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Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules
- teaneedz 10y agoRemoving the ".@" syntax is a mistake. I don't always want to broadcast replies. I still don't understand why URLs are still included within the 140 char limit either. Can someone explain that better than the article?
- alexizamerican 10y agoFrom the blog, replies aren't broadcasted. Only new tweets that use "@" are broadcasted.
- ecesena 10y agoUrls where fixed to 22, then 23, lately 24 chars. It's the length of the actual shortened url. I've been working with people helping social media for a bit, and one common issue in preparing a list of tweets to schedule is making sure the length is ok. So you end up with silly xls files where you have a url column, a text column, etc. and weird formulas to compute the size. I think Twitter just wants to simplify the life. You can send 140 chars of text/comment. Mentions, urls, images, etc. are not counted because normal people aren't counting like that.
- apetresc 10y agoHe was asking why URLs ARE still being counted as part of the length – Twitter seems to have excluded everything except for those. Your reply demonstrates how arbitrary that distinction is :)
- lutz 10y agoWhat they mean is that .@ isn't getting removed -- by default your replies won't be broadcast to everyone (same rules apply as always) -- but since you no longer see the leading @mentions, you physically cannot do .@ on the tweet. The right way to do it going forward will be a retweet on your own tweet.
- rochak 10y agoAbout damn time!
- fayimora 10y agoThe way I understand it, the 140 character limit still holds. They just stopped counting things like mentions and URLs.
- robmcm 10y agoBut if they didn't use a misleading title you wouldn't have clicked the link...
- Touche 10y agoIs it misleading to call a spade a spade? There's a character limit, they're just going to arbitrarily decide what is and isn't a character based on engagement feedback they get from advertisers.
- fayimora 10y agohaha I thought about that too. Clever but slightly misleading. Surely they could have come up with something true and equally attractive but then again it's the battle of "who gets the story out first"
- fayimora 10y agoWow I have been using Twitter since 08/09 and I never knew about the ".@" reply.
- jug 10y agoThere was nothing special to them though. Convention was just ".@user" but you could also have used "Hello @user!" The point was to force Twitter from treating it as a recipient-only message.
- t0mbstone 10y agoI almost completely ditched Twitter because I got sick of attempting to condense my thoughts into blurbs a toddler with ADD could understand. On twitter, I have thousands of followers and I'm lucky to get even one reply or mention. On Facebook, however, I have about 300 friends, and I can post an actual paragraph along with a photo or a video. I often get 30 likes and 20 comments on the posts. Facebook does a much better job of facilitating real conversations, and yet it still allows people to post 140 character blurbs (if they want to). I get it though. Twitter is what it is, and there are tons of people who love it. I'm not one of those people.
- donretag 10y ago"After all, Twitter is a great big, public conversational platform — the fact that you could follow chats between other users you cared about was part of its draw." Insane. For me it is the complete opposite. Having to read a personal conversation between two people is perhaps the primary reason I do not use Twitter. Far too much noise. And they should count hashtags as double (the other main reason why I cannot stand Twitter).
- giarc 10y agoIf you think twitter is bad for hashtags, I recommend staying away from Instagram.
- donretag 10y agoDo not use Instagram either, but for other reasons. :) I tried using Instagram. Downloaded the app and created an account. It promptly emailed everyone in my address book notifying them that I created an account. Deleted the app and my account. Never again.
- mettamage 10y agoSilly question perhaps (I'm a Twitterer): but can't you now do hacky things like @insert_complete_message_you_want_to_tell?
- AlphaNico 10y agoInteresting move toward the end of the 140 character limit. Let's see how it goes but I'm pretty sure people will still complain about the limitation, until they really ditch it...
- id122015 10y agoare bots going to be confused because there is no limit now ? or are they going to step up to the next level and write essays ?
- acaloiar 10y agoI get why this is news to many people, but when you get down to it, a company removed its own arbitrary limitation. It's really difficult to give a shit about such things. EDIT: I'm aware of the original reasoning for the limitation, so perhaps "arbitrary" is not the best adjective.
- tptacek 10y agoI don't know if this was the original Techcrunch title, but it is extraordinarily misleading. The proper title is the current article title: Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules
- dang 10y agoThanks, we restored the original title. Submitters: please do not rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please especially don't rewrite them to make them more misleading and linkbait. (Submitted title was "Twitter ditches 140 character limit".)
- Tomte 10y agoApropos character limits: maybe you could stop counting (2001) etc. towards the 80 character limit in submissions? Because a few times I have left out the year since I couldn't find a good shorter title, and then you added the year afterwards. I would have done that myself. :-)
- dang 10y agoWe can't get around that limit any more than you can! Currently the only thing that's allowed to exceed the limit is "[pdf]" but yes, it should probably include "(year)" and "[video]".
- detaro 10y agoofficial announcement: https://blog.twitter.com/express-even-more-in-140-characters https://blog.twitter.com/express-even-more-in-140-characters (running discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11761583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11761583)