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Twitter is useful as a type of news source, and way to be notified about certain important events in noteworthy people's lives, and organizations, but for any k

Twitter is useful as a type of news source, and way to be notified about certain important events in noteworthy people's lives, and organizations, but for any kind of actual human-to-human interaction it's correct that twitter is absolutely worthless. You're essentially muzzled and will be misunderstood the majority of the time, because everyone expects sarcasm and hate from everyone else, even when it isn't there. All they have to do to fix Twitter is make the 140ch limit text become the 'headline text' and then allow each post to have an unlimited (or very long) length 'body part' that you can see IF you choose to click on it, to read the whole thing. The other thing they need is to make it threaded for conversation so that each node has a parent node, so that to 'reply' to a node you make a 'child' node, under what you're replying to. HN does this to some decent extend. I've done this in my own side-project meta64.com app, but meta64 is not open for business yet so don't go there and then complain that it's not finished/working.

acjohnson55 10y ago
I totally agree with the expandable tweet. Down with the indexed tweet-essay! Down with having to quote blocks of text with screenshots! Unfortunately, the overwhelming sentiment appears to be that posts over 140 chars would "kill the platform", as though it's some kind of pristine thing today.
- ClayFerguson 10y ago
  The 140ch thing was a gimmic that made twitter go viral. That's all it was. It wasn't even an innovation. Limiting text is certainly no innovation. Twitter is afraid to change it, because it's the very thing that made them different to the point where they did go viral. But it has become so widely used by now that the 140ch limit has become a massive pain in the ass for all of humanity (due to it's pervasiveness) and needs to be changed, BADLY. They are embarrassing themselves and making fools of humanity with everyone becoming expert at abbreviating, and living with the stupid morass.
  - specialist 10y ago
    You probably already know that 140 char limit was a SMS medium restriction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob It may have made sense to honor the 140 char limit so long as TXTMOB/Twitter served as a SMS gateway, router, aggregator, whatever. But Twitter abandoned that notion early on.
    - ClayFerguson 10y ago
      No I didn't know the 140 thing was from SMS. I just remember everybody talking about how ground-breaking it was at the time. Software developers tend to all agree Twitter was never an admirable technology but merely a gimmick that went viral.

acjohnson55 10y ago

I totally agree with the expandable tweet. Down with the indexed tweet-essay! Down with having to quote blocks of text with screenshots! Unfortunately, the overwhelming sentiment appears to be that posts over 140 chars would "kill the platform", as though it's some kind of pristine thing today.

ClayFerguson 10y ago
The 140ch thing was a gimmic that made twitter go viral. That's all it was. It wasn't even an innovation. Limiting text is certainly no innovation. Twitter is afraid to change it, because it's the very thing that made them different to the point where they did go viral. But it has become so widely used by now that the 140ch limit has become a massive pain in the ass for all of humanity (due to it's pervasiveness) and needs to be changed, BADLY. They are embarrassing themselves and making fools of humanity with everyone becoming expert at abbreviating, and living with the stupid morass.
- specialist 10y ago
  You probably already know that 140 char limit was a SMS medium restriction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXTMob It may have made sense to honor the 140 char limit so long as TXTMOB/Twitter served as a SMS gateway, router, aggregator, whatever. But Twitter abandoned that notion early on.
  - ClayFerguson 10y ago
    No I didn't know the 140 thing was from SMS. I just remember everybody talking about how ground-breaking it was at the time. Software developers tend to all agree Twitter was never an admirable technology but merely a gimmick that went viral.