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I think the fact that Twitter made a name for itself by restricting the degree to which you can actually express your thoughts (by constraining response length)
by z1mm32m4n 9y ago
I think the fact that Twitter made a name for itself by restricting the degree to which you can actually express your thoughts (by constraining response length) doomed them.
It's far easier to be snarky and mean in 140 characters than it is to be rational and respectful.
- fattire 9y agoYou think, if only they were given more space, the trolls would suddenly find themselves unspinning their vitriol into coherent, well-expressed and thoughtful sentiment? Or would they just shit-talk with more words?
- santoshalper 9y agoOr just continue to be terse and shitty. Unless the also implemented a minimum, I don't see how raising the maximum would help very much. At least that has been my experience in forums for many years.
- gaius 9y agoby constraining response length To be fair to Twitter that wasn't a philosophical decision - 140 chars was what fit into the 160-char SMS protocol limit, with the remainder given over to their own layer.
- mort96 9y agoIt wasn't originally, but twitter over SMS hasn't been relevant for a long time now. They definitely would have gone away from the 140 char restriction if they thought it would have made their service better.
- gaius 9y agoIt wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they had char* msg = malloc(141); spread throughout their code still... Maybe they can't change it.
- Tuna-Fish 9y agoUnless that's a 32-bit char, that won't work. These days twitter allows 140 unicode codepoints, not 140 bytes. At it's worst, that's 560 bytes.
- brainfire 9y agoThere are exceptions now to the length rule - URLs don't count, @names don't count. I would guess that means they've ripped that code all out.
- mgalka 9y agoBeen on reddit or Youtube lately?
- flukus 9y agoYes, and IME they are a big step up from twitter, particularly Reddit.