The fact that it took this long for them to make such an obvious change speaks to how afraid they are (were?) to challenge core assumptions about the product.
That said, I think most comments are missing the point - having attachments not take up characters really won't make the service any more useful to the mainstream... That's the real problem in my opinion.
It is better for the reader, not so for the writer. Because of that, I do not understand why they focus so much on getting more writers (login) than readers (views).
"follow me at _ on Twitter"
I have an unpopular view, but I'm firmly of the belief that all Twitter did was amplify the voice of celebrities - most of whom have not much to really say, made it easier for abusive speech to be targeted towards individuals and amplified moral outrage. Facebook has as well, but nowhere near as badly as Twitter.
Ironically, sometimes it's been for the better. But for every https://twitter.com/RabbiJason/status/728404847381204993 there is a https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/24046226568028979...
Sometimes you even get something like this:
https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313417655879102464
Edit: like I say, it's an unpopular view! If only someone would tell me why my view is wrong or unreasonable. In 140 characters...
Edit 2: It's suddenly occurred to me that if someone was able to give a highly convincing argument in favour of Twitter's ability to convey all complex arguments and views and did so with a lengthy response, but there was no way of distilling the message to 140 characters... would that invalidate it?
Your argument of Twitter being better when only programmers used it doesn't really apply if you only follow programmers, does it?
That's a fair point.
I follow several programmers (some internet famous, some merely who I've found from using a project they worked on or someone else's retweet), and through that, find it interesting to get a glimpse at what other people are doing or finding challenging, or see when there's buzz around some new technology in my space.
The other thing I find it useful for is local updates in my (relatively small) city. Traffic updates, road closures, police activity, events, etc. The local public works and city hall accounts are surprisingly active and often useful. I also follow a handful of restaurants nearby the office: they often tweet lunch specials.
I follow exactly zero mainstream celebrities, never look at 'Moments', 'trending', etc -- I find those things full of crap I simply don't care about at all.
Knowing strategies to avoid just nasty people is the main issue I have with it. Like, if you go into Twitter and see that you have a whole bunch of Gamer Gayers targeting you (just an example, I can't see how I would be a target!) then I'd imagine having no Twitter would be preferable to actually having a Twitter account!
Perhaps refrain from using childish insults like Gamer Gayers. Like attracts like.
Either way, yes, out of all the words to misspell, that one was quite unfortunate.
To some people it's so valuable to use as a means of participating in their community of choice that they're willing to keep using it despite severe harrasment.
Not being a woman gives you a big advantage against harrasment. But it can come from all sorts of weird places. My wife is a big Eurovision tweeter and encountered people who search for "Macedonia" to tweet Greek nationalist abuse at.
The change will be nice because it'll hopefully be easy to parse the metadata for attachments (images, url) and it should be more elegant to handle them in general than regexping them out.
What value do these services have 90% of their users but provide a throughline to celebrities?
Twitter is great for zeitgeist, silliness, mass-participation solidarity politics (this isn't very thoughtful, yes, but that's not always the most important thing), following live events, international fandoms, and kibitzing.
I eventually came to use 2 accounts, one anonymous, to interact with brands and personalities (but I repeat myself), and one personal, to keep up with people I knew first-hand. The former devolved into just ranting about everything that I found sub-optimal (usually about the .NET workflow for my day job), and the latter didn't generate enough interesting activity to care about. Both were just negative pressures on my daily activity, so I finally just shut down both.
Twitters troubles come from a misguided impression of what it is supposed to be, creating pressure on the product to not be what it in fact is.
Still I think the 140 character limit was in part due to their continued success; I know when I look at a tweet, I'm not going to get a 1000-word dissertatino on a subject - I will get bite-size pieces of info (for the most part, except for the multi-part diatribes or conversations, which I generally ignore).
Link anxiety is a real thing - I'm less likely to click if it's going to absorb my attention for 5m+.
edit: for the downvotes- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
But all of those, "Damn I made a typo or dumb spelling (thx mobile keyboard) and yet it has been replied to or re-tweeted already"... all of that is solved by edit with visible history.
Case 1:
I write "I love cats!" You RT it. I edit it to "I am Al Queda." The FBI visits you.
Case 2:
I write "I am Al Queda." I edit it to "I love cats!" before you see it. You like cats, too, so you RT it. The FBI has a slow feed, so they see that you endorsed my Al Queda membership. They pay you a visit.
---
From a systems point of view, when your whole stack is designed around immutability (so you can serve archives of past tweets from append-only CDNs, for example) it may be nigh impossible to add editing.
11
Then the question changes to an age related question. What is the ideal age of a prostitute?
We call that "learning".
It seems that one of the fundamental assumptions is that Tweets are immutable. Changing that could break all kinds of things and would probably their systems significantly more complicated.
Short of [mega star], few tweets see much favoriting/RTing in that window.