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I'm not going to argue here about whether Twitter's character limit produces better or worse discourse by any particular metric. My only point in the comment ab

I'm not going to argue here about whether Twitter's character limit produces better or worse discourse by any particular metric. My only point in the comment above was that the character limit remains a fundamental characteristic of Twitter, and removing that constraint would qualitatively change Twitter, in a way that "emoji now always count as 2" and "we're moving from 140 to 280 characters" did not. Constraints can lead people to be more innovative and creative. That does not mean they universally do, only that they can. Removing such constraints is thus not an obvious improvement with zero potential downside.

julienreszka 6y ago
I used to believe this too but I changed my mind eventually. Do you know what changed my mind? I was swimming in the Lac Leman in Geneva. I decided to go underwater and hold my breath for a while, I noticed that I couldn't stay that long while my brother who had his gear could look underwater for a long time and enjoy it way more. That's when it hit me. Constrains don't make you more creative per se. They only force you to create workarounds, but in the end that's all it is, workarounds not really a good breath of fresh air. Hopefully the analogy makes sense to you too.
nomagicbullet 6y ago
I 100% agree that constraints can be great fuel for creativity. Innovation is not about examining all possibilities, is about finding the unexplored paths. Sometimes fewer options means you can more easily focus on discovery something new vs exploring what's already out there.
grawprog 6y ago
>My only point in the comment above was that the character limit remains a fundamental characteristic of Twitter, and removing that constraint would qualitatively change Twitter I don't use twitter, so either way it doesn't matter much to me. But was twitter not created with this constraint due to the original intention that tweets could be posted by sms and were thus constrained by the format of sms itself and not actually an inherent and necessary part of the platform? It seems like there's room for twitter to provide at least a method for long form content. Maybe have it seperate from the actual twitter feed and let people use a normal size tweet to link to it? People already seem to use it for longform content, providing a way for people to do it efficiently may provide a positive change. It would give people a reason to use twitter who otherwise might not because of the content limitations. Even adding such a system, I imagine the bulk of tweets will still be the 280 character kind, but it would provide a built in method for that occasional time you want to write something longer.

julienreszka 6y ago

I used to believe this too but I changed my mind eventually. Do you know what changed my mind? I was swimming in the Lac Leman in Geneva. I decided to go underwater and hold my breath for a while, I noticed that I couldn't stay that long while my brother who had his gear could look underwater for a long time and enjoy it way more. That's when it hit me. Constrains don't make you more creative per se. They only force you to create workarounds, but in the end that's all it is, workarounds not really a good breath of fresh air. Hopefully the analogy makes sense to you too.

nomagicbullet 6y ago

I 100% agree that constraints can be great fuel for creativity. Innovation is not about examining all possibilities, is about finding the unexplored paths. Sometimes fewer options means you can more easily focus on discovery something new vs exploring what's already out there.

grawprog 6y ago

>My only point in the comment above was that the character limit remains a fundamental characteristic of Twitter, and removing that constraint would qualitatively change Twitter I don't use twitter, so either way it doesn't matter much to me. But was twitter not created with this constraint due to the original intention that tweets could be posted by sms and were thus constrained by the format of sms itself and not actually an inherent and necessary part of the platform? It seems like there's room for twitter to provide at least a method for long form content. Maybe have it seperate from the actual twitter feed and let people use a normal size tweet to link to it? People already seem to use it for longform content, providing a way for people to do it efficiently may provide a positive change. It would give people a reason to use twitter who otherwise might not because of the content limitations. Even adding such a system, I imagine the bulk of tweets will still be the 280 character kind, but it would provide a built in method for that occasional time you want to write something longer.