8 ms·

>Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. The format is the entire point of twitter. It forces the condensation of thought.

>Let people pay $1/month to raise their limit to 280 characters per message. The format is the entire point of twitter. It forces the condensation of thought. Increasing the limit would fundamentally change the service.

andromeduck 10y ago
Then charge per character and ramp it up as it gets longer.
- gonzo 10y ago
  first 140 chars are free. 141st and subsequent costs $1 ea
- jpalomaki 10y ago
  This makes sense, although I would keep it simple and just offer for example normal and extended messages (max 280 char) with extended costing for example $0.10-$0.50/each. Condensing your thoughts to 140 characters takes effort. This would allow trading the effort to money. The per message fee would limit the usage of this feature, encouraging people to still keep things short and only use the extended feature when they really need it.
gregmac 10y ago
People already hack around this by posting images of text, or using several tweets (usually annotated with "1/" "2/" etc, or merely by replying to their own tweets). The images hurt accessibility, and the streams make it harder to share the discussion (which is partly the purpose of being a social app to begin with).
- euyyn 10y ago
  But doing it has friction, both for the writer and for the readers. If you remove the friction, you get more of it.
  - potatolicious 10y ago
    This feels like maybe a [citation required] thing. Facebook doesn't have any particular length limit on posts, and anecdotally vast screeds are quite rare on my feed, and most posts are pretty terse regardless. Is there data to suggest that people will just rant all the time if they're permitted to? [edit] Anecdotally, my current top 20 posts in my FB feed: 17 under 140 chars, 3 greater than 140 chars.
    - gnicholas 10y ago
      Does this include adding 23 chars for a link, and possibly also for images (which I think used to count as extra but no longer do)?
    - wila 10y ago
      We don't need twitter to be another facebook.
      - vickychijwani 10y ago
        Not sure why you've been down-voted. Twitter is so different from Facebook in terms of what it's primary use is, that it doesn't make sense to compare them, and while I wouldn't quite word my response this way, I agree with the sentiment that Facebook usage data doesn't tell us enough to predict Twitter usage under higher character limits.
    - euyyn 10y ago
      Nobody's arguing people will rant all the time. A lower frequency of longer texts is expected, even if Facebook didn't show it.
- westiseast 10y ago
  Yeah, plus what happens now is you get these almost garbled, code-like sentences with emojis, inB4 type abbreviations, truncated URLS, hashtags, @ references and its unreadable/unscannable. I would totally prefer a 140 character block where the hashtags, @references and links fell outside and I coukd parse the tweet more naturally.
  - VLM 10y ago
    Yet, the people who like it, like it, and changing it would mostly make them leave, and the people who don't like it already left for something else and aren't coming back. Its like daydreaming if the next version of Microsoft Word were reskinned EMACS with a new splash screen. Superficially that sounds pretty cool. But six months later everyone who wanted EMACS continued to use real EMACS and everyone who didn't want EMACS switched away from the MS Word clone of EMACS, leaving MS Word with zero users. That's twitter's problem, the people who are really into "twitter 2016" are just going to leave if things are changed, yet the number of people into "twitter 2016" is seen as too small. Perhaps their best bet is to abandon acting like a startup. Absolutely no one wants my local electric company to pivot into water and sewer services or open an office on Mars. There's nothing immoral or lower class about operating a respected public utility. What twitter should be terrified about isn't finding the next billion users, but avoiding the 1970s CB Radio bust or the decline of BBSes in the 90s. The odds are much higher that twitter is going to be out of business and forgotten in 20 years than they're going to be ten times bigger in size/revenue/profit. Essentially twitter is a fad or a utility or in between and has to be monetized as a fad or a utility.
dandare 10y ago
The very first Twitter clone I remember came up with the killer feature - infinitely long Tweets. How many times did I hear this dumb idea? It is not a sandwich, longer does not mean better! The scarce resource is not the number of electrons you send, the scarce resource is the attention of the reader.
- Godel_unicode 10y ago
  Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Answer cannot contain words "always", "traditional", or "nostalgia". There's a large distance between 140 and infinitely long.
  - aphextron 10y ago
    >Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Why are youtube videos mostly 5 to 7 minutes? Why are pop songs 3 minutes long? Why are sitcoms 30 minutes long? Forms of expression are defined by their constraints. I think of twitter's relationship to prose as analogous to a haiku.
    - Godel_unicode 10y ago
      > twitter's relationship to prose I think we read very different Twitters :)
      - nandemo 10y ago
        Oh, do you read a lot of poetry tweets?
    - snowwrestler 10y ago
      YouTube videos can be as long as you want. Songs can be as long as you want. TV shows can be as long as you want. You think you're arguing the value of constraints, but you're actually arguing that different media formats have different points of cultural optimization. If that's true, then is there any need to enforce an artificial length limit on tweets? If shorter, pithier tweets are better, then most tweets will be short and pithy--naturally.
theincredulousk 10y ago
Maybe holding this arbitrary line in the sand as if it were a commandment is why Twitter apparently needs to be "turned around". 280 characters isn't now extensive prose - it isn't fundamentally changing anything. It has been 10+ years and they are still losing a tremendous amount of money, I think it is time to lose the idealism if there is a win-win for users and revenue. At some point "condensed" thought just means reduced quality of communication. If some users want to say more, let them pay a dollar. I doubt users would be rattled to their core because some people can put two tweets in one. Bottom line, users don't care about what Twitter's agenda is regarding character limit. Nobody decided to use Twitter because they were excited about a 140 character limit, they use it in spite of the limit. Twitter should be focusing on what the "in spite of" reasons are, because those are the reasons that define the intrinsic value of their service, not the character limit. I believe most people use Twitter because it gives them the attention of an audience. If you can acquire the same size (or redundant, since most are on multiple platforms) audience elsewhere, then what reason is left for a user to tolerate any annoyance or quirk of the service?
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Well if it makes people just stop using Twitter then it hurts the one thing they have going for them, a big userbase.
  - toyg 10y ago
    As long as the previous mode remains free, I don't see people moving away.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      If what you liked was that everything was short but now it isn't maybe you'd just get on Facebook or whatever.
- tajen 10y ago
  Twitter is also a public discussion platform. It's a cog for democracy. But after the 140 limit, Twitter's other annoyance is how public your comments are. You can't remove them and you're extremely liable for them. Making them private (actually, that option exists) would make it look like Facebook, so it isn't the solution, and making them anonymous won't solve trolls. Liability on twitter currently doesn't prevent stupid people from harassing others, while a lot of clever people avoid using it because they understand the consequences of a mistake. That's pretty much the opposite of what we want. Twitter should think about reducing liability while moderating trolls better. A bit like on HN, where we have much less liability, but many more CEOs.
cortesoft 10y ago
Well, the original reason for the 140 character limit was because you could get tweets via SMS, which at the time had a character limit.
- theoh 10y ago
  Via a single SMS message. The size of SMS messages is still fixed at 160 characters, but now they can be transparently chained to send longer texts. This is quite unlike IP protocols which have much larger maximum packet sizes. Whether Twitter should ever have taken a cue from SMS is moot: apparently the Twitter creators were inspired by the way police and emergency services use radio, so terseness was an aesthetic choice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS
  - derefr 10y ago
    > apparently the Twitter creators were inspired by the way police and emergency services use radio, so terseness was an aesthetic choice. It'd be interesting to see a Twitter clone where people could only communicate in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code (i.e. a code + its predefined strongly-typed parameters.)
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    140 bytes to be more precise. An SMS client will cycle through 7-bit, 8-bit and UCS-2 encodings depending on the content, limiting the number of actual characters depending on the language. The last time I tested it aaages ago, Twitter didn't enforce the encoding-based limitations, and if you sent a 140 character tweet full of unicode, it would actually send you several concatenated SMS.
- xellisx 10y ago
  I would hate to have twitter SMS me.
- lazyjones 10y ago
  > because you could get tweets via SMS could? You still can: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170004 https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170004
pc86 10y ago
I haven't seen any evidence of thought on Twitter for a long time, condensed or otherwise.

andromeduck 10y ago

Then charge per character and ramp it up as it gets longer.

gonzo 10y ago
first 140 chars are free. 141st and subsequent costs $1 ea
jpalomaki 10y ago
This makes sense, although I would keep it simple and just offer for example normal and extended messages (max 280 char) with extended costing for example $0.10-$0.50/each. Condensing your thoughts to 140 characters takes effort. This would allow trading the effort to money. The per message fee would limit the usage of this feature, encouraging people to still keep things short and only use the extended feature when they really need it.

gregmac 10y ago

People already hack around this by posting images of text, or using several tweets (usually annotated with "1/" "2/" etc, or merely by replying to their own tweets). The images hurt accessibility, and the streams make it harder to share the discussion (which is partly the purpose of being a social app to begin with).

euyyn 10y ago
But doing it has friction, both for the writer and for the readers. If you remove the friction, you get more of it.
- potatolicious 10y ago
  This feels like maybe a [citation required] thing. Facebook doesn't have any particular length limit on posts, and anecdotally vast screeds are quite rare on my feed, and most posts are pretty terse regardless. Is there data to suggest that people will just rant all the time if they're permitted to? [edit] Anecdotally, my current top 20 posts in my FB feed: 17 under 140 chars, 3 greater than 140 chars.
  - gnicholas 10y ago
    Does this include adding 23 chars for a link, and possibly also for images (which I think used to count as extra but no longer do)?
  - wila 10y ago
    We don't need twitter to be another facebook.
    - vickychijwani 10y ago
      Not sure why you've been down-voted. Twitter is so different from Facebook in terms of what it's primary use is, that it doesn't make sense to compare them, and while I wouldn't quite word my response this way, I agree with the sentiment that Facebook usage data doesn't tell us enough to predict Twitter usage under higher character limits.
  - euyyn 10y ago
    Nobody's arguing people will rant all the time. A lower frequency of longer texts is expected, even if Facebook didn't show it.
westiseast 10y ago
Yeah, plus what happens now is you get these almost garbled, code-like sentences with emojis, inB4 type abbreviations, truncated URLS, hashtags, @ references and its unreadable/unscannable. I would totally prefer a 140 character block where the hashtags, @references and links fell outside and I coukd parse the tweet more naturally.
- VLM 10y ago
  Yet, the people who like it, like it, and changing it would mostly make them leave, and the people who don't like it already left for something else and aren't coming back. Its like daydreaming if the next version of Microsoft Word were reskinned EMACS with a new splash screen. Superficially that sounds pretty cool. But six months later everyone who wanted EMACS continued to use real EMACS and everyone who didn't want EMACS switched away from the MS Word clone of EMACS, leaving MS Word with zero users. That's twitter's problem, the people who are really into "twitter 2016" are just going to leave if things are changed, yet the number of people into "twitter 2016" is seen as too small. Perhaps their best bet is to abandon acting like a startup. Absolutely no one wants my local electric company to pivot into water and sewer services or open an office on Mars. There's nothing immoral or lower class about operating a respected public utility. What twitter should be terrified about isn't finding the next billion users, but avoiding the 1970s CB Radio bust or the decline of BBSes in the 90s. The odds are much higher that twitter is going to be out of business and forgotten in 20 years than they're going to be ten times bigger in size/revenue/profit. Essentially twitter is a fad or a utility or in between and has to be monetized as a fad or a utility.

dandare 10y ago

The very first Twitter clone I remember came up with the killer feature - infinitely long Tweets. How many times did I hear this dumb idea? It is not a sandwich, longer does not mean better! The scarce resource is not the number of electrons you send, the scarce resource is the attention of the reader.

Godel_unicode 10y ago
Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Answer cannot contain words "always", "traditional", or "nostalgia". There's a large distance between 140 and infinitely long.
- aphextron 10y ago
  >Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280? Why are youtube videos mostly 5 to 7 minutes? Why are pop songs 3 minutes long? Why are sitcoms 30 minutes long? Forms of expression are defined by their constraints. I think of twitter's relationship to prose as analogous to a haiku.
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    > twitter's relationship to prose I think we read very different Twitters :)
    - nandemo 10y ago
      Oh, do you read a lot of poetry tweets?
  - snowwrestler 10y ago
    YouTube videos can be as long as you want. Songs can be as long as you want. TV shows can be as long as you want. You think you're arguing the value of constraints, but you're actually arguing that different media formats have different points of cultural optimization. If that's true, then is there any need to enforce an artificial length limit on tweets? If shorter, pithier tweets are better, then most tweets will be short and pithy--naturally.

theincredulousk 10y ago

Maybe holding this arbitrary line in the sand as if it were a commandment is why Twitter apparently needs to be "turned around". 280 characters isn't now extensive prose - it isn't fundamentally changing anything. It has been 10+ years and they are still losing a tremendous amount of money, I think it is time to lose the idealism if there is a win-win for users and revenue. At some point "condensed" thought just means reduced quality of communication. If some users want to say more, let them pay a dollar. I doubt users would be rattled to their core because some people can put two tweets in one. Bottom line, users don't care about what Twitter's agenda is regarding character limit. Nobody decided to use Twitter because they were excited about a 140 character limit, they use it in spite of the limit. Twitter should be focusing on what the "in spite of" reasons are, because those are the reasons that define the intrinsic value of their service, not the character limit. I believe most people use Twitter because it gives them the attention of an audience. If you can acquire the same size (or redundant, since most are on multiple platforms) audience elsewhere, then what reason is left for a user to tolerate any annoyance or quirk of the service?

emodendroket 10y ago
Well if it makes people just stop using Twitter then it hurts the one thing they have going for them, a big userbase.
- toyg 10y ago
  As long as the previous mode remains free, I don't see people moving away.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    If what you liked was that everything was short but now it isn't maybe you'd just get on Facebook or whatever.
tajen 10y ago
Twitter is also a public discussion platform. It's a cog for democracy. But after the 140 limit, Twitter's other annoyance is how public your comments are. You can't remove them and you're extremely liable for them. Making them private (actually, that option exists) would make it look like Facebook, so it isn't the solution, and making them anonymous won't solve trolls. Liability on twitter currently doesn't prevent stupid people from harassing others, while a lot of clever people avoid using it because they understand the consequences of a mistake. That's pretty much the opposite of what we want. Twitter should think about reducing liability while moderating trolls better. A bit like on HN, where we have much less liability, but many more CEOs.

cortesoft 10y ago

Well, the original reason for the 140 character limit was because you could get tweets via SMS, which at the time had a character limit.

theoh 10y ago
Via a single SMS message. The size of SMS messages is still fixed at 160 characters, but now they can be transparently chained to send longer texts. This is quite unlike IP protocols which have much larger maximum packet sizes. Whether Twitter should ever have taken a cue from SMS is moot: apparently the Twitter creators were inspired by the way police and emergency services use radio, so terseness was an aesthetic choice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenated_SMS
- derefr 10y ago
  > apparently the Twitter creators were inspired by the way police and emergency services use radio, so terseness was an aesthetic choice. It'd be interesting to see a Twitter clone where people could only communicate in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_code (i.e. a code + its predefined strongly-typed parameters.)
- kalleboo 10y ago
  140 bytes to be more precise. An SMS client will cycle through 7-bit, 8-bit and UCS-2 encodings depending on the content, limiting the number of actual characters depending on the language. The last time I tested it aaages ago, Twitter didn't enforce the encoding-based limitations, and if you sent a 140 character tweet full of unicode, it would actually send you several concatenated SMS.
xellisx 10y ago
I would hate to have twitter SMS me.
lazyjones 10y ago
> because you could get tweets via SMS could? You still can: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170004 https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170004

pc86 10y ago

I haven't seen any evidence of thought on Twitter for a long time, condensed or otherwise.