion that they will be increasing the character limit (if only through a "show more" button). Very telling that he used "if we decide to ship what we explore, WE'RE [emphasis added] telling developers well in advance" instead of "we would tell developers"
- ErikAugust 11y agoWhat are the business advantages? It has to make business sense, right? Bigger ads? Trap people more in the ecosystem, less outbound links, maybe?
- Spooky23 11y agoThey don't have traction amongst normal humans.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jsprogrammer 11y agoJust what the world needs: more traps.
- a_shane 11y agoAll of the above, plus attracting new users. Comparatively, Twitter doesn't have the same user base as Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp, and I think that extending the character limit is a way of making Twitter more accessible for first-time users. It's also designed to bring more brands to Twitter. Right now it's extremely difficult to promote your brand/business, include a photo, @ mention someone, and include a hashtag. An extended character limit solves all of these problems, making it a more attractive platform for advertising than ever before.
- chippy 11y agoHaving more text means more text to mine which would be something of a paid service. I can imagine a couple of ways, but imagine a real time feed of all long text "posts" which mention your brand, product, company.
- Indyan 11y agoIf you need a thousand words to say something, put it on Medium or Tumblr or any of the hundreds of other blogging and social media platforms. I dont mind a minor tweak of the char. limit, but the rumored 1000 word limit is way too much. The beauty of Twitter is its brevity. It forces people to cut out the flab and be concise. This in turn makes the entire steam easily glanceable. Huge walls of text will take away much of what makes Twitter special.
- a_shane 11y agoI'm 100% with you. Honestly, my "prefect Twitter" would be to keep the 140char limit, but to exclude @ mentions, photos, and links from the limit. That way users can be a bit more expressive without the word-barf walls of text which make Facebook, Tumblr, and other social platforms a nightmare to read through.
- chimeracoder 11y ago> I'm 100% with you. Honestly, my "prefect Twitter" would be to keep the 140char limit, but to exclude @ mentions, photos, and links from the limit. Right now, there's a real benefit to having short Twitter handles, because they count less against the limit (longer ones really add up in Twitter conversations that involve multiple people). I understand why usernames count towards the limit, but I wish they didn't.
- Pharaoh2 11y agoYou know what a good solution to that? Constant cost for @mentions. Each one costs you two characters. While you are at it, urls cost you 5. Images cost you 10. Removes the benefit of shorter twitter handles, longer twitter handles doesn't fuck up what you are trying to say and, you can talk to multiple people in the same tweet.
- HorizonXP 11y agoI really like this idea.
- bishnu 11y agoTwitter is chasing growth. They are not adding this feature because the current user base demands it, they're adding it because they think they can use it to bring more people in.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoThough it should keep the current user base happy.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- zobzu 11y agoexactly :/ and its the kind of move you dont come back onto, argue upon for the next 5 to 10 years which either result in: - twitter becomes another FB/tumblr/medium/whatever. shareholders happy, money flows better, old twitter users gone. - twitter slowly dies while arguing it was a good choice and writing 10k letters of excuses Neither result interests me.
- randycupertino 11y ago"- twitter becomes another FB/tumblr/medium/whatever." It's it that already? How is it different/special? Seriously most of my friends on twitter just reblog the same exact stuff they post on instagram and facebook. They all seem analogous to me at this point.
- JBReefer 11y agoTwitter seems angrier and more prone to witchhunts than the others. Gamergate/Justine Sacco/whatever seem like they're more likely to happen when the boundary between chatting with friends and public statements is blurry. I feel like Twitter is not going to make it because it feels very hostile to _any_ beliefs. I'd bet that it will be seen as leading to Instagram/Medium/Weibo/whatever, much the same way that the BBSs led us to HN.
- randycupertino 11y ago
- lazyant 11y agoI don't undestand since you can insert pictures people use them to post long posts so what's the point of having limited number of characters? EDIT: or you can post a link to somewhere
- lazyant 11y agoI don't undestand since you can insert pictures people use them to post long posts so what's the point of having limited number of characters?
- hendzen 11y agoI guess Dorsey will finally get his revenge on Evan Williams.
- randycupertino 11y agoI'm out of the loop, can you fill me in? Did they have a falling out?
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoDear Twitter, People hate change. They really do. So if you're going to make a change, do it swiftly. Just yank that bandaid off. They'll get over it when the stinging stops. Yours, Everyone not whining about this.
- schnevets 11y agoTwitter wants to be Tumblr; They want to be an amalgamation of people's content, including photos, surveys, tweets, posts, and anything else people can come up with. I would definitely use the service more if longer text posts were allowed, but make sure you set them up as separate "entry" types. Tweets should be in large font, while text should be smaller, and maybe a different background color (and possibly filterable).
- zobzu 11y agotruth is, except for this single tweet, i just skip images-as-text. they're the minority. with the new twitter, making this a real thing, i suspect the amount of large messages will be enough that...i will skip twitter?
- jimmar 11y agoMost of the time when I see a tweet, it's when somebody takes a screenshot and posts it in a news article. It's been years since I've logged into twitter.com to sift through garbage looking for anything useful.
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- soyiuz 11y agoBasically he is saying "we allowed pictures, but now people are taking pictures of long texts, therefore we should lift the limit." The photos were a mistake in the first place! The path for Twitter is now to become a Facebook clone, without much differentiation (and with a smaller user base).
- seliopou 11y agoMost photos of text on Twitter are not original content. They're either a photo with no textual content (e.g., selfie), a photo of a twitter conversation (used as a form of archiving in case of deletion), or a photo of a physical text (used to quote a non-digital medium). If tweet-storms are aesthetically compatible with Jack Dorsey's denim collection, and a character limit isn't meant to replace them, then I don't see how the expanded character limit is addressing an existing problem for users. It's certainly not gonna replace textual photos.
- recursive 11y agoWhat definition of "original content" do selfies fail to meet?
- soyiuz 11y agoIs there room for a constrained text-only Twitter clone?
- ehudla 11y agoThey should auto-create a blog for you, when you create a long message (twitter.com/user/blog/), and only include the link to the blogpost in your twitter stream.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoPhotographs of text are not searchable. Twitter needs your tweets in text so that they can target ads at you and make money. If you want twitter to succeed as a business, you'll support the increase in text length.
- yggydrasily 11y ago"What if text was actually text?" Imagine if you traveled back in time to the 90s and showed this to someone and said this was coming from the CEO of two multi-billion dollar 21st century companies.
- a_shane 11y agoI'm actually in the process of updating my quote template for my content marketing services at the moment, and looking over it again it's basically a bunch of gibberish and nonsense that wouldn't have made sense when I was growing up. Weird.
- nhebb 11y agoThey should tier it. 140 characters for a free account. 280 characters for a cheap but paid ($) account. 1000 chars for a premium ($$$) account.
- krmmalik 11y agoIts interesting to see both responses to his tweet and the responses here. Pretty much everyone seems dead set against the idea. Personally i'm cautious about the implementation but im not against the idea. I post on FB far more than any other platform. It's not because I have more friends there. In fact I have more followers on twitter. Its simply because FB doesnt limit what I want to say. I completely get that brevity is a huge advantage. Honestly I do, but no matter how lean one is with one's words, there's only so much one can cram in. It's the only reason I dont post more to twitter. Heck i broadcast more out on Telegram than I do on twitter and i dont even have a large broadcast list. Yes, these problems can be solved with a blog but that introduces a new problem of distribution. Its far easier to get a large number of people to read your text on twitter than it is on a blog, even when you have a slick platform such as Medium. There's just too much thinking involved in something like that. A blog isn't something you write while you're jumping on the bus, but an extended tweet is something you might. I know for a fact I'd tweet more even if i had just a couple hundred more characters to play with. It doesnt need to be a huge change. As i said. It all comes down to how they choose to execute. This could potentially make or break twitter. Edit: sp/grammar
- test_account_ 11y agoThis is almost definitely not going to actually allow tweets to be any longer. My bet is that it manifests as some kind of text attachment. Just as you're currently able to attach images, video, and all sorts of random junk via 'cards', you'll now be able to attach a text post.