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Giving you more characters

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576 pointscoloneltcb473 comments

  In an effort to get people to look 
  into each other’s eyes more, 
  and also to appease the mutes, 
  the government has decided 
  to allot each person exactly one hundred   
  and sixty-seven words, per day. 
  
  When the phone rings, I put it to my ear   
  without saying hello. In the restaurant   
  I point at chicken noodle soup. 
  I am adjusting well to the new way. 

  Late at night, I call my long distance lover,   
  proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.   
  I saved the rest for you. 

  When she doesn’t respond, 
  I know she’s used up all her words,   
  so I slowly whisper I love you 
  thirty-two and a third times. 
  After that, we just sit on the line   
  and listen to each other breathe.
  
  The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel

For those (like me) on mobile who can't read this (well):

"In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.

"When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way.

"Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you.

"When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe."

The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel

Now I feel silly after having just read the parent comment on mobile by constantly scrolling left and right.

People could just use > like the internet has for ages:

> In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.

> When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way.

> Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you.

> When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.

- The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel

The author of the poem has most certainly made sure not to go over the daily word limit.

These are the words actually spoken in the poem:

> I only used fifty-nine today. = 5

> I saved the rest for you. = 6

> I love you * (32 1/3) = 96 + 1 = 97

The remainder of the words are thoughts which don't add to the daily count.

Plus the author had already used 59 words earlier in the day.

So if we add it all up:

       5
       6
      97
      59
    ----
     167 words total 
    ----

This. This is the reason I love HN :)

He saved all his 167 words for the girl but she didn't.

Surely they set the word limit afterwards, yes?

I was disappointed to find this poem didn't have exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words.

It's kind of weird that it doesn't. You could so easily change the "sixty-seven" to "twenty-five".

At first I didnt understand why either, but looking at poem more and thinking about if I were writing it; I think he did it so he could use the "Thirty two and a third" line. It's much more dramatic and stimulating ("...I love you, I...") than just saying "twenty-five times".

Edit: Oops, I think I screwed up my math. It would be 22 times.

Edit: misquoted! worked in a record store too long. :)

Maybe the author already used the other 42 words for the day.

The poet saved 42 words for later.

Sort of related, but on a more humorous note, a short film about a man who has only 1500 words left to live:

https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2016/05/25/1500-words/

Please don't use code blocks for anything but code; they're unreadable on mobile.

In this case, it makes sense because the author was trying to preserve the line breaks in the original poem, which give cadence to the writing and are integral to the work.

Don't blame the commenter. Blame HN for having broken <pre> blocks (or at least for consuming single line breaks otherwise).

At least the GP used short lines... I hate those single-line code-blocked long comments.

A gift for you: https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmVARCKc4tqh82csydiAQ2JVmvvKeckm...

I see this more and more. Why is there a recent trend to use codeblocks instead of > ? Is there a popular platform where codeblocks are quotes?

I think you (and many valiant others) are fighting a losing battle here. God forbid HN should allow a quote style, that'd be so bloaty.

Really powerful text. Can't remember when last time couple of words touched me like those.

May I suggest this reading of a Charles Bukowski poem. It's helped me to get out of bed a number of times, when the days look so foreboding. http://youtu.be/yVisTfbVSFE

> When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello.

Actually I often do this with unknown callers, it usually confuse them especially when it's advertisement, they usually wait for someone to speak up, but at least it's easier way to save your breathe if someone who is calling you doesn't even know your name to ask "is mr. XY there?", then you can just hang up.

Beautiful and prophetic. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you very much for sharing. Touching. Did not expect something like this in the comment section. You definitely made my day with this beautiful poem.

Great poem. And what I like about HN is that the first dozens of comments on the poem are about technicalities like how it is displayed in the browser, the mathmatics of it etc., not its interpretation :-)

haha, full disclosure I took a screenshot of this comment because it epitomizes HN in a way that made my day

Thank you for bring that to my attention. It's really rather lovely.

it's great seeing a poem by a poet i know.

for the record, jeffrey mcdaniel is also a fantastic performer, so if you get a chance to see him recite, don't sleep on it.

spell bounding!

I'm not sure what to make of this.

I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc?

Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it.

I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 140 characters that matters, it's also all the other times when people don't feel social pressure to write up longer, perhaps more thoughtful messages, that's important here.

I agree with you that the 140 is iconic and it's probably not a good idea to abandon it. What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.

That way you don't lose the iconic 140 characters thing, and you don't have any problem to solve by making weird compromises where the user names or media URLs don't count toward the 140, blurring the lines of what 140 means and losing the "creativity loves constraints" factor.

> What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.

How is that elegant?

>What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.

Indeed, especially as people have been already doing this by sharing longer posts as pictures of text

And reversely, it's incredibly creative for Trump to attempt to fit the entire USA diplomacy in 140 characters.

Articles with good titles/descriptions/images are already beautifully embedded as cards.

So having a medium(or any other) blog that automatically posts links to twitter is the perfect solution to this, I think.

Better solution is to let users solve a complicated CAPTCHA when they want to tweet longer messages. That way, there is no social pressure to make long tweets (no reasonable person can pressure you to solve boring CAPTCHAs), while it's still there if you need it.

Or, phrased differently, they should make it harder to tweet longer messages.

> the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition

It was related to the core of their value proposition when that was “microblogging that can be updated and recieved over SMS”. Now, its just legacy.

I feel like the core value proposition is something like "public expressions that can be consumed quickly and produced with little forethought". I think it's important that Twitter gives you the excuse to be less precise: there isn't enough space.

It's a small thing sure, but if you look at the differences between the popular social platforms, it's all about small differences. If Twitter loses that which distinguishes it from everyone else, that may give them an initial boost when it's a new feature, but then the novelty will wear off and maybe they will have lost what makes them unique.

I'd like to compare this to Hollywood. It feels like the kind of alteration a studio might come up with by relentlessly screen-testing a movie using test audiences. It's one way to guarantee a bland, non-specific result, that won't command any lasting mindshare.

Clearly moving from 140 characters to 280 characters isn't yet that just-like-everything-else end result, but it somehow feels like a step in that direction to me.

Twitter with no character limit is just a blog site. There are plenty of blog sites, none of them close to as successful as Twitter. The character limit is key to holding on to the modern zero-attention-span user.

The exact number 140 is legacy, but the super-brief "microblogging" format is vital.

Things fall into place by accident. I'd say there's no telling what would happen.

Imagine what this is going to do to president Trump. His short quips had a striking impact. He'll never again need to end a message with the one word sentence "JOBS!"

It's hard to compress your thoughts and present it in limited time or space while still keeping its essence and power. This is why lot of tweets are iconic: They are presentation of very strong ideas and opinions in tiny amount of space. You can wear them on t-shirt or thumb it out on smartphone while using just few seconds you have. Larger char limit means diminishing of this quality from writers part and also higher cost from readers part. The 140 chars might be accidental limit but it was just the right balance given the amount of tweets that already exists and able to express intent in that much space.

Nah. It is still very valuable for readers in that it forces concision. It keeps the "micro" in microblogging.

Remember that the 140 count was based on SMS (160 total, giving 20 for the handle and a colon). It wasn't a randomly picked number.

It also correlates to the # of characters Google allows in it's headlines.

It's worth noting that there is something to the # of characters a human can scan & understand without turning it's full focus to it.

I don't use Twitter myself, but I think the reason behind the limit is that SMS can send 140 bytes in each message. When sending regular text messages a 7-bit alphabet is usually used, for 160 characters in total.

> the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it.

I had similar thoughts when Snapchat started introducing their (now many) non-ephemeral features, but I was proved wrong at every turn.

My first thought is that this guy is going to have to buy a lot more paper now: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/3/28/15102170/donald-trum...

>it's at the core of their value proposition

Is it?

Mastodon [0] has a default character limit of 500, which individual instances can turn up or down as they see fit (Mastodon is a federated network). Hundreds of thousands of people use it and the social dynamics work just fine, or even better, with the additional breathing room for expression. To me Twitter's attachment to such a low cap feels like an anachronism.

[0] https://joinmastodon.org

I've been using it for about 2 weeks now and I love it. If you pick a cool instance related to your interests and toot to your liking, you often get responses almost instantly from people reading the local and federated timelines, and you get tons of new people to follow as well. It just feels so much more open to meeting new people than Twitter does.

It doesn't just feel like an anachronism, it is one. The cap was chosen to conform to the 160 character limit of SMS (140 characters in the tweet and 20 characters for your Twitter handle).

Very cool but too nerdy.

Visiting that site requires clicking "Get Started" which then directs you to a list of instances, from which you choose a server and sign up (not sure because in the age of 140 chars don't have the attention span to follow through). Without doing that there's no content short of a bunch of reasons why Mastodon is open and free, but the average user doesn't care about that. It's kind of preaching to the choir which means that the choir is gonna dominate it.

Maybe the goal isn't mass adoption, or maybe adoption would be a long term result of smaller communities getting popular, but wish it'd just get to the product a lot quicker than it does.

You could point people to https://mastodon.social, the "flagship" instance, or directly to any other instance's homepage. There's something of a word-of-mouth aspect here, in that instances targeted toward particular communities can be more attractive to people within those communities than general-purpose social networks.

There's an instance chooser wizard at https://instances.social/, but I can see someone looking at that and calling it too complicated as well.

Do you need to have an account to lurk around a mastodon instance?

Mastoview is a tool for previewing Mastodon instances without signing up: http://www.unmung.com/mastoview

It helps. But now, if you scroll down on the generic signup page that each instance greets you with, there's a "look inside" box with recent messages from users of that instance.

Rapidly approaching a million accounts

I really wanted to like Mastodon, but their "default" instance is just too restrictive on speech. It's basically a tumblrina safe space network. I'm saying this as a mostly-liberal, not your average OMG LIBTARDS ARE SNOWFLAKES person.

If a social network, even a federated one, wants to gain traction, it needs to be a bit more open. Yeah, nazis are obnoxious assholes, but I'd rather have a network with them on it (and just ignore them) than have to constantly worry "am I saying the 'wrong thing'??" each time I post something.

I mean, the whole point of distribution seems to be that you can say what you want and it can't get shut down. Mastodon's ideals are at odds with its goals, IMO.

Then you don't understand what distribution means. If you want to use mastodon you don't have to go to the main instance, you can go to another instance that allows what you want. Theresr httsp://instances.social to help you with that. Here's the result:

https://instances.social/list#lang=en&allowed=racism,hateSpe...

And if you really don't find an instance to your liking here, that means you should open one that is moderated exactly the way you want.

Say the flagship instance was a free speech one, what do you think would be the consequences

> but their "default" instance is just too restrictive on speech. It's basically a tumblrina safe space network

To some people, that's a selling point!

And if you don't like it, join another instance!

It would seem to me that the solution to the problem described in the blog would be to reduce the number of characters allowed for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese users. The whole appeal of twitter, I thought, was if you said what you wanted to say the system forced you to reconsider how you said it until you got down to the bare essence of what you were trying to convey. I'd be in favor of a maximum number of tweets per day, too.

They found out that Japanese Twitter users don’t run up against the character limit, and are less frustrated as a result. The point is to make everybody else less frustrated, not to make the Japanese as frustrated as everybody else.

Yeah, you can type a lot more in Japanese. Most characters stand for at least two US characters, which is most likely how they came up with the 2x decision.

Found the UX designer in this sea of clueless engineers

A lot of Japanese people use Twitter quite effectively as a micro-blog. This is harder in English because of the character counts. So it could be that "Japanese-style twitter" is the true product vision, and it's not working in English The original 140-character constraint was an external restriction from formatting, it could be that 280-characters is, in fact, the "right" number of characters for the service they want.

So many people complain about the overly-terse nature of tweets. This can help tackle this and get to a better product.

You're missing the fact that Twitter's engagement is way higher in East Asian countries and that's because they can pretty much use Twitter as a normal blog. On the other hand in the countries with very long words (like Hungary and Finland) Twitter is not very popular. It's been clear for a while and I'm surprised they haven't implemented this sooner.

Must be true, as a native speaker of Croatian, I find most Tweets in English understandable, not in Croatian, however. People tend to send 4 or 5 tweets instead.

Doing this distillation seemed to be too much trouble for many users. You see people splitting things to multiple tweets, using images or simply posting links.

Trying to for example summarise interesting stuff you seen online to 140 chars is hard. Every increment in the character count makes it a bit easier. 140 to 280 has much larger effect that say 280 to 420, so I don't see slippery sloap here.

Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint. The limit for Asian languages should have been adjusted downwards as early as Twitter launched (though I suppose that's actually somewhat hard to do from a technological viewpoint, as people might mix Western letters and Asian symbols).

And then they point out that in Asian countries people tweet more, so alright, who cares about history, do what works best. But you shouldn't just be looking at how many tweets are written. People are going to post more, just because it's easier to post something. That doesn't mean that people actually read these longer tweets just as much. Like, there is a feedback loop here, people would also start to tweet less, if they didn't bother reading tweets, because many tweets are also responses to other tweets, but still, this reasoning seems quite a bit oversimplified.

>"Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint."

I don't believe this is correct but rather 140 characters limit was chosen because SMS will break a message greater than 160 characters into two messages. 140 characters leaves 20 characters for a username.

In Japan at least, the anonymity factor was at least as strong as the information density factor (TWTR > FB for a very long time there because people there generally don't want to tie their irl identities to online accounts).

The 140 character limit was chosen based on sending 8bit SMS messages. If it was chosen from an English speaking viewpoint, they could have chosen to base it on GSM 7bit SMS, which would allow 160 characters.

Was the default SMS 8bit in the US at the time or?

Asian languages would require UCS2 encoded SMS messages, which can contain 70 characters as far as I remember.

When I type an actual SMS, the 160 limit seems to be reduced if I add non-English characters, like emoji or possibly even just an em-dash. So they could simply have followed SMS more closely, 140 bytes or something.

From the standpoint of not wanting to alienate users, I can see why they might be hesitant to go this route; it's much more likely to piss people off if you take away some of their characters rather than giving them more.

There is precedent of treating CJK characters as "double-width", but it's anachronistic in a world of proportional fonts and UTF-8.

CJK users also don't use CJK characters exclusively. There's almost always single-byte characters mixed in, such as URLs and numbers, and in the case of Korean, even punctuation. If some characters count as 1 and others count as 2, it will result in fluctuating limits that are hard to grasp intuitively.

If you used CJK before UTF-8 was popular, you would know that people had absolutely no issue counting some characters as 2. It’s entirely natural. In typical proportional fonts CJK characters still occupy about twice the width of a Latin character.

> the system forced you to reconsider how you said it until you got down to the bare essence of what you were trying to convey

... and stripping away context and nuance, and ultimately providing such a paucity that people these days have trouble recognising context and nuance. Twitter's played a major hand in the damage to people's attention spans and ability to interpret communications effectively. Recognising subtext no longer seems to be a thing anymore.

> Twitter's played a major hand in the damage to people's attention spans and ability to interpret communications effectively.

That, right there, is going to need a hefty wallop of [citation needed].

Most of the original design intent that made Twitter great has been washed away by employee turnover.

>> I'd be in favor of a maximum number of tweets per day, too.

A while back, I spent a few days hashing out a concept for a social network that would impose posting limits. The initial obvious approach is a single post per 24 hours, to really make each person think about whether hitting send is worth it. However, I cast this aside as being too restrictive.

Introducing the concept of categories: you can post once per 24 hours, but per user-defined category, up to some maximum category limit per account. You could post once about your cooking hobby, once about your programming hobby/career, once about the news, etc. Your followers could subscribe or unsubscribe to your individual categories; someone can opt to see your cooking and news posts, but ignore your posts about programming.

The concept starts to collapse at the "policing" stage. People would cheat by using all of their categories to spam a single topic, or to bypass followers' unsubscribing from a topic they just must be heard on. This necessitates a moderation system whereby followers could vote on posts, or report those which are miscategorized. With such a system in place, the possibility exists to increase the limit to 2-3 posts per day in categories for which someone receives overwhelmingly positive (or nonnegative) feedback. Dealing with users' and bots' vote manipulation is of course a never-ending battle.

The concept completely disintegrates when you consider who, as a publisher of content, would choose such a platform. A lot of people love sharing their every thought, meal, personality test, quiz, BuzzFeed article, etc. Such people would never opt in to a platform that limits their ability to do so - and why should they? Companies, celebrities, and other popular figures rightfully depend on being able to communicate whenever it suits them, so this concept is utterly useless to them.

Thus the market is tiny, to the point of being non-existent, for limiting the publishing side of the equation. This pushes the entire problem to the side of the readers/followers. We as consumers really just want to be able to intricately tailor what we see. I'm hoping we will soon have AI that can appropriately categorize posts, so I can filter out every single post having to do with personality tests and quizzes, BuzzFeed-like links, anything and everything having to do with US politics (I'm not American), animal abuse (I'm really tired of "save the animals"), and the constant stream of photos from new parents parading their children. I stopped using FaceBook entirely because their filtering options are just not adequate. Nor do I expect FaceBook to ever offer such filtering, as it would nullify all the mindless drivel that keeps their users engaged with their platform.

Lastly, I considered a monetization strategy whereby a user could pay (heavily) to post above their allocated limit. It sounds useful if you imagine people using it very rarely to push out that one extra gem that surely all followers would love to see. Of course, "pay to play" has no place in a social network designed to reduce the number of posts, and I couldn't come up with a solution to have my cake and eat it too. A "pay per post" strategy would be the foundation of a standalone concept - one for which no market exists.

tldr; A social network that limits publishers' ability to maximize engagement will never gain traction. What we need, as consumers of social networking, is the ability to perform advanced categorization and filtering of existing content. Don't get your hopes up - FaceBook and Twitter will never allow us to skip straight to the "good stuff", as viewing only a dozen posts a day would decimate their engagement stats, including ad views.

Lots of cynicism around here. For me, the 140 character limit really was very frustrating. I tweet rarely, but when I do I often spend 2-3 minutes trying to fit the message into the character limit. Often I just abandon it completely because there's no way to make it fit without having to send multiple messages.

This change seems completely reasonable to me, if not a bit delayed.

Making people stop and think, and sometimes abandon what they were going to say, is a really good aspect of Twitter.

Doesn't seem to be working, does it? I'm a fairly verbose person and nothing I ever want to say fits in 140 characters. And the stuff I see on twitter that DOES fit into 140, well, I'm typically better off not reading it. (222 characters)

Absolutely. That drive toward concision is what makes it hugely valuable to me as a reader. If people want to write something longer elsewhere and link to it, they can. But even there they need to precisely summarize it so I can decide whether it's worth the time.

That doesn't work, Twitter is swamped with very talkative persons.

For me that writing process was the most fun. Trying to get an idea to fit in 140 characters and still be grammatically correct is a pleasant challenge. Expanding the character limit may make that easier and therefore less fun - or maybe it'll just give more characters to edit and rearrange.

They gave the statistic that 9% of tweets were at the character limit. That's the wrong statistic though. What they need to check is something like "met or exceeded the limit during composition" because I'd suppose that more tweets are affected by the limit than only 9%. Most of those affected tweets are simply pared down to less than 140 characters.

Maybe that's because you're trying to say something meaningful on a platform designed to limit expression to meaningless quips?

I don't know...the 140 character limit forced you to be creative in how you condensed your thoughts, but it also provided an easy-to-consume stream of content for readers. My fear is that by doubling the limit, that stream is going to take more effort to consume and lose its differentiation from Facebook.

数千字で書く方が、二十六字だけで書く方より効率的だ。(26 characters)

Writing with thousands of characters is more efficient than writing with just 26. (82 characters)

I admit my Japanese is not so great, and the comparison is somewhat unfair because of the subtleties of counting the characters. Still, the point here is that Twitter is more constrained in some languages than in others. If people are not having the problem you described in China or Japan maybe the problem is not too terrible...

I'm convinced there is no one at twitter that understands why they succeeded as a company. Their management team continually makes decisions that are reminiscent of shuffling around deck chairs on the titanic. I get the feeling that they only exist due to inertia which is a death sentence for most tech companies.

No one in silicon valley will say the reason, but it's blindingly obvious. It was dumb luck. Luck plays a part in every success and failure and Twitter was about 98% luck. There was and is no vision or strategy that explains this. No lessons to learn. Pure zeitgeist that is bound to crumble sometime after Trump leaves office.

I think it was a convergence of luck, the solving of a specific problem that was relevant at the time (sms messages), well timed celebrity adoption (Shaq was an early twitter user) and the idiosyncratic constraint of 140 characters which distinguished the platform from alternatives and contributed to a unique feel.

It's large part luck, but the particular features play a role, too.

Reminds me of Zuckerberg's famous quote about Twitter: "... a clown car that fell into a gold mine."

They turned dumb phones into smart phones which was pretty amazing back when they launched.

No one understands why they succeeded as a company. They haven't. They created a really popular product. That's completely different from succeeding as a company.

This blog post and Jack's subsequent praise of all the hard work that went into this groundbreaking product decision is exactly why they haven't succeeded yet as a company.

> they succeeded as a company

10 years alive, still no profit.

As a company it did not succeed at all.

So why did they succeed, and how can they leverage that for user growth?

Early evidence that it is a mistake:

OH HOLY SHIT. I figured out what we should do with the new 140 characters.

´•._.•´¯`•._.•´Forum Signatures Are Back Baby`•._.•´¯`•.¸¸.•´

https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/912793201592999936

Oh nononononono.

Reading the 280 test page feels odd. It kills the instantaneous feel of 140chars. The 280 ones feel like engaging a different part of your brain.

I think they should try to allow easier creation and reading of "thread" (when one user starts a long stream, while keeping the 140 char base.

apparently they're working on a built-in threading tool: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-button/

280 would be the absolute maximum. I think their hope is that the number of English tweets that reach that amount is very low; at the same time they allow users to tweet easier.

It is clear that people want to use Twitter to say things longer than 140 characters as the rise in popularity of long threaded Tweets would attest. It is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their iconic 140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform.

> It is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their iconic 140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform.

They don’t: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-button/

One of those options was announced publicly with an official blog post and one of them was slipped into an app unannounced likely as part of a/b testing. Maybe they eventually implement both, but at this moment their preference between the two is clear.

In the very early days of Gmail (2005-ish) they had a constantly-increasing ticker on the front page showing you how many bytes of storage your account had access to. In my head I'm imagining such a ticker on Twitter's home page as well, but ticking up to show you how many characters your tweets can be. Given their current rate, the ticker would be incrementing at 0.00000037 characters per second. This way we'd have access to 281 characters by next month!

Twitter seems to have the worst luck/timing when it comes to 'new features'. Last time it was

    Users: Please help get rid of these nazis
    Twitter: ROUND PROFILE PICS!

this time its

    Users: Please help prevent nuclear war
    Twitter: HOW ABOUT LONGER TWEETS!

Because otherwise the role of Twitter is thwarting nazis and preventing nuclear war?

Sadly, these days it seems that the tech companies have become the content police :sigh:

The only thing worse is that there are people crying out for it.

Hey, I'm not sure what they can or should do about these things. Just pointing out they seems to have the worst timing.

Because their service is being used to further negative outcomes. Their job isn’t directly stopping Nazis any more than a bar owner’s primary job is stopping drunk drivers but that doesn’t mean they aren’t fueling the problems, especially given their tendency to skimp on actually enforcing their TOS.

I can't believe I'm writing this, but given the current modes of political communication in the US longer tweets may prevent nuclear war...

They could do their bit in preventing nuclear war by banning a couple of users.

Don't think it's a trump thing , or even something specific to the US. I remember a few years ago, our french prime minister tweeted his condolences to the victim of a terror attack in France.

Indeed. If you recall when Trump announced his transgender ban on the military, he had a ten minute delay between part one and the actual subject of the message.

"After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow....."

During those ten minutes, even folks at the Pentagon were wondering if Trump was about to announce a strike on a foreign power or something of that gravity... and surely folks in other countries' governments were wondering the same.

A cut-off tweet could, indeed, lead someone to believe a strike is imminent.

Well, Twitter is not going to kill itself for the welling being of mankind after all....

Why code block, whyyyyyy PITA on mobile :(

How is Twitter gonna make Kim and Trump not crazy narcissists? Trump is Twitter in its purest form.

madeofpalk 59 minutes ago | undown [-]

Twitter seems to have the worst luck/timing when it comes to 'new features'. Last time it was

> Users: Please help get rid of these nazis

> Twitter: ROUND PROFILE PICS!

this time its

> Users: Please help prevent nuclear war

> Twitter: HOW ABOUT LONGER TWEETS!

Peter Theil once said "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters". Looks like that 140 characters limit have now doubled.

Peter Theil says lots of things.

many of them very dumb

Peter Thiel also said that

That's a bold move by Twitter. I can't help but feel it is out of desperation

Ex-twitter eng here. Twitter has been debating this change internally for at least 5 years now. They were afraid to pull the trigger because no one inside knows why they've had the success that they've had and they're afraid to change too much (lest they pull a Digg).

This move isn't made out of desperation, but it's probably being done right now because they've nothing to lose by randomly trying things.

Some might even call it 'courageous'.

That's not bold by any definition of the word I know...

All of Twitter has immediately gone for the "I would rather have no Nazis" joke.

Is it a joke?

In the "ha ha only serious" vein, I suppose.

This doesn't solve the main pain points with length (megathreads and screenshots for quotes), but harms brevity that made Twitter varied and quick to read.

People post huge "threads", which are a UI mess, and are much much longer than 280 chars. So now instead of "[1/15] Thread…" we'll have "[1/7] Thread…" rants. And people post screenshots of articles which again are longer than 280 chars.

Twitter used to float idea of 10K limit: https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/140-to-10k/ A 10K char "attachment" to a tweet would have allowed people to stuff their megathreads and articles there.

Good.

Twitter needs to keep moving forward. There have been several features that feel like the core of their platform, but based on their revenue growth, they may be holding them back. Personally, eh, 280-length tweets feel weird and long and I don't see the need, but I'll probably get over it. If they can change how Twitter is used open up new audiences and conversations, this is good.

They are trying something big, and that is Good.

The character limit is a core aspect of what makes consuming content on Twitter so engaging vs. other platforms.

Will this change improve engagement number or ad revenue? I sincerely doubt it.

An actual useful change would be versioning functionality so that users can edit tweets to correct typos or factual errors while not erasing the record.

Twitter will not implement the ability to edit tweets. tweet text being immutable is one of their data model core tenets:

https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-...

Have they gone into any detail about how exactly they're going to enforce different limits for different languages? If it's by the localization of your browser/app, what's stopping someone from changing their language to English and then typing 280 Japanese characters? If it's by doing some sort of language recognition on the tweet, how will it deal with mixed content?

They could do something like this:

280 character limit.

1 Japanese character counts as 2 characters.

If you have the Japanese locale, the limit is still visually displayed at 140, and your displayed count is halved (and rounded down).

Is punctuation or whitespace commonly used in Japanese tweets? If so, that seems like it would make the limit somewhat variable

The code counts all CJK characters twice.

Sometimes, things that look obvious and simple require a lot of work and research to build so that it will fit the product and won't damage the community and momentum.

This isn't one of those times. Seriously, what in the world took so long.

I wish it would take longer, because frankly it's a dumb idea. It defeats the purpose of Twitter.

It’s also dumb when I have to read 3 tweets in a sequence by the same person trying to get a single point across, each one with a different set of comments, likes, and retweets.

Im not sure this will fix it though, maybe it will help. I feel like the same could be accomplished with an expando at whatever limit they set. That way when I browse twitter the tweet boxes are still the same size as originally, and if i want to read more I can tap the expand box button.

Yet Twitter is much more popular in Japan, where the higher information density of the written language effectively gave them this feature from the start.

Can someone explain this:

"But in English, a much higher percentage of Tweets have 140 characters (9%). Most Japanese Tweets are 15 characters while most English Tweets are 34"

Why is 34 characters considered most tweets when the chart shows 140 characters higher than "34"? As labeled, the hump is lower than spike at 140 characters.

What am I missing?

Edit: Is the author saying the mode is 34?

This confused me as well. The chart leaves much to be desired if the quote is accurate.

They might be binning the data to form those conclusions (because you are right, the graph does not support those statements). If they bin at each character +/- 5 characters it looks like 34 (+/-5) would be max.

Everyone is criticizing this decision, but I think it's useful to point out that I've heard a lot of users say that Japanese Twitter has significantly fewer misunderstandings and toxicity and is a generally friendlier place than English Twitter.

This might be a lot of the reason Twitter is trying this out.

I bet it's just Japanese culture itself, not Japanese Twitter.

worth noting that the 160 char limit on SMS was a product of thoughtful design, and user-centric deliberation, not arbitrary: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-...

I wish Twitter had the same commitment. Or at least hired product people who used the service.

The 160 character limit was a balance between "limit should be as low as possible for bandwidth reasons" and "users must be able to express simple messages". The former isn't an issue anymore, so there's not longer any obvious reason why 160 should be the limit.

Did you even read the blog?

The increase wasn't arbitrary. And neither is the initial 140 limit...

Originally, our constraint was 160 (limit of a text) minus username. But we noticed @biz got 1 more than @jack. For fairness, we chose 140. Now texts are unlimited. Also, we realize that 140 isn't fair—there are differences between languages. We're testing the limits. Hello 280!

https://twitter.com/biz/status/912783936123691009

According to your article, 160 characters was a product of technical limitations later justified by postcard and Telex research, not the other way around as you claim.

We don't need 140 characters. They could solve this a dozen other ways including:

* Not counting links as characters.

* Not including images as characters.

* Improving tweet-storm capabilities.

* Improve threading + response mechanisms.

This is the easiest + worst improvement they could do. I hope it's not permanent.

* Links are 20 characters, flat (could be less, but users would spam 100+ links).

* Images aren't counted (unless they come from links).

* @handles were moved out of the text for replies.

* Threads have improved a lot over the past year.

* Thread composer is apparently on it's way.

Just don't follow spam accounts? Not that hard...

* Improving tweet-storm capabilities.

That's what they just did.

* Not counting links as characters.

Oh, think of the spam.

Literally just don't follow spam accounts?

https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=tweet_length&type...

I wanna make a PR bot that just changes every instance 140 to 280 for every repo that has the word Tweet on Github.

Presumably there are going to be a lot of broken 3rd party plugins on people’s sites(design wise at a minimum). Should there have been more of a warning period?

>Presumably there are going to be a lot of broken 3rd party plugins on people’s sites

even worse, buffer overflows

> We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).

If the only justification they had was that three languages can convey more information than the rest why not reduce the characters for the three "cramming" languages?

Well, their idea is to increase the amount of communication _per tweet_.

A few years ago I suggested Twitter should roll out an optional $1-per-month plan to let users tweet 280 characters.¹ If 10% of their MAU sign up, this would up their revenue by 17% (extra $400M yearly.)

¹ http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month...

You do realize the credit card processing fee on a $1 purchase is ~$0.40?

Batch the monthly payments into one $12 yearly payment.

> If 10% of their MAU sign up,

I'd bet <1% would actually sign up.

Japanese/Chinese only “fit” in 140 because of the way they count “characters”.

280 for alphabetic languages seems roughly equivalent.

A Chinese character is much more dense than two roman letters. When I was texting in china during the SMS phase, I got around 16 or maybe 20 characters before it was broken into extra messages.

…huh? It should be able to fit 70 characters (70 UCS-2 characters is 140 bytes, which is the SMS message limit).

In the interest of being fair, let's compare bytes:

日日是好日 (15 bytes)

Every day is a good day (23 bytes)

It's not just how one counts "characters;" some languages are written more compactly than others. I would not be surprised if Hebrew is also a bit more compact than English, as it is typically written without vowels.

I like it. Will reduce the amount of 1 out of X tweets from the same person. It will allow tweets to become quite a bit more expressive, without becoming Facebook-like novels. And hey, when Twitter doesn't try new stuff, people complain. When Twitter does, they complain as well.

PS: This post would perfectly fit in a next-gen tweet ;)

Your PS is a statement whose existence makes itself false. Kind of like "This page intentionally left blank."

My only concern is I really appreciate zero fluff when browsing whatever.

I imagine this will be abused a little bit. Not a big deal since there's images, gifs, video, and polls to grab your eye. Just slightly annoying.

For example:

```

BREAKING

Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet Consectetur Adipisicing Elit Sed Do Eiusmod Temp - http://example.com

```

This is as earth shattering as when Macromedia Director went from 24 layers to 48 layers!!!

Yet Director still didn't have enough layers to make an animated map of all 50 United States of America (or a car insurance turkey with 50 clickable tail feathers). So we got Flash!

And in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images containing large blocks of text which is worse for everyone than just removing length limits.

> And in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images containing large blocks of text

The blog post explains how that’s not true with their Japanese example:

> Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese.

If Japanese people feel they have enough space to write their thoughts, why wouldn’t the English ones with a bit more space?

The point is that their analysis is garbage. They looked at the length of tweets, and what percentage of tweets hit the 140 character limit. But the reality is that users impacted by the limit either send multiple tweets (1/n, 2/n, ... n/n) or attach an image containing a block of text. How do you measure that?

The irony is that both Biz's [1] and Jack's [2] tweets announcing the change could convey the same message with a third of the characters. In fact, they'd be better written. The need to carefully think, rethink, edit, and reedit your tweets so they fit in the limit lead to much higher quality.

[1] https://twitter.com/biz/status/912783936123691009

[2] https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824

example of how it could be better written in 140: https://twitter.com/brianrbarone/status/912788388150960130

https://twitter.com/DocPop/status/912799932829929472

Luckily the demoscene graphics showcase platform https://www.dwitter.net still enforces the 140 character limit! Keepon making those webgl canvas graphics!

And let's not forget http://tinytocs.org, a CS journal whose article bodies must fit into 140 characters.

this basically reads as:

"We didn't grow at all last quarter, but things here at Twitter are A-OKAY (please belive us)! We can still grow, all we need to do is destroy/modify the one thing that made us unique and successful!"

If the only thing that makes you unique and successful is a technical limitation that dates back to text messages, it’s probably time to move on.

I remember reading the story of an ex-twitter employee who was not very happy about innovating with "140 characters". People learned the art of crafting content with 140 character. Many of the reply-to-self and 1/2 tweets are going to be history. So does people write on the notes, screenshot and share. I believe it's more about building a better graph with more content intake, than giving voice to express. Twitter is always a tool polished by its users and several inventions made due to constraints. Let's see how people are going to take the 2x tweets.

Factoid of the day: the 140-char limit originates from the SS7 MAP signalling protocol used for SMS, which allows a message payload of precisely 140 bytes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS

You can actually cram up to 160 characters into an SMS if you use a 7-bit character set, but Twitter apparently wanted to support European languages and went with the 8-bit version. However, allowing 140 double-byte chars (Chinese etc) blows through the actual limit of 80, requiring concatenated SMS to send.

I thought the extra 20 was for the originator's username.

I’m glad Twitter is changing things up. Technically this means doubling everything (database, cache, etc) which I imagine was an undertaking.

But...

Is this really what’s preventing Twitter from growing? I don’t think so.

I use twitter for both personal and company reasons and I can see how it’d help the latter. I don’t see how it helps the former. To me, the whole purpose of the feed is to get the “gist”. 280 characters is wayyy more than that.

I wish they spent their efforts on improving/building useful things (including better targeting for ads) or bring back the tweet counts.

So congrats, but to me it’s a sign things aren’t chirping anymore.

I've often wondered what effect, if any, the higher information density of Chinese/Japanese/Korean has on peoples' minds and the way people think. Anyone ever heard of any studies on this?

This type of announcement needs to come from the CEO, not a product manager.

Product managers execute the vision of the CEO and the company in general. Why do you think they don't deserve to announce something major?

Because this is more important than something you delegate. It's the biggest change to the company since the company was created. It's not like Twitter does 10 products, and it's like "bring Phil up to talk about this one". This is Twitter. If it was discussing random licensing deals with the NFL, fine, you can, and probably should, delegate that in order to signal its relative importance. But for this to be treated like something of that magnitude is wrong.

This is an experiment with a small group of users; it’s not affecting everyone.

Huh, I am in that group, and I have no clue how I got there, why, nor how do I get out.

Proof I guess: https://twitter.com/r3bl_/status/912800305833799686

Any reason not to simplify that measure and make it 280 chars for all? They might not use it in Japan but what's the point of limiting them if they apparently don't use the space anyway?

Forcing brevity is the whole point of twitter. They've found that they are limiting the English twitter with 140 characters, but 140 characters seems to be working well for Japanese.

They should make Chinese, Japanese and Korean tweets shorter instead.

Another cool feature could be not enabling people to start nuclear war on the service.

This might get down voted as trolling, but the real trolling is going on between Donald Trump and North Korea. The fact that twitter continues to allow the racism, bigotry, sexism, antisemitism, climate change denial and warmongering of the most high profile account they have to go unchecked is ridiculously unethical. Instead of taking a stand against the erosion of Western ethical standards they're profiting from it

Are you kidding? You really think that Twitter should be censoring the president of the United States?

That is beyond ridiculous. His tweets are instantly newsworthy - would you object to CNN writing about them?

And if you've gotten to the point where your political philosophy is to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, you've basically removed all possibility of ever understanding about half the people in the country.

Surely there's a distinction to be made between a government censoring its citizens free-speech, and a private service allowing The most powerful man in the world to use its platform to excuse white-supremacists and increase tension between hostile nuclear powers?

Surely?

This is not censorship we're talking about, and it's not free-speech. It's about having a set of rules on your social network and enforcing those rules. Unfortunately, twitter seems to have none.

> You really think that Twitter should be censoring the president of the United States?

Given his output that frequently and flagrantly breaks their TOC? Yes. And I'd go further - they should permaban him for the things he's repeatedly said over the last 5 years.

I'm currently living in China, and I see things disappear from social media ALL THE TIME. It's not pleasant or proper, it's just scary to have someone else decide what you can or cannot see.

Say whatever you want, I'll make my own decisions about whether I'll believe you, hopefully without the aid of censorship, thank you very much.

Honestly, I don't see why they shouldn't change to 280 characters. I mean, Mastodon instances allow 500 by default, Gab.ai allows 300 by default...

And neither find it takes away from the microblogging aspect one bit. Pretty sure a lot of other Twitter alternatives allow for messages of around those sizes too.

Yes, it means doing away with a bit of tradition. But generally, my experience there is that the tiny amount of characters has hurt more than its helped. So easy to lose necessary context in that space.

So they are making the roads wider, which will only increase pollution. Twitter's one saving grace was it at least enforced some concision to the tides of ill-informed opinion.

I'll be impressed with Twitter when they actually show they care about the security and safety of their users by implemented end to end encryption for their DMs...

The analysis was really interesting. I wonder if there's cultural bias as well - i.e. English speakers tend to be more verbose because we have a need to speak more

Hah, in Japanese and Chinese a lot of words are single characters. To use your post as an example, "analysis", "really", and "interesting" will probably be one character each, they're several UTF-8 bytes, but Twitter counts those still as single characters...

In Japanese those three words could be translated as 分析、本当に、面白い respectively, 8 characters in total - i.e. the same length as just "analysis" in English.

Does anyone else get the impression that Twitter has no idea what to do with their service, let alone how most people use it?

Adding verbosity is the last thing the service needs.

In my opinion, the best balance would be to keep the focus on short, succinct, 140 character tweets, but to also give the option to add a "read more" section to any given tweet.

So you could eliminate tweet storms and give people a convenient outlet for longer-form thoughts, without just bloating everything. I expect 240 characters will largely result in people just using more words to say the same thing.

They shot themselves in the foot by putting this ridiculous limit! Make it 500, or, better yet, limit the number of words, which makes more sense, but I don't use Twitter much if at all, because I hate broken English, missing punctuation, and having to restructure your thought to fit into the SMS limit of the '90s!

Well glad to see Twitter is finally tackling humanity's woes. I'm sorry for the vitriol, but what kind of value is this adding to anyone's life? It seems to me like another way of having the hunched-over-zombies-with-lit-faces spend even more time 'connecting' with other humans.

Great, now I have to recount to see if my joke about Game of Thrones breaking the Twitter rule still works.

I hope this isn't actually language-based, else it'll be awkward for tweets that mix languages, or multilingual users who have their UI in one language and tweet in another.

It would make more sense to simply count CJK characters twice, like the “double-width character” days of old.

It's weird that their justification is that other languages can fit more words in than you can in English. But then they increase the character count.

Wouldn't it make more sense to switch to a word limit, instead of a character limit?

> Wouldn't it make more sense to switch to a word limit, instead of a character limit?

CanYouImagineTheCamelCaseNightmareThatWouldCause?

I guess they didn't consider halving the limit for the other languages instead?

Exactly. The short length of tweets creates joy and makes Twitter unique.

People who speak other languages are cheated out of that joy. The best solution is to shorten tweets in those languages!

> Most Japanese Tweets are 15 characters while most English Tweets are 34

Doesn't the graph shows that most English tweets are 140 characters instead? The first peak on the English curve is indeed on 34 characters, but it's lower than the 140 peak.

You're right about the mode, but the quote is also correct in the sense of the area under the curve. Most English tweets are 34+/-n characters, where n gives you more than 50% under the curve. It rapidly falls off from 9% on the 140 character side.

@Jack said "Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!"

https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824

How many people did it take to come up with double a char limit, and how is that 'thoughtful' or 'solving' anything? Total guff.

The start of the end of twitter hashtag hottake.

I can think of many reasons, why a limit is somehow hardcoded/assumed throughout the entire system including the history and probably a lot of optimizations around it. You can not think of any? In databases you also have limits, like character limits, like 16k for a varchar or something. Or memcaches with bucket sizes and so on. It is not just changing a number, i can imagine.

I am sure that after a well deserved break from such amazingly hard work, they'll tackle the next increase in characters. Their solution makes it look so easy, but it isn't. /s

Does "Hail Mary ..." fit in 280 characters?

I'm unable to parse what is meant by "twitter hashtag hottake". If anything, hashtags are already overused on twitter, and I imagine this will make it worse (like the neverending stream of useless hashtags on instagram that nobody will ever ever search for). Are you saying the hashtag hottake is to use a single (?) hashtag to provide a meta-description of the content?

I think perhaps the problem is, try as I might, I can't really get my head around the term 'hot take' and it alway seems to lead me astray when I try to figure it out in a new context.

Hey man, Jack's been putting in 23 hour days for the last seven years to make this happen. Not cool to mock his effort.

But seriously that Tweet shows the usefulness. For them not to have tried it until now shows how scared they are to make any real changes. 1) Guess 2) this 3) doesn't 4) fix 5) this 6) nonsense? Those comments are absolute youtube quality cancer though. Goddamn tragedy that this is the pinnacle of human discourse right now.

These are the first five replies to that tweet:

Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 1h1 hour ago Replying to @jack

I will reserve my full response until I get 280 characters but this is a slap in the face to everyone harmed by your lax governance 1 reply 15 retweets 109 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 57m57 minutes ago

Your platform has been co-opted and manipulated, turned into a megaphone for hate and propaganda. 3 replies 20 retweets 154 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 56m56 minutes ago

Your response? Remove the last filter forcing careful selection of words. This makes Twitter boring without making room for real thought. 4 replies 14 retweets 107 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 55m55 minutes ago

And yet again, another surface-level tweak that fails to deal with the rot inside this community. 1 reply 10 retweets 82 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 54m54 minutes ago

You have failed signally in your responsibilities to your users, investors, and frankly to all of humanity. Thanks, Jack.

What a weird platform.

And all they had to do was to remove URL from character count. Now we will be staring at Twitter trying to become Tumblr.

In moments like these, I'm reminded of the scene in the Simpsons where the cartoon director asks the writers to come up with a name for the cool new dog character. He says "Come up with something catchy, like Poochy". He leaves the room and the writers say "Everyone good with Poochy?".

When I think of it, this 140 -> 280 might have been the same. But when I think harder, I can picture a bunch of engineers debating over this for many weeks.

Someone needs to make an Apple-style video of a Twitter employee talking about this latest breakthrough in human communication. Oh, and they have to use the word "courage"

true disruption

Going to prove https://recordsetter.com/world-record/twitter-hashtag/785 wrong

Oh, great, it only took them how many years to acknowledge the stupidity of char limit? Now they only need to throw their UI out of the window and make a proper intuitive tree style interface and they are golden.

A solution would be to give you a fixed space, then make the font smaller or narrower as you write more. It's a softer limit and it accommodates CJK because usually those characters are bigger.

Easier solution would be to limit Japanese etc to 70 characters.

I think the 140 is a good limit which forces you to write the "headline" of what you want to say and assimilate a feed reasonably quickly.

Latin-derived languages are getting longer, but Asian ones aren't? It sounds like they're switching to utf-8.

I know that's not really what's happening, but that's what it sounds like.

I’m curious how much has to change code wise to get this to work. Or is there simply a single global variable that controls max tweet size (ignoring the fact that this is language specific).

Called it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759157

Should have charged people for it though. They need the money.

Ah good, maybe Trump will make more fleshed out policy decisions now.

Having known many Japanese, I feel they like to be concise and simple in their expression, they do like infer a lot and not be direct, hence no need to spell everything out all the time

I've always thought they should charge 10 cents per extra character over 140.

Trying to eliminate 1 or 2 letters is exhausting - I would often pay 10 or 20 cents just for the convenience.

As a Chinese, I was never bothered by the 140 chars limit because symbols in Chinese can convey much more information than the same length of English characters.

It's all down hill from here. Pretty soon there will be a 2K word minimum and we'll all be making up stuff, like those fifth grade book reports.

Lmao. This isn't what's going to save Twitter.

Since brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief... Wit should fit on a Hollerith card.

It's a trick to get Trump to double the rate at which he incriminates himself!

I hope he doesn't start twice as many wars.

If he takes to it, then Twitter could gradually raise the limit bit by bit, like you train a cat to shit in the toilet by slowly moving its litter box [1], and eventually he'll be tweeting in full paragraphs of complete (if not coherent) sentences.

[1] http://www.wikihow.com/Toilet-Train-Your-Cat

Twitter has had a net negative effect on discourse, media and, by extension, on society. More characters won't help.

I suggest the characters limit to grow/shrink dynamically based on the percentage of tweets that reach the limit.

Why raise the character limit? If you are going to do that then what purpose does the limit serve anymore?

#define MAX_TWEET_LENGTH 280

Bfd. If this is enough to make headlines all over the world you can bet they will do it again.

Do you think this change will result in a positive improvement to the content of the tweets from POTUS?

@dang What's a good way to run a poll without abusing karma. Throwaways?

Aren't many Japanese characters also words? which would explain why they use less characters...

Seems like one possible solution is to increase the character limit, but also increase the "pain" a user has to go through to use the additional characters (my ghetto solution would be to use a captcha to unlock the higher char limit).

That way people would only use the additional chars if they really needed them, reducing noise from otherwise unnecessarily long tweets.

"Watch this 30-second ad to expand your character limit by 30 characters for this tweet!"

Wait, so how does it work? What if half my message is in Chinese, and the other English?

Don't use Twitter? Diaspora has a much larger limit, and you can use hashtags.

tldr; Twitter is changing the limit 140 -> 280 characters

I wish that emphasis (bolding? anything really) on what actually changed, I read through a lot of reasoning that I didn't really care to read/find compelling.

> For example, when I (author's name) Tweet in English, I quickly run into the 140 character limit and have to edit my Tweet down so it fits.

... sparing all your readers that reading time. The whole post doesn't mention reading time once. Doesn't that matter too?

Hasn't Twitter given us enough characters already?!

How about actually enforcing your terms of service?

alter table messages modify message_body bigtext; -- thanks for the feature enhancement twitter! it only took eleven years!

Love it! Tired of micromanaging characters.

Twitter has no vision under Jack Dorsey.

who was possibly asking for this?

I can see far more need for "read more" expandable tweets to replace tweetstorms

When? Mine's not working

You need entropy not length!

Good, I hope this spells the death of this horrifying product.

Innovation!

> Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain.

When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's blog.

The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy.

Then came the bots and the spammers and the place got ruined. Twitter has a bunch of problems, but the 140 characters isn't one of them.

I agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter.

But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it. The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitter is aswell a tool to share simplistic ideas with people that already agree with you.

If the content is better, it's pictures of text and 12 tweets in a row. Right now it seems you have to fight the platform if you want to post something good. Not sure if 280 solves it, but it might become more useful, as it still restricts verboseness.

And the aim of twitter should be to be usefull, rather than twitter. As being twitter does not earn them any money.

/edit: 1) I feel german "grime twitter", a buch a trolls being extremists of all flavors insulting people with way too much ego is the best part. It's like 4chan, with less racism and slightly more grown up. And it is, as you can image, toxic garbage. And that's the best part in my view.

This seems to be an unpopular opinion for some reason, but I don't think the core of what you're saying is wrong. There was an article on HN a few weeks ago about how Twitter was originally meant to be the "pulse of the planet". Part of what made it feel like that, for me at least, has always been the ability to get a quick snapshot of what someone has to say.

I don't go on Twitter to read in-depth analysis or discussion (though, as has been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Twitter has great potential for improving its ability to support real discussion). Twitter, for me, is a lot like the front page of reddit - I go to my Twitter feed to get an overview of what's going on. If I want to know more, I'm fine being linked to a blog post or article, or getting into a discussion elsewhere.

NB: Thinking about it more, I think my opinion stems from filling out one too many "describe your startup in n characters" forms...

> Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy.

I think most people view “have to do a bit of puzzling” as opposed to, rather than supporting, being “read worthy”. Terse stops being valuable when it goes beyond concise (as brief as possible while still clearly conveying intended meaning.)

The 140 character limit was an artifact of Twitter being designed to be usable over SMS in an era of ubiquitous SMS-equipped phones before smartphones were themselves ubiquitous.

140 characters might be one of them. There is honestly not a lot of difference in being limited to either 140 or 280 characters. In that you still cannot tell a whole story. But now you might run into the situation where you can't even finish your sentence a lot less, which is a positive in my opinion.

you can now compress it use emojis. now if there was a service that did that it would be great. also the decompress it (change emojis back to words)

But then people tweet pics of text!

Twitter should have subscription plans that correlate to the number of characters you can use.

280 = free tier

1000 = $0.99 per month

2500 = $1.99 per month

5000 = $2.99 per month

External links shouldn't also take any characters in Twitter. It should be a separate data field, like images are right now.

Also, I'm not sure why there isn't a separate expanded post field as well. Use the twitter feed for your headlines to a post.

finally you can argue with every facetious person on twitter that'll need extra detail or will take everything out of context, or that need a citation for something that should be common knowledge.

We don't care, we have Mastodon and our limit is 500.

Here comes the shark jump!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4ZGKI8vpcg

It would have been cool if they instead had reduced the number och characters!

The new character count feels like they arbitrarily just doubled it.

Like Gob Bluth made this decision to be a better CEO than Michael.

"Oh yeah Michael I'm taking your 140 characters and DOUBLING IT!"

This seems rash. I feel like you should have to select something in order to have a 280 character tweet. I think the reason Twitter has worked is because of the constraints and the creativity working around said constraints. By opting everyone in immediately, I feel there may be some culture shock.

Which is why they aren't doing that...

"Although we feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change will have, we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone"

I feel like this could be a good change, looking forward to seeing how it goes either way.

Culture shock? You can just write a bit more now. It's not like people haven't used embedded images or (1/n) tweetstorms to bypass this issue.

It's not like they switched the scrolling from vertical to horizontal or something.

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