Twitter to keep 140-character limit, CEO says | Hacker News Reader

Twitter to keep 140-character limit, CEO says

reuters.com

44 pointsshayannafisi54 comments

John Gruber had a suggestion where they just make a new attachment type, "Text Post" that renders like an image card. Slack has a similar feature and it works well for posting very long form messages.

This would obviate extending the 140 char limit for regular tweets.

But it would make it even more incomprehensible for potential and new Twitter users. Twitter already has a big problem with attracting and retaining new users. Creating two types of messages, short ones and long ones, only adds to the confusion. Just be like Facebook (JBLF): one text box fits all. Ditch the 140 char limit, it's 2016.

That's a decent compromise design. People already attach images of text to bypass the 140 char limit. It makes sense to "pave the cow paths" that users have found useful.

Keeping the limit at 140 or maybe a little longer would be fine, but it shouldn't consume characters to attach an image or URL. It's annoying that when one tweets with a URL, every character of the URL is counted, but then replaced with a shortened t.co link anyway. And because they host images themselves, they shouldn't count as characters consumed.

Yeah, that... Makes a lot of sense. Always surprised me that the URL counted for the char limit.

This is for backwards compatibility with SMS (text messaging). Only the length of the t.co link is counted toward your 140 characters. Images are the same -- they are uploaded and a link is generated, so when you send a tweet over SMS the recipient can view the image.

More generally, if you think about Twitter's design decisions as preserving SMS compatibility, then a lot of strange choices make more sense.

Ah! Interesting. That count of t.co URLs must have changed at some point. I see how it works now. Still, I don't think a URL should count against your character consumption at all. That is what led to URL shorteners and the damage they do to begin with.

I completely understand that SMS compatibility is a big reason for keeping the limit. I just don't think it's a good enough reason now that most users aren't using SMS or are on MMS where they have more than 160 total characters to play with.

They could provide an option to SMS users to see a truncated tweet or a URL with the complete tweet, deprecate SMS but keep it around, and not let themselves be constrained by it.

You just taught me that Twitter has sms support. I always thought the character limit was odd. Is there a particular market they're trying to reach with that feature, because I've never seen anyone use it.

Twitter pre-dates smartphones, mobile apps and push notifications

Slightly off-topic, but I recommend the "Twitter Link Expander" Firefox extension that expands short links to the original URL when reading tweets, so you know where you will be clicking:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-link-...

If Twitter wants to be more welcoming to new users, they would count each @-tag as a fixed number of characters. As it is now, it's much easier to tweet at early adopters, who have very short handles. New users end up with much longer ones, and it can be difficult to have a conversation—especially if several folks are tagged.

I don't think that tagging people should count as 0, as this would encourage spamming, but I do think that all tags should count as the same number of chars, or perhaps have a ceiling on the number of chars. So it could be up to 5 chars to tag someone, and if you're tagging someone with a shorter handle then you get it for less.

This would make the platform more egalitarian—and more welcoming to newcomers.

>Dorsey has changed some of Twitter's core features since he returned to run Twitter permanently in October. Twitter has added "Moments," which allows users to easily find tweets about the day's biggest news stories, and changed the shape of its "favorite" icon from a star to a heart.

And now Twitter will keep the thing that made it unique. All kinds of innovation going on over there.

My mind is blown.

I'm sure a lot of decisions were made by him, specifically business related, that aren't visible as much as product features, but that sarcastic comment made me chuckle.

It reminds me of my brilliant designer friends who have done amazing work at small startups helping create ideas/features/UI for companies them grow from seeds of ideas into big, successful businesses. When they switched jobs to some of the bigger companies in SV (FB, Twitter, Dropbox, etc), they always seem to struggle to mention anything tangible they managed to accomplish during their tenure (all of them left left for startups).

I think they should have done something. The 140 character limit might make Twitter a unique experience, but 140 is quite low. I think they could have bumped it to 220 at least or 240.

Split the difference: 5,070 character limit.

I also find 140 characters to be too limiting and hate spending more time than necessary to twist my words into something that will save a few characters.

I know that this issue is very important for Twitter as a company, but it's just funny how the existence of a service is so highly dependent on the number of characters in a textfield.

Why can't his cofounder, Ev Williams, just partner with him and make a Twitter + Medium feature. Embedding Medium article excerpts like how quote tweets would be fantastic. They did it with Periscope..

That's interesting. How would that work in practice?

Sad. It's pretty much the only reason I can't stand Twitter. I'm sick of finding ways to save one or two characters but still get my message across.

I dunno, it actually kind of releases my inner editor. "What can I do to make this comment extra pithy?"

I dislike that it's essentially impossible to share more complex ideas on Twitter, but that's different that just having to make a single idea more concise so it'll come in under the Holy 140.

I stopped using it altogether; got bored of endless self-editing and reading people explain their misread truncated tweets. 140 is just retarded. Still, they'll prosper because google, ello (remember that?), app.net (remember that?) etc aren't up to the task, and facebook doesn't need to take them on.

Actually, Facebook copied the @mention system and the #hash_tagy thing from tweeter so... there.

It also encourage low quality interaction between users and messages taken out of context. Twitter needs a way to convey context in a message. Twitter is definitely not a way to have a meaningful discussion with other users. Worse, any discussion on Twitter is almost impossible to follow. I personally do not understand the UI. I don't know who is speaking to whom or who is answering to whom. Twitter isn't a forum, I get it, but the horrible UI definitely works against Twitter as a medium. It silly but I believe the core product has gotten worse as time went by. unfotunatly,since any attempt at an alternative client is being shut down, Twitter can't even profit from experimentation of third parties. They are shooting themselves in the foot, just like Facebook.

Good point. If your message does not fit into the limit, you have to spend time trying to shorten it, creatively, by chnging speling, usng abrvatns, usng URL shrtnrs, nd so on. Novelty wears off after first few times, then is just a chore. Programming equivalent is CRUD or boilerplate - sort of.

At some point they made it so that in the web UI (you could do this in some other clients before, but since they started shutting those out it doesn't really count) if you replied to your own tweet and removed your name you could connect tweets together. People have been making excellent use of this to link thoughts together in a way that's readable but still encourages you to pare down your thoughts into bite size chunks (though some people do abuse it to write uninterrupted essays, this was no less true before).

All they really need to do is make this feature a little more accessible, imo.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the ability to connect tweets to get something resembling a longer tweet is probably considered to be a bit of a cop out.

The reasoning behind retaining the 140 character limit seems to be that if it's longer than 140 characters - post it elsewhere, then link to it if you want it on your feed. Trying to cater to the market where you can create messages to your social network that are somewhat untargeted seems like it would make twitter less able to offer the 'of the moment brevity' they want, and really would result in them being a partially implemented feature that already exists on other social media platforms.

I disagree, and I personally rarely click through to such "I expand on my thoughts over there" posts. I don't read twitter for that.

But I think there is value to the concept of forcing brevity, and I think it's essential to twitter. As I said, some people abuse it and those people should do just as you said, because that's what they really want.

Connected tweets are basically like a semicolon in normal writing. They imply a loose connectedness between independent thoughts. When used that way I think they're incredibly valuable for certain kinds of expression, and they still force brevity upon you in ways that "oh just go look at my 10,000 word essay on Medium" does not.

I have a love-hate relationship with that feature.

On the one hand, some of the most insightful things that I've seen on Twitter have been written in such way.

On the other, it's just so effin ugly. You can't reply/share/like the whole thing at once, so you end up with splintered conversation trees with different people replying to different parts of the mega-tweet.

I think it's a poor design choice, really.

Well, I think it's only worth comparing it to how it was before when someone had a train of thought in tweets. Linking to a single tweet then and telling people to follow it through meant that they had to go to the user's page, to the time it was posted, and then possibly go back and turn on tweets&replies, and then follow it backwards up the page.

I do not think there is any really perfect solution, but sometimes tweets should be connected to each other and much like many other twitter features (lists being the other really notable one) this one is only half complete and wanting of some extra love to make it not suck as much. But, like many of those features, does fill a real need.

I can see what you mean, but as a still-current user I only compare it to my user experience at the present.

Certainly I understand that it used to be much worse, but if it's not satisfying me now, well, I'm keeping an eye out for what will.

It's interesting you note lists as I agree that there's a really good underlying idea there that has never blossomed. Any ideas by how they could be improved?

Really I think they should be more like google+ circles (I don't like much about g+, but I do think that particular idea is well suited to twitter). They should be part of the home page presentation, allowing you to filter your main view down by list.

Personally, almost all the time I look on twitter I'm looking at a list. Either the one that's basically "these are the people I want to see all the tweets of" or topical ones (politics, infosec, etc). I spend very little time on the 'firehose' main feed.

Yeah, I actually like that a lot. I was thinking of something along the same lines.

Do you think it would be cool if there was a way for people to choose which lists to post their tweets to? Like, I follow some people who do research on type theory and I love their insights, but I really don't care what they've had for lunch, or if they find some cat picture funny. So maybe if there was a way for them to tag things in such a way that when I filter by "type theory" I only see their posts related to type theory and nothing else.

I like the idea in general, but my fear that it might be a bit too complicated for a lot of people? I think it's important to have a really simple and intuitive user interface, and something like that could just overcomplicate things.

I don't know, what do you think?

Guessing it was a nightmare to change it in their codebase so they axed it. Also, increasing the limit would probably add no additional value to their business.

I'd argue the opposite. With them recently changing Direct Messages to account for 10,000 characters, they know what it takes to make the changes.

They know what it means to make the change, but it's entirely different to change something like direct messages, which go from one person to another, and the millions of tweets sent every day.

Do the Twitter APIs support direct messages? I imagine that the ecosystem of Twitter clients, libraries, site scrapers, and related database schemas have hardcoded the 140 char limit in many unexpected places. :)

This is interesting to me. The 140 character limit definitely works for what Twitter does, but is it optimum? How would you even tell?

I love the long form messages that being in a place like HN allows you to have.

I also think that there's something unique to Twitter that being on HN does not provide. I can't quite articulate that yet, though. Would anyone using Twitter care to try?

I wonder how microblogging works in China/Japan?

With Kanji/Hanzi 140 character limit turns into a 140 word limit.

That's like a friggin essay.

That's an interesting point. How does the distribution of tweet lengths vary by language?

That would be a fun linguistic/NLP project to work on!

Most tweets that I see in English are pushing towards the boundary of the 140 character limit, which suggests to me that it's at best barely-sufficient to express ourselves. If it turns out that, say, most Chinese tweets are in the region of 100-120 characters then that would mean that using Hanzi they can express everything they want to say and still have space left over.

I would be quite keen to collaborate with someone on this.

You're making an excellent point about languages. 140 characters in French or German might not be enough to make a quick point, given how convoluted written French is supposed to be for instance ( I'm french ). "SMS writing" in french is almost like the worst offense possible to the language. I wonder what Balzac would have thought of Twitter.

I was just thinking about how it would work for German, which I speak to a certain extent. I suspect that, per-capita, twitter might be quite unpopular in Germany compared to other countries. Do a lot of people use it in France?

140 chars is great.. shouldn't change - but urls, images, and hashtags and @users shouldn't count (hashtags may have a limit of 5-10 per tweet but all of those should be consider meta-data about the tweet and who it's geared towards and who it personally addresses. The msg itself should remain 140 chars.

140 characters makes twitter unique. It shouldn't be used as a platform for long form stories. Other platforms already exist for that. I don't want another facebook. Maybe it takes some editing to make your thought fit, but it also forces you to cut out the fluff. I like that.

> 140 characters makes twitter unique. It shouldn't be used as a platform for long form stories

But it is (used as such). People try to have lengthy (arguments) discussions on Twitter. It ends up badly most often because people can't express themselves properly, the discussion lacks of context then it provokes outrage then people cry they are being "harassed" publicly. The way Twitter works cheapens communication. And when communication is reduced to the lowest common denominator anything can be considered harassement or insult. 140 characters works with SMS because people who send each other SMS usually are acquaintances, so there is some context. Publishing SMS out there in the wild is often a recipe for disaster. Now take any forum like this one. People don't know each other, however, they have enough space to at least attempt to convey their thoughts in an accurate way. I admit that the fact that is it a tech centered, well moderated forum helps to create a proper environment for discussion too.

With the Olympics and Presidential elections this year, this might be do or die for Twitter.

They're very relevant, but not in the ways they want to be.

People find out what happened on Twitter yesterday via the news the next day. Not while it's happening (which is how Twitter would like it).

A simple way to change the limit without changing the limit has been shared here before.

Profile name shouldn't count as part of the 140 character limit.

I don't know why but the title of this article sounds eerie and reminds me of something out of 1984.

I will keep boycotting and stick with Facebook Notes. RIP!

This seems like a silly thing to have an article about.

What next, are we going to have the news report when Fiverr changes the width of their "What are you looking for?" box to 361 pixels instead of 359 pixels to work around a browser display issue?

Or if Amazon adds a new dropdown menu to their product detail sidebar?

It's not silly because this is something that a lot of people care about. The other things you've mentioned are, obviously, completely irrelevant to most people.

Given twitter's popularity, it deserves X amount of attention. Now, the product itself has really few features, so each feature will be disproportionally analyzed, no matter how simple.

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