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Comment by sparkzilla | Hacker News Reader

The 140 characters forces concise communication. It suits people who like to read and write witty one-liners and those who like to share URLs. It's fast to read. Change the limit and you will also change the site's core appeal to many.

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The problem is that they appear to have hit the ceiling on the audience that appeals to, and it's just not a big enough audience to justify the enormous amounts of capital that have been plowed into Twitter over the years. So they have a tricky tightrope act to pull off: come up with a way to reach enough new people to make those investments pay off, without losing the users they already have, and without spending so much more of other peoples' money to do so that they just end up digging the hole deeper.

It seems like Twitter has been stuck in a bind for the past 5 years between pissing off its "core users" and becoming more useful to more people and simultaneously more lucrative. The specific improvements mentioned by your parent – removing link text and @mentions from the character limit – would not affect concision and would make things far less frustrating for the vast majority of people. That they have been unable to get even this sort of simple stuff done is what makes people worry about their ability to dig themselves out of the hole they've found themselves in.

I'm not saying change the 140 character limit. As it stands there is usually a limit of 0 characters because by the time I fit a link, mentions, and a retweet into a tweet I am over the limit. Make these things not count against that limit and instead always allow for the user to input 140 characters of their own text

I agree with you. But it's likely they will extend the character limit to much more, and that will change the nature of the service.

It might be interesting to see Twitter modify their core service on some variation of what I posted, but also reopen their API and serve as a backbone for real time messaging applications that other developers can use either at the cost of money, or allowing Twitter to populate their feed with ads and subsequently share part of the profit with the app maker.

I see a lot of potential for what Twitter has in their hand but the fact that that potential has not been utilized already makes me wonder if it will ever be used/if there is some kind of organizational disfunction going on that is preventing them from acting nimbly. Things like twitter polls and moments seem like bandaids to cover a slashed artery. They're designed to restore faith in the company so they don't get destroyed by timid investors but they don't add any real value to the company as I see it.

Periscope is a step in the right direction also and I think that it adds some real value but I am left wondering why they didn't just acquire Meerkat. Still, either one is an early stage risky bet that isn't going to save Twitter within the next year or two which is what I think they will need. It's essentially a one product company.

140 characters also allowed Twitter to fit a tweet into an SMS text message, which was a USP. The brevity (which is the soul of wit) was an attractive by-product.

The problem now is that whatever Twitter does to its system will probably -- yet again -- make it more like Facebook. And while I understand the HN audience's hostility to Facebook, that looks to me like a losing strategy.

I could use like 5 more characters though :)

I once suggested that they should just start charging for extra characters. Like, charge a penny per character, or sell a block of 100 to be used across as many tweets as you want for 90 cents. The marginal cost to them of shipping 141 characters instead of 140 is so small as to be practically nonexistent, so it'd be more or less pure profit.

Would anyone actually buy them? I think maybe they would, as long as they were priced low enough to be impulse-buyable. For the power users who live on Twitter, it could easily be worth the time it would save them over constantly having to edit their posts to get them under the 140 character limit. It could be to Twitter what in-app purchases are to "free-to-play" games like Candy Crush -- a way to skip out of a grind.

A penny per character?

This is overpriced by several orders of magnitude and would instantly spark a huge user revolt.

Artificial scarcity as a business model, ugh.

> It could be to Twitter what in-app purchases are to "free-to-play" games like Candy Crush -- a way to skip out of a grind.

Intentionally design your user experience to suck, but it gets better if the user pays.

I don't like your ideas.

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