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Giving you more characters
- aleksanb 9y agoLuckily the demoscene graphics showcase platform https://www.dwitter.net https://www.dwitter.net still enforces the 140 character limit! Keepon making those webgl canvas graphics!
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoAnd let's not forget http://tinytocs.org http://tinytocs.org, a CS journal whose article bodies must fit into 140 characters.
- jsnathan 9y agoI'm not sure what to make of this. I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc? Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it. I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 140 characters that matters, it's also all the other times when people don't feel social pressure to write up longer, perhaps more thoughtful messages, that's important here.
- Shank 9y agoRemember that the 140 count was based on SMS (160 total, giving 20 for the handle and a colon). It wasn't a randomly picked number.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sorenjan 9y agoI don't use Twitter myself, but I think the reason behind the limit is that SMS can send 140 bytes in each message. When sending regular text messages a 7-bit alphabet is usually used, for 160 characters in total.
- kristianc 9y agoThe SMS limit was decided when an engineer working for German Telecom decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences. Twitter based their limit on the SMS limit (140 + user address).
- avar 9y agoExcluding the username from the 140 character limit was only changed this year: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-character-limit http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-character-limit
- adrusi 9y agoThat's not what is meant. Twitter was originally an SMS service, which would text you whenever someone you followed posted a tweet. In order for you to be able to tell who had posted each tweet, the message had to contain the poster's username. This is distinct from the username of whoever they were replying to.
- cesarb 9y ago> decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences From what I heard, the SMS limit was actually a protocol limitation: it piggybacks on signaling messages, which have a small size limit (this is also why SMS can sometimes work even when everything else doesn't). Quoting from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS): "Messages are sent with the MAP MO- and MT-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signaling protocol to precisely 140 bytes (140 bytes * 8 bits / byte = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet, the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS-2 alphabet. Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual short message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters."
- joelrunyon 9y agoIt also correlates to the # of characters Google allows in it's headlines. It's worth noting that there is something to the # of characters a human can scan & understand without turning it's full focus to it.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y agoCan you explain what you mean by this? If you're talking about the 'title' of each search result, it looks like it's capped at a way lower number of characters than that.
- joelrunyon 9y agoThe total number of characters in an ad is 130(ish). 25 for title 35 for line 1 35 for line 2 35 for display url 130 characters total.
- scbrg 9y agoFor what it's worth, your message required a lot more attention from me than it would have, if you had used the word "number" rather than the strange glyph "#". I guess you were doing this with some sort of meta humour because the story is about twitter, but the point was inversed. Your attempt to abbreviate things to make them more legible, made them less so. The lesson above applies, incidentally, to pretty much everything twitter.
- joelrunyon 9y agoI'm sorry to inconvenience your day.
- scbrg 9y agoWell, apologies. I got the impression that your argument was that you make a messages easier to understand by shortening them. I just gave you a concrete example of when a message got harder to understand because it was shortened. But good job on deliberately missing the point as a discussion strategy. That too, was very twitter of you.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 9y ago> the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition It was related to the core of their value proposition when that was “microblogging that can be updated and recieved over SMS”. Now, its just legacy.
- orblivion 9y agoThings fall into place by accident. I'd say there's no telling what would happen. Imagine what this is going to do to president Trump. His short quips had a striking impact. He'll never again need to end a message with the one word sentence "JOBS!"
- jsnathan 9y agoI feel like the core value proposition is something like "public expressions that can be consumed quickly and produced with little forethought". I think it's important that Twitter gives you the excuse to be less precise: there isn't enough space. It's a small thing sure, but if you look at the differences between the popular social platforms, it's all about small differences. If Twitter loses that which distinguishes it from everyone else, that may give them an initial boost when it's a new feature, but then the novelty will wear off and maybe they will have lost what makes them unique. I'd like to compare this to Hollywood. It feels like the kind of alteration a studio might come up with by relentlessly screen-testing a movie using test audiences. It's one way to guarantee a bland, non-specific result, that won't command any lasting mindshare. Clearly moving from 140 characters to 280 characters isn't yet that just-like-everything-else end result, but it somehow feels like a step in that direction to me.
- glenstein 9y agoI agree with you that the 140 is iconic and it's probably not a good idea to abandon it. What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures. That way you don't lose the iconic 140 characters thing, and you don't have any problem to solve by making weird compromises where the user names or media URLs don't count toward the 140, blurring the lines of what 140 means and losing the "creativity loves constraints" factor.
- tajen 9y agoAnd reversely, it's incredibly creative for Trump to attempt to fit the entire USA diplomacy in 140 characters.
- endless1234 9y ago>What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures. Indeed, especially as people have been already doing this by sharing longer posts as pictures of text
- rayalez 9y agoArticles with good titles/descriptions/images are already beautifully embedded as cards. So having a medium(or any other) blog that automatically posts links to twitter is the perfect solution to this, I think.
- refrigerator 9y ago> the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it. I had similar thoughts when Snapchat started introducing their (now many) non-ephemeral features, but I was proved wrong at every turn.
- macspoofing 9y ago>it's at the core of their value proposition Is it?
- craftyguy 9y agoMy first thought is that this guy is going to have to buy a lot more paper now: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/3/28/15102170/donald-trump-tweets-robot-burning-twitter https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/3/28/15102170/donald-trum...
- xenadu02 9y agoJapanese/Chinese only “fit” in 140 because of the way they count “characters”. 280 for alphabetic languages seems roughly equivalent.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoA Chinese character is much more dense than two roman letters. When I was texting in china during the SMS phase, I got around 16 or maybe 20 characters before it was broken into extra messages.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago…huh? It should be able to fit 70 characters (70 UCS-2 characters is 140 bytes, which is the SMS message limit).
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoNo way. Maybe someone Chinese knows the limit better, but I definitely couldn't send a 70 character message without it having been broken up into 3 or 4 texts.
- betterunix2 9y agoIn the interest of being fair, let's compare bytes: 日日是好日 (15 bytes) Every day is a good day (23 bytes) It's not just how one counts "characters;" some languages are written more compactly than others. I would not be surprised if Hebrew is also a bit more compact than English, as it is typically written without vowels.
- buf 9y agohttps://twitter.com/_buf/status/912791999706738688 https://twitter.com/_buf/status/912791999706738688
- ppod 9y agoIn an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you. When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe. The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel
- why-el 9y agoBeautiful and prophetic. Thanks for sharing.
- lossolo 9y agoReally powerful text. Can't remember when last time couple of words touched me like those.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoMay I suggest this reading of a Charles Bukowski poem. It's helped me to get out of bed a number of times, when the days look so foreboding. http://youtu.be/yVisTfbVSFE http://youtu.be/yVisTfbVSFE
- drworm 9y agoYou may also be interested in this excellent Bukowski poem, with a beautiful matching video: https://vimeo.com/26946995 https://vimeo.com/26946995
- bostonpete 9y agoI was disappointed to find this poem didn't have exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words.
- auvi 9y agoPeter Theil once said "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters". Looks like that 140 characters limit have now doubled.
- tzakrajs 9y agoPeter Theil says lots of things.
- notfromhere 9y agomany of them very dumb
- huntermonk 9y agoPeter Thiel also said that
- aarestad 9y agoAll of Twitter has immediately gone for the "I would rather have no Nazis" joke.
- georgestephanis 9y agoHere comes the shark jump! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4ZGKI8vpcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4ZGKI8vpcg
- nafey 9y agoThat's a bold move by Twitter. I can't help but feel it is out of desperation
- tytytytytytytyt 9y agoThat's not bold by any definition of the word I know...
- ikeyany 9y agoMeaning it's bold of them to admit they're so out of ideas, they're willing to end the only thing that made them unique.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoSome might even call it 'courageous'.
- elmigranto 9y ago#courage
- sgk284 9y agoEx-twitter eng here. Twitter has been debating this change internally for at least 5 years now. They were afraid to pull the trigger because no one inside knows why they've had the success that they've had and they're afraid to change too much (lest they pull a Digg). This move isn't made out of desperation, but it's probably being done right now because they've nothing to lose by randomly trying things.
- jochung 9y agoIsn't it obvious? Twitter is a dopamine pump combined with a misunderstanding machine that has gamified the cult of personality. Familiar readers feel a reward for their constant interpretive skimming of aborted thoughts, outsiders project the worst kind of interpretation to feel superior, as it automatically turns everything you post into a shareable post card with your face on it.
- Kenji 9y agoWith the ever dropping attention spans of people, one would think they'd rather go down to 70 characters per tweet.
- thebiglebrewski 9y agoLmao. This isn't what's going to save Twitter.
- agumonkey 9y agoReading the 280 test page feels odd. It kills the instantaneous feel of 140chars. The 280 ones feel like engaging a different part of your brain. I think they should try to allow easier creation and reading of "thread" (when one user starts a long stream, while keeping the 140 char base.
- notatoad 9y agoapparently they're working on a built-in threading tool: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-button/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-button/
- a1371 9y ago280 would be the absolute maximum. I think their hope is that the number of English tweets that reach that amount is very low; at the same time they allow users to tweet easier.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nradov 9y agoAnd in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images containing large blocks of text which is worse for everyone than just removing length limits.
- hk__2 9y ago> And in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images containing large blocks of text The blog post explains how that’s not true with their Japanese example: > Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese. If Japanese people feel they have enough space to write their thoughts, why wouldn’t the English ones with a bit more space?
- nradov 9y agoThe point is that their analysis is garbage. They looked at the length of tweets, and what percentage of tweets hit the 140 character limit. But the reality is that users impacted by the limit either send multiple tweets (1/n, 2/n, ... n/n) or attach an image containing a block of text. How do you measure that?
- betterunix2 9y agoMultiple tweets or attaching an image of a block of text are both annoying for users. If in one language users are more likely to be annoyed than in another, why not fix the problem?
- misterbowfinger 9y agoThe analysis was really interesting. I wonder if there's cultural bias as well - i.e. English speakers tend to be more verbose because we have a need to speak more
- netsharc 9y agoHah, in Japanese and Chinese a lot of words are single characters. To use your post as an example, "analysis", "really", and "interesting" will probably be one character each, they're several UTF-8 bytes, but Twitter counts those still as single characters...
- looki 9y agoIn Japanese those three words could be translated as 分析、本当に、面白い respectively, 8 characters in total - i.e. the same length as just "analysis" in English.
- mozumder 9y agoExternal links shouldn't also take any characters in Twitter. It should be a separate data field, like images are right now. Also, I'm not sure why there isn't a separate expanded post field as well. Use the twitter feed for your headlines to a post.
- gallerdude 9y agoThis seems rash. I feel like you should have to select something in order to have a 280 character tweet. I think the reason Twitter has worked is because of the constraints and the creativity working around said constraints. By opting everyone in immediately, I feel there may be some culture shock.
- buttscicles 9y agoWhich is why they aren't doing that... "Although we feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change will have, we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone" I feel like this could be a good change, looking forward to seeing how it goes either way.
- sushid 9y agoCulture shock? You can just write a bit more now. It's not like people haven't used embedded images or (1/n) tweetstorms to bypass this issue. It's not like they switched the scrolling from vertical to horizontal or something.
- trjordan 9y agoGood. Twitter needs to keep moving forward. There have been several features that feel like the core of their platform, but based on their revenue growth, they may be holding them back. Personally, eh, 280-length tweets feel weird and long and I don't see the need, but I'll probably get over it. If they can change how Twitter is used open up new audiences and conversations, this is good. They are trying something big, and that is Good.
- yssrn 9y agoThe character limit is a core aspect of what makes consuming content on Twitter so engaging vs. other platforms. Will this change improve engagement number or ad revenue? I sincerely doubt it. An actual useful change would be versioning functionality so that users can edit tweets to correct typos or factual errors while not erasing the record.
- riffic 9y agoTwitter will not implement the ability to edit tweets. tweet text being immutable is one of their data model core tenets: https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-editing-a-tweet-after-being-posted-to-the-timeline/answer/Raffi-Krikorian?srid=uMEx https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-...
- peterarmstrong 9y agoThis type of announcement needs to come from the CEO, not a product manager.
- hk__2 9y agoThis is an experiment with a small group of users; it’s not affecting everyone.
- r3bl 9y agoHuh, I am in that group, and I have no clue how I got there, why, nor how do I get out. Proof I guess: https://twitter.com/r3bl_/status/912800305833799686 https://twitter.com/r3bl_/status/912800305833799686
- mypalmike 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing
- robinhood 9y agoProduct managers execute the vision of the CEO and the company in general. Why do you think they don't deserve to announce something major?
- peterarmstrong 9y agoBecause this is more important than something you delegate. It's the biggest change to the company since the company was created. It's not like Twitter does 10 products, and it's like "bring Phil up to talk about this one". This is Twitter. If it was discussing random licensing deals with the NFL, fine, you can, and probably should, delegate that in order to signal its relative importance. But for this to be treated like something of that magnitude is wrong.
- JamesBaxter 9y agoPresumably there are going to be a lot of broken 3rd party plugins on people’s sites(design wise at a minimum). Should there have been more of a warning period?
- gruez 9y ago>Presumably there are going to be a lot of broken 3rd party plugins on people’s sites even worse, buffer overflows
- billmalarky 9y agoSeems like one possible solution is to increase the character limit, but also increase the "pain" a user has to go through to use the additional characters (my ghetto solution would be to use a captcha to unlock the higher char limit). That way people would only use the additional chars if they really needed them, reducing noise from otherwise unnecessarily long tweets.
- cwkoss 9y ago"Watch this 30-second ad to expand your character limit by 30 characters for this tweet!"
- billmalarky 9y agoAnything to disincentivize casual use of the huge limit.
- fairpx 9y ago> Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain. When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's blog. The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy. Then came the bots and the spammers and the place got ruined. Twitter has a bunch of problems, but the 140 characters isn't one of them.
- dorfsmay 9y agoBut then people tweet pics of text!
- notatoad 9y agoI really wish twitter had stuck to their guns on their previous solution to this: a built-in tool to post longer text blocks as embeds inside tweets, just like people post images of text right now, but essentially "text of text" instead of images of text. But everybody lost their shit when twitter proposed that, so now we get 280char tweets instead.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy. I think most people view “have to do a bit of puzzling” as opposed to, rather than supporting, being “read worthy”. Terse stops being valuable when it goes beyond concise (as brief as possible while still clearly conveying intended meaning.) The 140 character limit was an artifact of Twitter being designed to be usable over SMS in an era of ubiquitous SMS-equipped phones before smartphones were themselves ubiquitous.
- 1ris 9y agoI agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter. But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it. The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitter is aswell a tool to share simplistic ideas with people that already agree with you. If the content is better, it's pictures of text and 12 tweets in a row. Right now it seems you have to fight the platform if you want to post something good. Not sure if 280 solves it, but it might become more useful, as it still restricts verboseness. And the aim of twitter should be to be usefull, rather than twitter. As being twitter does not earn them any money. /edit: 1) I feel german "grime twitter", a buch a trolls being extremists of all flavors insulting people with way too much ego is the best part. It's like 4chan, with less racism and slightly more grown up. And it is, as you can image, toxic garbage. And that's the best part in my view.
- nothis 9y agoAny reason not to simplify that measure and make it 280 chars for all? They might not use it in Japan but what's the point of limiting them if they apparently don't use the space anyway?
- bradjohnson 9y agoForcing brevity is the whole point of twitter. They've found that they are limiting the English twitter with 140 characters, but 140 characters seems to be working well for Japanese.
- nickthemagicman 9y agoThe new character count feels like they arbitrarily just doubled it. Like Gob Bluth made this decision to be a better CEO than Michael. "Oh yeah Michael I'm taking your 140 characters and DOUBLING IT!"
- secfirstmd 9y agoI'll be impressed with Twitter when they actually show they care about the security and safety of their users by implemented end to end encryption for their DMs...
- mintplant 9y agoMastodon [0] has a default character limit of 500, which individual instances can turn up or down as they see fit (Mastodon is a federated network). Hundreds of thousands of people use it and the social dynamics work just fine, or even better, with the additional breathing room for expression. To me Twitter's attachment to such a low cap feels like an anachronism. [0] https://joinmastodon.org https://joinmastodon.org
- UberActivist 9y agoI've been using it for about 2 weeks now and I love it. If you pick a cool instance related to your interests and toot to your liking, you often get responses almost instantly from people reading the local and federated timelines, and you get tons of new people to follow as well. It just feels so much more open to meeting new people than Twitter does.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoVery cool but too nerdy. Visiting that site requires clicking "Get Started" which then directs you to a list of instances, from which you choose a server and sign up (not sure because in the age of 140 chars don't have the attention span to follow through). Without doing that there's no content short of a bunch of reasons why Mastodon is open and free, but the average user doesn't care about that. It's kind of preaching to the choir which means that the choir is gonna dominate it. Maybe the goal isn't mass adoption, or maybe adoption would be a long term result of smaller communities getting popular, but wish it'd just get to the product a lot quicker than it does.
- mintplant 9y agoYou could point people to https://mastodon.social https://mastodon.social, the "flagship" instance, or directly to any other instance's homepage. There's something of a word-of-mouth aspect here, in that instances targeted toward particular communities can be more attractive to people within those communities than general-purpose social networks. There's an instance chooser wizard at https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/, but I can see someone looking at that and calling it too complicated as well.
- dboreham 9y agoInnovation!
- slg 9y agoIt is clear that people want to use Twitter to say things longer than 140 characters as the rise in popularity of long threaded Tweets would attest. It is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their iconic 140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform.
- hk__2 9y ago> It is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their iconic 140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform. They don’t: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-button/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-button/
- slg 9y agoOne of those options was announced publicly with an official blog post and one of them was slipped into an app unannounced likely as part of a/b testing. Maybe they eventually implement both, but at this moment their preference between the two is clear.
- hk__2 9y ago> One of those options was announced publicly with an official blog post and one of them was slipped into an app unannounced likely as part of a/b testing. Both of them are currently being tested on a limited group of users; but that’s true only one got a blog post.
- mbillie1 9y agoGood, I hope this spells the death of this horrifying product.
- robtaylor 9y ago@Jack said "Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!" https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824 https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824 How many people did it take to come up with double a char limit, and how is that 'thoughtful' or 'solving' anything? Total guff. The start of the end of twitter hashtag hottake.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoHey man, Jack's been putting in 23 hour days for the last seven years to make this happen. Not cool to mock his effort. But seriously that Tweet shows the usefulness. For them not to have tried it until now shows how scared they are to make any real changes. 1) Guess 2) this 3) doesn't 4) fix 5) this 6) nonsense? Those comments are absolute youtube quality cancer though. Goddamn tragedy that this is the pinnacle of human discourse right now. These are the first five replies to that tweet: Near deGrasse Tyson @DrNeilTyson 1h1 hour ago Replying to @jack I will reserve my full response until I get 280 characters but this is a slap in the face to everyone harmed by your lax governance 1 reply 15 retweets 109 likes Near deGrasse Tyson @DrNeilTyson 57m57 minutes ago Your platform has been co-opted and manipulated, turned into a megaphone for hate and propaganda. 3 replies 20 retweets 154 likes Near deGrasse Tyson @DrNeilTyson 56m56 minutes ago Your response? Remove the last filter forcing careful selection of words. This makes Twitter boring without making room for real thought. 4 replies 14 retweets 107 likes Near deGrasse Tyson @DrNeilTyson 55m55 minutes ago And yet again, another surface-level tweak that fails to deal with the rot inside this community. 1 reply 10 retweets 82 likes Near deGrasse Tyson @DrNeilTyson 54m54 minutes ago You have failed signally in your responsibilities to your users, investors, and frankly to all of humanity. Thanks, Jack. What a weird platform.
- leeoniya 9y agohttps://twitter.com/badastronomer/status/747503673882746880?lang=en https://twitter.com/badastronomer/status/747503673882746880?...
- 9y ago
- rsrsrs86 9y agoYou need entropy not length!
- logicallee 9y ago> For example, when I (author's name) Tweet in English, I quickly run into the 140 character limit and have to edit my Tweet down so it fits. ... sparing all your readers that reading time. The whole post doesn't mention reading time once. Doesn't that matter too?
- iagooar 9y agoI like it. Will reduce the amount of 1 out of X tweets from the same person. It will allow tweets to become quite a bit more expressive, without becoming Facebook-like novels. And hey, when Twitter doesn't try new stuff, people complain. When Twitter does, they complain as well. PS: This post would perfectly fit in a next-gen tweet ;)
- ramshorns 9y agoYour PS is a statement whose existence makes itself false. Kind of like "This page intentionally left blank."
- Havoc 9y agoAh good, maybe Trump will make more fleshed out policy decisions now.
- orblivion 9y agoThey should make Chinese, Japanese and Korean tweets shorter instead.
- SquareWheel 9y agoLots of cynicism around here. For me, the 140 character limit really was very frustrating. I tweet rarely, but when I do I often spend 2-3 minutes trying to fit the message into the character limit. Often I just abandon it completely because there's no way to make it fit without having to send multiple messages. This change seems completely reasonable to me, if not a bit delayed.
- phailhaus 9y agoI don't know...the 140 character limit forced you to be creative in how you condensed your thoughts, but it also provided an easy-to-consume stream of content for readers. My fear is that by doubling the limit, that stream is going to take more effort to consume and lose its differentiation from Facebook.
- betterunix2 9y ago数千字で書く方が、二十六字だけで書く方より効率的だ。(26 characters) Writing with thousands of characters is more efficient than writing with just 26. (82 characters) I admit my Japanese is not so great, and the comparison is somewhat unfair because of the subtleties of counting the characters. Still, the point here is that Twitter is more constrained in some languages than in others. If people are not having the problem you described in China or Japan maybe the problem is not too terrible...
- phailhaus 9y agoMaybe. I already saw someone post a heated reply to one of Trump's tweets, and the 280 character limit made it read more like a mini-essay. Seeing a whole feed of that would make me even less likely to read Twitter, because it would look just like Facebook.
- onion2k 9y agoMaking people stop and think, and sometimes abandon what they were going to say, is a really good aspect of Twitter.
- mwcmitchell 9y agothis basically reads as: "We didn't grow at all last quarter, but things here at Twitter are A-OKAY (please belive us)! We can still grow, all we need to do is destroy/modify the one thing that made us unique and successful!"
- hk__2 9y agoIf the only thing that makes you unique and successful is a technical limitation that dates back to text messages, it’s probably time to move on.
- OscarCunningham 9y agoGreat, now I have to recount to see if my joke about Game of Thrones breaking the Twitter rule still works.
- madeofpalk 9y agoTwitter seems to have the worst luck/timing when it comes to 'new features'. Last time it was Users: Please help get rid of these nazis Twitter: ROUND PROFILE PICS! this time its Users: Please help prevent nuclear war Twitter: HOW ABOUT LONGER TWEETS!
- iaw 9y agoI can't believe I'm writing this, but given the current modes of political communication in the US longer tweets may prevent nuclear war...
- bsaul 9y agoDon't think it's a trump thing , or even something specific to the US. I remember a few years ago, our french prime minister tweeted his condolences to the victim of a terror attack in France.
- 2muchcoffeeman 9y agoI think it's fairly reasonable to tweet condolences or important news. Twitter is widely used and as a government you probably want to spread information as quickly as possible. Tweets are probably made along side more traditional forms of communication. But Trump is just something else. The sheer lack of self control. This is not the behaviour of a leader of a first world nation or for that matter, an adult.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago> This is not the behaviour of a leader of a first world nation or for that matter, an adult. This is factually incorrect.
- baddox 9y agoIt’s clear that the commenter is referring to expected or acceptable behavior of someone in that role. Like if a 30 year old human threw a hissy fit over not having enough cake to eat, you might say they’re not acting like an adult.
- orf 9y agohttps://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=tweet_length&type=Code https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=tweet_length&type...
- legostormtroopr 9y agoI wanna make a PR bot that just changes every instance 140 to 280 for every repo that has the word Tweet on Github.
- megapatch 9y agoIt would have been cool if they instead had reduced the number och characters!
- greggeter 9y agoFlying cars. Where are my flying cars?
- coloneltcb 9y agoworth noting that the 160 char limit on SMS was a product of thoughtful design, and user-centric deliberation, not arbitrary: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-text-messaging.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-... I wish Twitter had the same commitment. Or at least hired product people who used the service.
- rajivtiru 9y agoDid you even read the blog? The increase wasn't arbitrary. And neither is the initial 140 limit... Originally, our constraint was 160 (limit of a text) minus username. But we noticed @biz got 1 more than @jack. For fairness, we chose 140. Now texts are unlimited. Also, we realize that 140 isn't fair—there are differences between languages. We're testing the limits. Hello 280! https://twitter.com/biz/status/912783936123691009 https://twitter.com/biz/status/912783936123691009
- eridius 9y agoThe 160 character limit was a balance between "limit should be as low as possible for bandwidth reasons" and "users must be able to express simple messages". The former isn't an issue anymore, so there's not longer any obvious reason why 160 should be the limit.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoAccording to your article, 160 characters was a product of technical limitations later justified by postcard and Telex research, not the other way around as you claim.
- SkyMarshal 9y agoI've often wondered what effect, if any, the higher information density of Chinese/Japanese/Korean has on peoples' minds and the way people think. Anyone ever heard of any studies on this?
- davesque 9y agoHow about actually enforcing your terms of service?
- pg_bot 9y agoI'm convinced there is no one at twitter that understands why they succeeded as a company. Their management team continually makes decisions that are reminiscent of shuffling around deck chairs on the titanic. I get the feeling that they only exist due to inertia which is a death sentence for most tech companies.
- ianamartin 9y agoNo one understands why they succeeded as a company. They haven't. They created a really popular product. That's completely different from succeeding as a company. This blog post and Jack's subsequent praise of all the hard work that went into this groundbreaking product decision is exactly why they haven't succeeded yet as a company.
- fullshark 9y agoSo why did they succeed, and how can they leverage that for user growth?
- tootie 9y agoNo one in silicon valley will say the reason, but it's blindingly obvious. It was dumb luck. Luck plays a part in every success and failure and Twitter was about 98% luck. There was and is no vision or strategy that explains this. No lessons to learn. Pure zeitgeist that is bound to crumble sometime after Trump leaves office.
- glenstein 9y agoI think it was a convergence of luck, the solving of a specific problem that was relevant at the time (sms messages), well timed celebrity adoption (Shaq was an early twitter user) and the idiosyncratic constraint of 140 characters which distinguished the platform from alternatives and contributed to a unique feel. It's large part luck, but the particular features play a role, too.
- bluthru 9y agoThey turned dumb phones into smart phones which was pretty amazing back when they launched.
- dreamfactored 9y agoSo they are making the roads wider, which will only increase pollution. Twitter's one saving grace was it at least enforced some concision to the tides of ill-informed opinion.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- joelrunyon 9y agoWe don't need 140 characters. They could solve this a dozen other ways including: * Not counting links as characters. * Not including images as characters. * Improving tweet-storm capabilities. * Improve threading + response mechanisms. This is the easiest + worst improvement they could do. I hope it's not permanent.
- factsaresacred 9y ago* Improving tweet-storm capabilities. That's what they just did. * Not counting links as characters. Oh, think of the spam.
- joelrunyon 9y agoLiterally just don't follow spam accounts?
- ebola1717 9y ago* Links are 20 characters, flat (could be less, but users would spam 100+ links). * Images aren't counted (unless they come from links). * @handles were moved out of the text for replies. * Threads have improved a lot over the past year. * Thread composer is apparently on it's way.
- joelrunyon 9y agoJust don't follow spam accounts? Not that hard...
- swamp40 9y agoI've always thought they should charge 10 cents per extra character over 140. Trying to eliminate 1 or 2 letters is exhausting - I would often pay 10 or 20 cents just for the convenience.
- bitmapbrother 9y agoTwitter should have subscription plans that correlate to the number of characters you can use. 280 = free tier 1000 = $0.99 per month 2500 = $1.99 per month 5000 = $2.99 per month
- kibwen 9y agoIn the very early days of Gmail (2005-ish) they had a constantly-increasing ticker on the front page showing you how many bytes of storage your account had access to. In my head I'm imagining such a ticker on Twitter's home page as well, but ticking up to show you how many characters your tweets can be. Given their current rate, the ticker would be incrementing at 0.00000037 characters per second. This way we'd have access to 281 characters by next month!
- pornel 9y agoThis doesn't solve the main pain points with length (megathreads and screenshots for quotes), but harms brevity that made Twitter varied and quick to read. People post huge "threads", which are a UI mess, and are much much longer than 280 chars. So now instead of "[1/15] Thread…" we'll have "[1/7] Thread…" rants. And people post screenshots of articles which again are longer than 280 chars. Twitter used to float idea of 10K limit: https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/140-to-10k/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/140-to-10k/ A 10K char "attachment" to a tweet would have allowed people to stuff their megathreads and articles there.
- jpatokal 9y agoFactoid of the day: the 140-char limit originates from the SS7 MAP signalling protocol used for SMS, which allows a message payload of precisely 140 bytes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS You can actually cram up to 160 characters into an SMS if you use a 7-bit character set, but Twitter apparently wanted to support European languages and went with the 8-bit version. However, allowing 140 double-byte chars (Chinese etc) blows through the actual limit of 80, requiring concatenated SMS to send.
- nicky0 9y agoI thought the extra 20 was for the originator's username.
- Decabytes 9y agoWhy raise the character limit? If you are going to do that then what purpose does the limit serve anymore?
- cherrytree 9y agoI guess they didn't consider halving the limit for the other languages instead?
- richdougherty 9y agoExactly. The short length of tweets creates joy and makes Twitter unique. People who speak other languages are cheated out of that joy. The best solution is to shorten tweets in those languages!
- komali2 9y agoWait, so how does it work? What if half my message is in Chinese, and the other English?
- unpythonic 9y agoSince brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief... Wit should fit on a Hollerith card.
- scotchio 9y agoMy only concern is I really appreciate zero fluff when browsing whatever. I imagine this will be abused a little bit. Not a big deal since there's images, gifs, video, and polls to grab your eye. Just slightly annoying. For example: ``` BREAKING BREAKING BREAKING BREAKING BREAKING BREAKING Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet Consectetur Adipisicing Elit Sed Do Eiusmod Temp - http://example.com http://example.com ```
- andr 9y agoThe irony is that both Biz's [1] and Jack's [2] tweets announcing the change could convey the same message with a third of the characters. In fact, they'd be better written. The need to carefully think, rethink, edit, and reedit your tweets so they fit in the limit lead to much higher quality. [1] https://twitter.com/biz/status/912783936123691009 https://twitter.com/biz/status/912783936123691009 [2] https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824 https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bitdiddle 9y agoIt's all down hill from here. Pretty soon there will be a 2K word minimum and we'll all be making up stuff, like those fifth grade book reports.
- jacquesm 9y ago#define MAX_TWEET_LENGTH 280 Bfd. If this is enough to make headlines all over the world you can bet they will do it again.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoI hope this isn't actually language-based, else it'll be awkward for tweets that mix languages, or multilingual users who have their UI in one language and tweet in another. It would make more sense to simply count CJK characters twice, like the “double-width character” days of old.
- iXce 9y ago> Most Japanese Tweets are 15 characters while most English Tweets are 34 Doesn't the graph shows that most English tweets are 140 characters instead? The first peak on the English curve is indeed on 34 characters, but it's lower than the 140 peak.
- projektfu 9y agoYou're right about the mode, but the quote is also correct in the sense of the area under the curve. Most English tweets are 34+/-n characters, where n gives you more than 50% under the curve. It rapidly falls off from 9% on the 140 character side.
- zeep 9y agoAren't many Japanese characters also words? which would explain why they use less characters...
- mrb 9y agoA few years ago I suggested Twitter should roll out an optional $1-per-month plan to let users tweet 280 characters.¹ If 10% of their MAU sign up, this would up their revenue by 17% (extra $400M yearly.) ¹ http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month-to-raise-the-limit-to-280-c/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month...
- grafporno 9y ago> If 10% of their MAU sign up, I'd bet <1% would actually sign up.
- brianwawok 9y agoYou do realize the credit card processing fee on a $1 purchase is ~$0.40?
- mrb 9y agoBatch the monthly payments into one $12 yearly payment.
- ElijahLynn 9y agoLove it! Tired of micromanaging characters.
- hardwaresofton 9y agotldr; Twitter is changing the limit 140 -> 280 characters I wish that emphasis (bolding? anything really) on what actually changed, I read through a lot of reasoning that I didn't really care to read/find compelling.
- homero 9y agoWhen? Mine's not working
- shmerl 9y agoDon't use Twitter? Diaspora has a much larger limit, and you can use hashtags.
- c3534l 9y agoIt would seem to me that the solution to the problem described in the blog would be to reduce the number of characters allowed for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese users. The whole appeal of twitter, I thought, was if you said what you wanted to say the system forced you to reconsider how you said it until you got down to the bare essence of what you were trying to convey. I'd be in favor of a maximum number of tweets per day, too.
- kijin 9y agoThere is precedent of treating CJK characters as "double-width", but it's anachronistic in a world of proportional fonts and UTF-8. CJK users also don't use CJK characters exclusively. There's almost always single-byte characters mixed in, such as URLs and numbers, and in the case of Korean, even punctuation. If some characters count as 1 and others count as 2, it will result in fluctuating limits that are hard to grasp intuitively.
- kccqzy 9y agoIf you used CJK before UTF-8 was popular, you would know that people had absolutely no issue counting some characters as 2. It’s entirely natural. In typical proportional fonts CJK characters still occupy about twice the width of a Latin character.
- saghm 9y agoFrom the standpoint of not wanting to alienate users, I can see why they might be hesitant to go this route; it's much more likely to piss people off if you take away some of their characters rather than giving them more.
- 482794793792894 9y agoYeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint. The limit for Asian languages should have been adjusted downwards as early as Twitter launched (though I suppose that's actually somewhat hard to do from a technological viewpoint, as people might mix Western letters and Asian symbols). And then they point out that in Asian countries people tweet more, so alright, who cares about history, do what works best. But you shouldn't just be looking at how many tweets are written. People are going to post more, just because it's easier to post something. That doesn't mean that people actually read these longer tweets just as much. Like, there is a feedback loop here, people would also start to tweet less, if they didn't bother reading tweets, because many tweets are also responses to other tweets, but still, this reasoning seems quite a bit oversimplified.
- anonfunction 9y ago> We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean). If the only justification they had was that three languages can convey more information than the rest why not reduce the characters for the three "cramming" languages?
- kumarvvr 9y agoWell, their idea is to increase the amount of communication _per tweet_.
- sharkjacobs 9y agowho was possibly asking for this? I can see far more need for "read more" expandable tweets to replace tweetstorms
- neximo64 9y agoTwitter has no vision under Jack Dorsey.
- jijji 9y agoalter table messages modify message_body bigtext; -- thanks for the feature enhancement twitter! it only took eleven years!
- arielm 9y agoI’m glad Twitter is changing things up. Technically this means doubling everything (database, cache, etc) which I imagine was an undertaking. But... Is this really what’s preventing Twitter from growing? I don’t think so. I use twitter for both personal and company reasons and I can see how it’d help the latter. I don’t see how it helps the former. To me, the whole purpose of the feed is to get the “gist”. 280 characters is wayyy more than that. I wish they spent their efforts on improving/building useful things (including better targeting for ads) or bring back the tweet counts. So congrats, but to me it’s a sign things aren’t chirping anymore.
- Pxtl 9y agoLatin-derived languages are getting longer, but Asian ones aren't? It sounds like they're switching to utf-8. I know that's not really what's happening, but that's what it sounds like.
- m3kw9 9y agoHaving known many Japanese, I feel they like to be concise and simple in their expression, they do like infer a lot and not be direct, hence no need to spell everything out all the time
- nobodynobodee 9y agoA 4 person startup can double its character count in an afternoon. A 1,000 person startup needs a team of 8 and two quarterly OKR periods.
- __s 9y agoGoing to prove https://recordsetter.com/world-record/twitter-hashtag/785 https://recordsetter.com/world-record/twitter-hashtag/785 wrong
- saghm 9y agoHave they gone into any detail about how exactly they're going to enforce different limits for different languages? If it's by the localization of your browser/app, what's stopping someone from changing their language to English and then typing 280 Japanese characters? If it's by doing some sort of language recognition on the tweet, how will it deal with mixed content?
- astrange 9y agoThe code counts all CJK characters twice.
- dannyw 9y agoThey could do something like this: 280 character limit. 1 Japanese character counts as 2 characters. If you have the Japanese locale, the limit is still visually displayed at 140, and your displayed count is halved (and rounded down).
- saghm 9y agoIs punctuation or whitespace commonly used in Japanese tweets? If so, that seems like it would make the limit somewhat variable
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- Zarel 9y agoEveryone is criticizing this decision, but I think it's useful to point out that I've heard a lot of users say that Japanese Twitter has significantly fewer misunderstandings and toxicity and is a generally friendlier place than English Twitter. This might be a lot of the reason Twitter is trying this out.
- Geee 9y agoI bet it's just Japanese culture itself, not Japanese Twitter.
- fiatpandas 9y agoI’m curious how much has to change code wise to get this to work. Or is there simply a single global variable that controls max tweet size (ignoring the fact that this is language specific).
- look_lookatme 9y agoTwitter has had a net negative effect on discourse, media and, by extension, on society. More characters won't help.
- theincredulousk 9y agoCalled it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759157 Should have charged people for it though. They need the money.
- isarat 9y agoI remember reading the story of an ex-twitter employee who was not very happy about innovating with "140 characters". People learned the art of crafting content with 140 character. Many of the reply-to-self and 1/2 tweets are going to be history. So does people write on the notes, screenshot and share. I believe it's more about building a better graph with more content intake, than giving voice to express. Twitter is always a tool polished by its users and several inventions made due to constraints. Let's see how people are going to take the 2x tweets.
- tempestn 9y agoIn my opinion, the best balance would be to keep the focus on short, succinct, 140 character tweets, but to also give the option to add a "read more" section to any given tweet. So you could eliminate tweet storms and give people a convenient outlet for longer-form thoughts, without just bloating everything. I expect 240 characters will largely result in people just using more words to say the same thing.
- Illniyar 9y agoSometimes, things that look obvious and simple require a lot of work and research to build so that it will fit the product and won't damage the community and momentum. This isn't one of those times. Seriously, what in the world took so long.
- partiallypro 9y agoI wish it would take longer, because frankly it's a dumb idea. It defeats the purpose of Twitter.
- daveFNbuck 9y agoYet Twitter is much more popular in Japan, where the higher information density of the written language effectively gave them this feature from the start.
- wpietri 9y agoTwitter is used very differently in Japan than elsewhere, and in ways that seem tightly bound to aspects of Japanese culture. I'd be very careful about assuming that higher word count is really the key difference.
- daveFNbuck 9y agoI was responding to the idea that a higher word count defeats the purpose of Twitter. Japan shows that Twitter can be successful under a higher limit.
- wpietri 9y agoIt shows that it can be successful if you use it like it's used in Japan. It does not show that it can be successful when it is used like English speakers use it. Twitter is unusual in that it is a pretty spare tool. They've added a number of small features in support of how people were seen to be using it. But what mainly defines it is the ways people use it, not the tool itself.
- quickthrower2 9y agoEasier solution would be to limit Japanese etc to 70 characters. I think the 140 is a good limit which forces you to write the "headline" of what you want to say and assimilate a feed reasonably quickly.
- roryisok 9y agoAnother cool feature could be not enabling people to start nuclear war on the service. This might get down voted as trolling, but the real trolling is going on between Donald Trump and North Korea. The fact that twitter continues to allow the racism, bigotry, sexism, antisemitism, climate change denial and warmongering of the most high profile account they have to go unchecked is ridiculously unethical. Instead of taking a stand against the erosion of Western ethical standards they're profiting from it
- edanm 9y agoAre you kidding? You really think that Twitter should be censoring the president of the United States? That is beyond ridiculous. His tweets are instantly newsworthy - would you object to CNN writing about them? And if you've gotten to the point where your political philosophy is to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, you've basically removed all possibility of ever understanding about half the people in the country.
- roryisok 9y agoSurely there's a distinction to be made between a government censoring its citizens free-speech, and a private service allowing The most powerful man in the world to use its platform to excuse white-supremacists and increase tension between hostile nuclear powers? Surely? This is not censorship we're talking about, and it's not free-speech. It's about having a set of rules on your social network and enforcing those rules. Unfortunately, twitter seems to have none.
- edanm 9y agoThere is a difference, which is why I didn't talk about the 1st amendment or government protected free speech, so you seem to not be replying to my actual comment. All I'm saying is, if your rules imply that you need to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, then there's something wrong with your rules. Also, let's be clear on this - even if Twitter for some insane reason decided to censor President Trump, it's not like he has a lack of microphones around. As much as we techies love Twitter and other companies, there really are other solutions around, and I think POTUS specifically would be able to get his message out even without Twitter.
- matunixe 9y agoWe don't care, we have Mastodon and our limit is 500.
- ak39 9y agoCan someone explain this: "But in English, a much higher percentage of Tweets have 140 characters (9%). Most Japanese Tweets are 15 characters while most English Tweets are 34" Why is 34 characters considered most tweets when the chart shows 140 characters higher than "34"? As labeled, the hump is lower than spike at 140 characters. What am I missing? Edit: Is the author saying the mode is 34?
- subroutine 9y agoThey might be binning the data to form those conclusions (because you are right, the graph does not support those statements). If they bin at each character +/- 5 characters it looks like 34 (+/-5) would be max.
- rovek 9y agoThis confused me as well. The chart leaves much to be desired if the quote is accurate.
- CM30 9y agoHonestly, I don't see why they shouldn't change to 280 characters. I mean, Mastodon instances allow 500 by default, Gab.ai allows 300 by default... And neither find it takes away from the microblogging aspect one bit. Pretty sure a lot of other Twitter alternatives allow for messages of around those sizes too. Yes, it means doing away with a bit of tradition. But generally, my experience there is that the tiny amount of characters has hurt more than its helped. So easy to lose necessary context in that space.
- Yizahi 9y agoOh, great, it only took them how many years to acknowledge the stupidity of char limit? Now they only need to throw their UI out of the window and make a proper intuitive tree style interface and they are golden.
- jlebrech 9y agofinally you can argue with every facetious person on twitter that'll need extra detail or will take everything out of context, or that need a citation for something that should be common knowledge.
- lloda 9y agoA solution would be to give you a fixed space, then make the font smaller or narrower as you write more. It's a softer limit and it accommodates CJK because usually those characters are bigger.
- beager 9y agoHasn't Twitter given us enough characters already?!
- DonHopkins 9y agoIt's a trick to get Trump to double the rate at which he incriminates himself! I hope he doesn't start twice as many wars. If he takes to it, then Twitter could gradually raise the limit bit by bit, like you train a cat to shit in the toilet by slowly moving its litter box [1], and eventually he'll be tweeting in full paragraphs of complete (if not coherent) sentences. [1] http://www.wikihow.com/Toilet-Train-Your-Cat http://www.wikihow.com/Toilet-Train-Your-Cat
- DonHopkins 9y agoThis is as earth shattering as when Macromedia Director went from 24 layers to 48 layers!!! Yet Director still didn't have enough layers to make an animated map of all 50 United States of America (or a car insurance turkey with 50 clickable tail feathers). So we got Flash!
- kelvin0 9y agoWell glad to see Twitter is finally tackling humanity's woes. I'm sorry for the vitriol, but what kind of value is this adding to anyone's life? It seems to me like another way of having the hunched-over-zombies-with-lit-faces spend even more time 'connecting' with other humans.
- politician 9y agoDo you think this change will result in a positive improvement to the content of the tweets from POTUS?
- politician 9y ago@dang What's a good way to run a poll without abusing karma. Throwaways?
- notadoc 9y agoDoes anyone else get the impression that Twitter has no idea what to do with their service, let alone how most people use it? Adding verbosity is the last thing the service needs.
- korzun 9y ago> We see that a small percent of Tweets sent in Japanese have 140 characters (only 0.4%). But in English, a much higher percentage of Tweets have 140 characters (9%). Took them 17 years to figure that one out? > We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter Okay
- odbol_ 9y agoIt's weird that their justification is that other languages can fit more words in than you can in English. But then they increase the character count. Wouldn't it make more sense to switch to a word limit, instead of a character limit?
- DanBC 9y ago> Wouldn't it make more sense to switch to a word limit, instead of a character limit? CanYouImagineTheCamelCaseNightmareThatWouldCause?
- WillPostForFood 9y agoEarly evidence that it is a mistake: OH HOLY SHIT. I figured out what we should do with the new 140 characters. ´•._.•´¯`•._.•´Forum Signatures Are Back Baby`•._.•´¯`•.¸¸.•´ https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/912793201592999936 https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/912793201592999936
- a_t48 9y agoOh nononononono.
- nikolay 9y agoThey shot themselves in the foot by putting this ridiculous limit! Make it 500, or, better yet, limit the number of words, which makes more sense, but I don't use Twitter much if at all, because I hate broken English, missing punctuation, and having to restructure your thought to fit into the SMS limit of the '90s!
- zxia31 9y agoAs a Chinese, I was never bothered by the 140 chars limit because symbols in Chinese can convey much more information than the same length of English characters.
- feborges 9y agoI suggest the characters limit to grow/shrink dynamically based on the percentage of tweets that reach the limit.