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Tweeting Made Easier
- joelrunyon 9y agoDoes "tweeting" need to be made easier? I realize that they want their "userbase" to grow, but users has never seemed the right way to measure twitter. Tons of people read tweets, etc on news sites without having an account. Seems like there are a lot of other things they can do besides "making tweeting easier" to improve twitter.
- ProAm 9y agoWhen a company has been so stagnant with innovation, sometimes you just have to do something/anything to stay on the radar and remain technically relevant.
- wongarsu 9y agoTwitter could stop development today and they would stay relevant for years to come. Tweets don't get quoted in the news because of some great innovation, but because the basic idea and implementation is solid enough and has Twitter has a massive network effect. The bigger reason why they want to be seen as improving and innovating is likely to keep shareholders happy. From a profit standpoint the company is a lot less solid, leaving ample reason to play with perception.
- ProAm 9y agoTwitter would be profitable tomorrow if they laid off half the employees. The company is so bloated for product they deliver. It should be a money printing machine.
- saurik 9y ago> But importantly, people Tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity of Twitter remained. This has been the argument from an insanely large number of people for years, and it frankly isn't difficult to test. Even in mediums that have no character limit, the vast majority of users do not send insanely long messages, and if there is any mechanism at all to encourage short messages with a fallback to longer ones (such as hiding content behind "read more", or making short messages much larger and more visible: Facebook now does both), then people are even more stingy. I just scrolled through my Facebook feed and paid attention and virtually all of the posts I saw were extremely short (I think even all less than 140 characters excepting two or three). It just seen someone incompetent that it took Twitter this long to figure this out: this isn't shocking data.
- notahacker 9y agoAdd in the fact that anyone who has ever used Twitter knows that anything which takes a lot of characters to convey either (i) gets abbreviated in a confusing manner (ii) tweet threaded which is a far less user-friendly way of using 280 chars anyway or (iii) a special embedded text image, which again is far from user-friendly when it's just a workaround.
- duskwuff 9y ago> a special embedded text image, which again is far from user-friendly when it's just a workaround. Or, my personal favorite: an embedded image of the Twitter compose dialog with the over-length tweet in it.
- visarga 9y agosweet
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoOr, my personal favorite of BASE65536 encoded gzipped text.
- mark212 9y agoThis is a horribly written announcement. The headline should be "Limit on Tweets is Now 280 Characters for Most Languages," or something equally pithy and the first sentence should be a short restatement of that. Then -- and only then -- go into the details of the test and how this (probably) won't lead to loquacious tweeting etc etc. But my God. I had to read it three times to figure out what this post was supposed to be announcing.
- tyrust 9y ago>This is a horribly written announcement. Because it's not an announcement. The first sentence of the post links to the announcement: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/Giving-you-more-characters-to-express-yourself.html https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/...
- itake 9y agoit is an announcement of the results of their test that started with your link.
- mortenjorck 9y agoThat’s the initial announcement of the test back in September, not the announcement that they’re making the change permanent and rolling it out to all users, which is indeed the buried lede at the end of the first paragraph of today's “Tweeting Made Easier” post.
- tyrust 9y agoI wouldn't call a fact in the first paragraph a "buried lede".
- CM30 9y agoOkay, I'm gonna be honest here: Am I the only one who doesn't get all the complaints about an expanded character limit? Cause at the end of the day, many Twitter alternatives have far more than 140 characters available for posts. Mastodon has 500 by default, Gab has 300 characters and App.net allowed 256 characters per post before it closed down. Absolutely none of those sites or services has been worse off thanks to the higher character limit, nor has it hurt the microblogging feel in general. So why are people so stressed out over Twitter having a higher amount now?
- gilrain 9y ago> Absolutely none of those sites or services has been worse off thanks to the higher character limit, nor has it hurt the microblogging feel in general. > So why are people so stressed out over Twitter having a higher amount now? The answer to your question is that they disagree with your preceding statement.
- CM30 9y agoI've seen a fair bit of criticism about said services in regards to the content, but never the character limit. Can someone who dislikes the limit on Mastodon or Gab explain why here?
- InclinedPlane 9y agoTwitter has a lot of problems, the 140 character limit was not even in the top 5. That's why people are annoyed. Twitter's house is on fire with cougars eating people in the backyard and people dying of cholera in the front yard, now the owners rush back from vacation in a big white van... only to open it up and reveal a bunch of pink plastic flamingos, which they proceed to use to decorate the yard (in between cholera corpses). It's mystifying and infuriating.
- onlyfortyfive 9y agoWell, the 140 character may not be a problem for existing users, but it’s also a great reason not to use twitter if you don’t have a desire to cram arbitrary thoughts into arbitrary formats.... what kind of discussion can you have in that medium? Not a very meaningful one.... It’s certainly amusing to see people get angry that the experience is less stressful. Just saying—it seems pretty obvious this is at least in part to increase attractiveness of actually using the platform. The content certainly ain’t gonna do the trick. Or to put it another way, the last person to see how shitty it is is someone who already uses the site.
- r721 9y ago>Highlights are below and in our additional blogs about our experimentation process, extensive data analysis, research, and design work. Don't miss those: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2017/Experimenting-To-Solve-Cramming.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2... https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2017/Our-Discovery-of-Cramming.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2... https://medium.com/twitter-design-research/looking-after-number-one-forty-20da627e1f2e https://medium.com/twitter-design-research/looking-after-num...
- squeaky-clean 9y ago> Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit. More like 9% of posted tweets hit the character limit. I bet a much higher number hits above the character limit and then are trimmed down to fit. It doesn't sound like they consider that, and so it leads to it seeming like only a small number of tweets are limited by 140 characters when I'm sure a muuuch larger number of tweets could benefit from using "you" instead of "u" and such.
- jimktrains2 9y agoOr just broken into 2+ tweets.
- mortenjorck 9y agoOr broken into 10, 20, or more tweets. Which, to me, is the disappointing thing about the new character limit: it does nothing to address this emerging usage pattern, one might even say emerging form of communication, of the tweetstorm. It seems pretty clear that tweetstorms enable a certain mode of marshaling thoughts and communicating them in an off-the-cuff way that blogging services never identified or understood. And yet Twitter's product org doesn’t seem to understand it either.
- microcolonel 9y agoMaybe something intermediate could be done, but I think the tweetstorm format allows for interjections at fixed intervals, which can be helpful.
- viraptor 9y agoDidn't really think of this before, but yes - this is very useful and it would be a shame to lose this feature.
- mortenjorck 9y agoThat’s part of the missed opportunity I see: far from losing this ability, a proper tweetstorm feature should embrace it, making it easier to navigate and interact with.
- jijji 9y agoif you can post without having your message ghosted
- agumonkey 9y agoSurely 280 chars is better to extract data for twitter to get revenus.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wongarsu 9y agoFewer creative abbreviations will certainly make natural language processing a lot easier.
- jes5199 9y agoI can't quite explain it, but this change has given me conscious access to a feeling about Twitter-the-product that I only had at a subconscious level before now: complete, overwhelming, extraordinary rage.
- armandososa 9y agoI don't if this ui change was previous to the new character limit, but the Tweet editor on the web now has a progress indicator instead of displaying the number of characters left. I found that interesting.
- Gaelan 9y agoParallel. Probably has to do with the different handling of different charsets, and therefore not being able to give a simple "N more codepoints"
- microcolonel 9y agoThe new indicator design sucks, they should just use the old one and change the number to 280. I want to be able to see the exact number of remaining characters I have at a glance, this is not possible with a tiny little circular indicator.
- rcraft 9y agoTo be fair, once you hit 260 characters, it starts counting down, showing you that you have 20 characters left. I like the circle. It puts less emphasis on number of characters you are using, so perhaps people won't be as motivated to use up all 280.
- tedmiston 9y agoWell that sounds like an easy browser extension to write :)
- mypalmike 9y agoI think they're tweaking it still in A/B testing. I've seen both.
- PhilipA 9y agoThey are a public traded company, and for us casual users of Twitter the only change that has been in the talk the last couple of years has been to increase the character limit. What other companies can have this little improvement over the time, and still be a public traded company on Nasdaq? (I acknowledge that they might improve internal & marketing tools, but nothing us users sees)
- GuiA 9y agoYou are not the user. You are a consumer of promoted tweets, which are paid for by the users.
- gdulli 9y agoChange doesn't need to happen for the sake of change. It was an amazing product and they've made it worse with changes like the algorithmic timeline, so the less they do the better, from my perspective. Though I have no opinion either way about 280 characters.
- robzyb 9y ago> They are a public traded company, and for us casual users of Twitter the only change that has been in the talk the last couple of years has been to increase the character limit. I think that's a bit hyperbolic. But, that being said, it annoys me that they haven't even put enough effort into this change to update the documentation. > Note that the current best definition of the algorithm for counting characters on Twitter is described in the page on the twitter-text Tweet parsing library. This documentation will be refreshed shortly to reflect the most recent changes. https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/counting-characters https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/counting-charac...
- ballenf 9y agoComcast and other cable ISPs? They’ve increased their speeds to some but also my price has more than doubled. In retail, Walmart, Target and most mainstream supermarkets have changed very little. I think you mean to ask what tech company startup has ever remained relevant for so long without change, maybe?
- lyonlim 9y agoCurious how Twitter detects when it's Chinese or Japanese to restrict the length to 140 chars. What if it's a tweet that starts with English, then includes Chinese characters? Is that what the progress indicator is for, to let Twitter detect the language?
- akanet 9y agoTry it! I wonder, too.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- darkengine 9y agoThey've made CJK characters (including fullwidth characters of any kind, without exception for Latin letters or Arabic numerals) count as 2 characters. In a mixed alphanumeric/CJK tweet, the CJK part will simply count doubly towards your character limit.
- kurthr 9y agoInteresting... of course 70 characters of Mandarin would be the equivalent of over 400 characters of English. I suppose that plus goog-Translate would be another even less readable way to avoid the limit... since Chinese language speakers by and large just use WeChat.
- lifthrasiir 9y agoIt is a brain-dead solution: any Unicode scalar value not matching /[\u0000-\u10ff\u2000-\u200d\u2010-\u201f\u2032-\u2037]/ doubles the cost. [1] The primary range ends at U+10FF because it conveniently excludes virtually all CJK characters (Hangul starts at U+1100) with relatively low error rates. Yet, it's still brain-dead. [1] https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/928030981805588480 https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/928030981805588480 (used to be /[\u0000-\u10ff]/ during the test period)
- Touche 9y agoFrom a business perspective doesn't more characters = fewer tweets visible in the viewport = ads are less seen?
- tedmiston 9y agoGreat counterpoint below: > Surely 280 chars is better to extract data for twitter to get revenus. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15649155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15649155
- ForFreedom 9y agoSo it lightens the load on their servers with less number of tweets.
- phil248 9y agoIn the end, I'll just always be impressed by how Twitter got billionaire aristocrats and elder statesmen to use the number 2 to me the words to, too and two. Other than that, all the character limit did was make reading and writing more difficult. That's the opposite goal of all language education and should be considered a borderline crime against humanity.
- phr4ts 9y agoWhat if Twitter made character limits a level game - just like HN voting Karma? Level 1 users get 140 chars. Level 2 - 160 chars, 3...
- SilenceYou 9y agoYeah let's encourage more throwaway accounts!
- ryanx435 9y agoSo my feed would be filled with extra long tweets from bots and people who have nothing better to do but tweet all day to level up, and people who only tweet when they have something important to say would be limited to 140 . Hmmmmmmm
- drtse4 9y agoI've never seen a company put out so many announcements for a feature that if you think about it, from the point of view of what it offers, it's really a minimal change.
- SilenceYou 9y ago2 announcements is not alot.
- spiderfarmer 9y agoIt’s the first “product” blogpost since March, where they changed the default avatar. What have they been doing in the meantime?
- moomin 9y agoI can think of two things the entire company has done that stick in my mind: * Ban Rose McGowan. * Changed the T&Cs so that famous people can threaten to murder people.
- Illniyar 9y agoIt's interesting to look at it from a different angle. It took them years with a planned deployment of several weeks to increase the character limit. In a small or even medium sized startup, this kind of decision will be a single product manager's decision and most likely be implemented in a day or two at most. This kind of rigidness, bureaucracy and slowness is what makes big companies play catchup with small startups.And Twitter is at the top percentages of technologically competent, modern companies - imagine such a change in banks, or chain stores.
- FanaHOVA 9y agoThis has nothing to do with bureaucracy, this has to do with making sure the changes don't ruin the feel of your product and alienates your power users. It's not like they decided a year ago and then had to wait 6 months for somebody to sign a piece of paper.
- Illniyar 9y agoNo, but I'm guessing there were many meetings, committees, getting approval from the top, etc... involved. That is still bureaucracy.
- no_gravity 9y agoTo see how the 280 char limit feels, I tried to compose a tweet with the full 280 chars. Piping it through wc tells me it's actually 295 chars: https://twitter.com/marek_gibney/status/928184393755250688 https://twitter.com/marek_gibney/status/928184393755250688 Maybe some chars or chars in links count for less then 1?
- philo23 9y agoI believe links don’t directly count towards the character limit anymore, along with any mentions. I might be wrong but I believe for a time (maybe still?) only the automatically shortened URL length (t.co URLs) counts
- jakub_g 9y agoMy empirical test shows that links are treated as if they had a fixed length of 23 characters (even if they are shorter or much longer)
- zimpenfish 9y agoNo need for an empirical test - they have an endpoint that tells you. https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/developer-utilities/configuration/api-reference/get-help-configuration https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/developer-utilities/co... (via https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/tco https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/tco)
- cptwunderlich 9y agoHow to lie with graphs. It looks like a majority of the tweets hit the limit, yet the text clearly states only 9% of English tweets hit the limit. If you'd zoom out, it simply wouldn't look like a problem (which I don't think it is).
- digi_owl 9y agoWhat is sad about all this is that Twitter got its start as a sms relay, and sms has long had a system for stitching multiple messages into a singular long one. But rather than adapt that system early, Twitter now insist on dreaming up their own...
- brlewis 9y agoSad, or fortuitous? I don't think even the founders realized this was a feature, not a bug. Big media loves Twitter because it forces everything into sound bites. Twitter would not have taken off having the same functionality as everything else.
- mekazu 9y agoMany of the comments made here are < 140 chars. Others are more.