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I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter or tweeting... (as this c

by D9u 13y ago

I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter or tweeting... (as this comment illustrates)

PavlovsCat 13y ago
You're in good company: The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse. <label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/common-input-element-attributes.html#attr-input-maxlength http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
_delirium 13y ago
That's my problem with HN as an information source as well. Just an 80-character headline isn't much space to convey information, unless it's extremely simple information. A headline plus a short blurb, like on Metafilter or Slashdot, at least gives a slightly more coherent explanation of what this article is about and why the submitter thought it was interesting, and mitigates the tendency towards only promoting stuff that can catch people's eye in 80 characters. On HN you can sometimes get that by clicking through to the comments first, but it's kind of a frustrating way to browse links. Some subreddits on reddit have moved back to the Slashdot style by only allowing "text" submissions rather than "link" submissions; unlike HN's text submissions those can also contain clickable links, so the effect is to require people to write a little along with the link, instead of just submitting a link.
- codva 13y ago
  This is exactly what I do here. I start with the first few comments and then click through to read the story after the comments add some context to the headline.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    Occasionally the lead comment is dumb. It'll quote a tiny fragment of the article, and follow that with an explanation of why the author is wrong. The fragment will be misquoted or misunderstood and out of context. It might be a tiny part of the article, or not relevant to most of the article. But this post will have been made early, and few will down vote it, and many will up vote it and it'll stay near the top of the comment heap.
    - danmaz74 13y ago
      Not to mention when the first comment is about the layout of the linked website, or its technology, or whatever, but not about the content.
- sker 13y ago
  It's worse than that. Since you can't editorialize titles and some authors like to give their articles poetic, meaningless names like "A butterfly in the sky," when the actual article talks about a security exploit in Bitcoin, coded in Go and released by Wikileaks. I often find myself ignoring interesting articles on HN only to go read them later on reddit with a much more descriptive, editorialized headline.
  - slacka 13y ago
    I prefer the headlines here over Reddit’s. What worries me is the quality of the comments. The community and their insightful comments are what keeps me coming back. Lately I've seen an increase in memes and trollish comments from new IDs. I worry that if HN doesn't move to limited account signup period or invite only, it will end up another Slashdot.
fyrabanks 13y ago
"I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter." <-135 characters (+conveys the same info)
- smacktoward 13y ago
  Having to rewrite yourself constantly in order to fit your thought into a (let's face it, fairly arbitrary) limit is not fun.
  - stephengillie 13y ago
    It promotes consice yet well-thought out statements.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Really? Have you even been near twitter? It promotes slogan like ideas, contrained thinking, ADD, silly one-liners, and BS self-absorbed tibbits.
    - qu4z-2 13y ago
      Concise implies both short and information-rich. In my experience with twitter, the former is certainly true but...
    - saalweachter 13y ago
      Let's be honest: it gives authors permission to not write a lot. The thing that differentiates Twitter from its competitors isn't the well-thought-out-ness of the tweets, it's the volume. When you can't write more than 140 characters, you feel OK tweeting almost anything. And you do, and you do it a lot. A blogging platform is a drag because it feels like work to write a meaningful blog post. You start a dozen blog posts that you never publish because they don't feel finished. So you end up never blogging because you "don't have time for it". Twitter won because their 140 character limit encouraged constant, thoughtless posting, which allowed for an insane volume of tweets. And it turned out that volume is way, way more important for a social network than quality or thoughtfulness.

by D9u 13y ago

I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter or tweeting... (as this comment illustrates)

PavlovsCat 13y ago

You're in good company: The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse. <label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/common-input-element-attributes.html#attr-input-maxlength http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

_delirium 13y ago

That's my problem with HN as an information source as well. Just an 80-character headline isn't much space to convey information, unless it's extremely simple information. A headline plus a short blurb, like on Metafilter or Slashdot, at least gives a slightly more coherent explanation of what this article is about and why the submitter thought it was interesting, and mitigates the tendency towards only promoting stuff that can catch people's eye in 80 characters. On HN you can sometimes get that by clicking through to the comments first, but it's kind of a frustrating way to browse links. Some subreddits on reddit have moved back to the Slashdot style by only allowing "text" submissions rather than "link" submissions; unlike HN's text submissions those can also contain clickable links, so the effect is to require people to write a little along with the link, instead of just submitting a link.

codva 13y ago
This is exactly what I do here. I start with the first few comments and then click through to read the story after the comments add some context to the headline.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Occasionally the lead comment is dumb. It'll quote a tiny fragment of the article, and follow that with an explanation of why the author is wrong. The fragment will be misquoted or misunderstood and out of context. It might be a tiny part of the article, or not relevant to most of the article. But this post will have been made early, and few will down vote it, and many will up vote it and it'll stay near the top of the comment heap.
  - danmaz74 13y ago
    Not to mention when the first comment is about the layout of the linked website, or its technology, or whatever, but not about the content.
sker 13y ago
It's worse than that. Since you can't editorialize titles and some authors like to give their articles poetic, meaningless names like "A butterfly in the sky," when the actual article talks about a security exploit in Bitcoin, coded in Go and released by Wikileaks. I often find myself ignoring interesting articles on HN only to go read them later on reddit with a much more descriptive, editorialized headline.
- slacka 13y ago
  I prefer the headlines here over Reddit’s. What worries me is the quality of the comments. The community and their insightful comments are what keeps me coming back. Lately I've seen an increase in memes and trollish comments from new IDs. I worry that if HN doesn't move to limited account signup period or invite only, it will end up another Slashdot.

fyrabanks 13y ago

"I dislike being limited to only 140 characters when trying to convey my thoughts and ideas, so I've never really been a fan of Twitter." <-135 characters (+conveys the same info)

smacktoward 13y ago
Having to rewrite yourself constantly in order to fit your thought into a (let's face it, fairly arbitrary) limit is not fun.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  It promotes consice yet well-thought out statements.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Really? Have you even been near twitter? It promotes slogan like ideas, contrained thinking, ADD, silly one-liners, and BS self-absorbed tibbits.
  - qu4z-2 13y ago
    Concise implies both short and information-rich. In my experience with twitter, the former is certainly true but...
  - saalweachter 13y ago
    Let's be honest: it gives authors permission to not write a lot. The thing that differentiates Twitter from its competitors isn't the well-thought-out-ness of the tweets, it's the volume. When you can't write more than 140 characters, you feel OK tweeting almost anything. And you do, and you do it a lot. A blogging platform is a drag because it feels like work to write a meaningful blog post. You start a dozen blog posts that you never publish because they don't feel finished. So you end up never blogging because you "don't have time for it". Twitter won because their 140 character limit encouraged constant, thoughtless posting, which allowed for an insane volume of tweets. And it turned out that volume is way, way more important for a social network than quality or thoughtfulness.