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Photos, videos, GIFs, polls, quotes no longer count toward your 140 characters
- biot 10y agoThe title is misleading. Actual text: "Rolling out now: photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters." Otherwise you could post a tweet with 141 URLs separated by 140 spaces, and only the spaces count.
- sctb 10y agoThanks, we updated the title from “URLs no longer count toward your 140 characters”. Unfortunately since the whole tweet doesn't fit in the title, we'll assume the features are sorted by importance.
- LukeB_UK 10y agoThe updated title is incorrect. Those features have been part of twitter before this, they just don't count towards the character limit anymore.
- sctb 10y agoThank you! Updated again.
- dbaupp 10y agoI think it is meant to parse as "[the hidden urls in] (photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and Quote Tweets) no longer count towards your limit", not "photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and (Quote Tweets no longer count towards your limit)", because those first 4 things have existed for a long time on twitter. The original title was only wrong because it is only a limited set of URLs that don't count, but the title implied all do not.
- kalms 10y agoCould have saved the Internet from a lot of useless traffic.
- agumonkey 10y agoThey should have 64c or less days. Just to motivate people to rethink their writing.
- zakfu 10y agohttps://this-is-my-really-long-tweet-that-gets-around-the-one-hundred-forty-character-limit-by-making-the-whole-message-a-url-now-that-urls-no-longer-count-toward-your-140-characters.com https://this-is-my-really-long-tweet-that-gets-around-the-on...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- trizic 10y agoSurely it has some hard cap, otherwise I can see this being abused (base64 dumps)
- andrewstuart2 10y agoNot sure what the appeal of inline base64 would be, though, over linking to a hosted file. Twitter is about sharing text, and arbitrarily long URLs mean mom and pop can achieve longer tweets by just adding http:// http:// and using dashes.
- Navarr 10y agonot really, considering it'll get truncated
- twic 10y agoApparently they still count data: URLs towards the limit.
- riboflava 10y agoWhat people actually do is write their long text, put it in an image, and tweet the image.
- spikej 10y agoHere's a way to do both: image and multiple tweets http://talltweets.com/ http://talltweets.com/
- dragonbonheur 10y agoMy personal opinion is that Twitter still sticking to 140 characters is stupid. If there is still an argument to be made for emergency services using SMS, I'd like to counter that they could implement an "emergency mode twitter" that reverts back to 140 characters in case there is an emergency and only in regions concerned by and adjacent to the occurence of said emergency. It's time they bump the character limit up to at least 512 characters.
- tedunangst 10y agoDoes twitter want more tweets or better tweets?
- dragonbonheur 10y agoQuality over quantity is almost always a more desirable trait. The real question is: Does Twitter want Weibo or Line to eat their lunch and dinner? Maybe it already happened and they're still asleep at the wheel.
- gnaritas 10y ago> Quality over quantity is almost always a more desirable trait. For the reader, but for the creators of content who largely rely on ads, quantity is far more desirable.
- brlewis 10y agoThat's my intuition too. I don't think even the makers of twitter expected it to be successful. But in hindsight, since most usage is consumption, the 140-character limit may actually be a killer feature, even though it irritates content producers. People like sound bites.
- mxuribe 10y agoI politely disagree. The vast majority of tweets are awful in communicating succinctly - even as sound bites. Most tweeters, when challenged with the 140-character wall, lack enough details.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jpalomaki 10y agoFor me the 140 character limit is a bit too little. Trying to squeeze my thoughts requires too much effort. Even a small increase to for example 200 characters would make a big difference.
- justincormack 10y agoIt is designed to revive the lost art of editing...
- LeoPanthera 10y agoNo it's not. It's designed to allow tweets to fit into a 160 char SMS along with the username.
- spudlyo 10y agoThis creative limitation forced folks to engage in pithy, and sometimes snarky commentary. It is both boon and burden.
- labster 10y agoWrite your tweets in a CJK language instead of one using a Latin character set: it's like getting 3 bytes for the price of one. Twitter is a much nicer platform in Japanese, as it gives the user plenty of space to state a complete thought.
- wineisfine 10y agoThey must have worked years on this "improvement".
- ramshorns 10y agoThis is similar to the improvement Facebook made when they added a few emotion buttons beside the like button. It's technically a pretty small change, but it affects what is seen as one of the core features of the website. What's Facebook? Oh yeah, that thing with the like button. What's Twitter? Right, it's that thing with the 140 characters. They must have spent a long time deciding whether it would be worth disrupting what made them popular in the first place to add a new feature. And in Twitter's case they probably also waited until single SMS messages were no longer really necessary.
- ocschwar 10y agoThe Internet was going to be an instrument for elevating discourse. Twitter turned it into the opposite with the 140 character limitation.
- Zikes 10y agoTwitter is not the Internet.
- redblacktree 10y agoIn fact, we're on the internet now, on a website that serves as an instrument for elevating discourse with its community standards!
- ocschwar 10y agoA web site whose influence is over a much smaller portion of the public.
- redblacktree 10y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ has impeccable standards and more than half a million subscribers, just as one other example.
- mxuribe 10y ago@ocschwar probably meant that twitter - being a single though admittedly big actor on the internet - didn't help in raising the level of discussion on the internet...At least that's what i interpreted.
- justinlardinois 10y agoWho at any point in the development of the internet ever expressed a goal to elevate discourse?
- kazinator 10y agoWhat is the meaning of the 140 limit if this and that doesn't count toward it? A 139 character message plus a 50 character uncounted URL won't pass through SMS. The 140 limit is from SMS. If you're going through SMS, meet the limit. If not, then chuck the limit, or pick another one. There is no way to rationalize any half assing like counting only these kinds of tokens or substrings in the message against a 140 limit but not others.
- tclancy 10y agoI suppose anyone still getting Twitter updates will notice the difference when their Danger Hiptop hasn't buzzed for hours.
- wodenokoto 10y agoThey allow 140 unicode characters, so you are a few years late with that SMS argument. The limit is there because that is what makes it micro blogging. It might have been invented for a different purpose, but it is a long time ago it was there for that.
- kazinator 10y agoSo it wouldn't be micro-blogging if it were .. a 192 character limit?
- Viper007Bond 10y agoSure, but 140 has become a defining attribute of the service. Now it's 140 with an asterisk, which is less of a change than a straight up length increase.
- cpeterso 10y agoI wonder how many systems, within Twitter and third-party API users, were broken by this change. I'm sure the 140 character limit is hardcoded, explicitly or implicitly, for things like buffer sizes or database schemas in tons of software.
- choward 10y agoThey do have a library that helps limit these types of issues: https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text https://github.com/twitter/twitter-text. However, it doesn't appear to be updated.
- smegel 10y agoMust be part of the Grand Vision. Or just someone tinkering with the controls hoping to avoid a crash.
- mxuribe 10y agoI can respect the cachet that twitter has had throughout the world, and the wonderful, positive things its platform has enabled...But honestly, this kind of improvement is so late in coming. Long ago, they should have raised the character limit...Now, I know some might reply with, "but historically SMS/texting limits to X characters only...". My response to this, is that twitter could have adjusted their platform to gracefully degrade. That is, if users can only tweet messages limited to 140 characters because of limits on their device or limits of their infrastructure of submission, then that should not stop other users - who do not have such limits - from tweeting longer messages. Some might feel my comment has the benefit of hindsight, but actually many, many users have said as much during Twitters early years. So I'm not disclosing anything revolutionary or new.
- kennydude 10y agoAt least they actually added this into the API this time https://www.hitchhq.com/twitter/activities/upcoming-changes-to-tweets-57dfb6557ab5cb2d63b136c4 https://www.hitchhq.com/twitter/activities/upcoming-changes-...