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Comment by jsnathan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

People often using the word "elegant" when they actually mean "my preferred."

It helps give credence to the solution.

It's hell'a more elegant than https://twithelper.com/long-text-to-image-converter

That's true as a general observation, but in this case I meant elegant in the usual sense.

That's an elegant explanation

>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.

That's just a side effect of him trying to fit the entire USA diplomacy into his head, which has approximately the same capacity.

That or trying to fit the entire USA diplomacy in a mail server under her desk... and getting it hacked.

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.

I was even thinking things like links to Twitlonger and Pastebin could be used for embedded text, the same way twitter knows how to handle imgur & youtube links and embed their content with tweets.

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.

Micropayments! /s

That is exactly my thought. Actually it was microtransactions.

> 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.

Concur.

Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish. When the platform limits his words, that works in his favour - no nuance can be conveyed, his utterances are sharp, authentic sounding, plausible.

Give him 1000 words to make his case, and suddenly he's stuck. His thoughts were never that deep, and they don't stand up well to being expanded on - there wasn't any substance to begin with.

Twitter is what it is in large part because of that 140 character limit. It allows boofheads of all stripes to sound convincing, because the platform was tailor made for short blasts of hot air.

> Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish.

There's no idiot shortage on Twitter (or elsewhere), but I'll bet an overwhelming majority of the people who read your sentence above thought of the same person.

> Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish. > Give him 1000 words to make his case, and suddenly he's

... now blurting out 1000 words of bileful rubbish instead of 100.

"...with little forethought".

Wow. I tweet very infrequently, and agonize over exactly what to say and how to phrase it so that it is intelligible and interesting in 140 characters.

Then again, I only have a few hundred tweets and endeavor to make each one count.

Yep. One step closer to FB.

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.

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.

There's a slight fallacy here: that no single blog site is as successful as Twitter does not mean blogs as a whole aren't, and therefore that you need the character limit to be successful. I don't have any hard data, but my anecdotal experience matches that: almost nobody I know uses Twitter, whereas every computer/smartphone user I know reads blog posts at least occasionally.

> almost nobody I know uses Twitter

Nobody I know voted for Trump, but here he is president. HN readers and their close friends are nowhere near being a representative sample of internet users.

I get that, but I'd think HN users and their friends would be overrepresented in Twitter, not underrepresented.

In my experience, the tech crowd is pretty average when it comes to social media (ab)use.

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!"

I'd bet real money, that his account is that the front of the queue for this feature. We'll be seeing longer tweets from him imminently.

Sad!

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.

Can you explain what you mean by this? If you're talking about the 'title' of each search result, it looks like it's capped at a way lower number of characters than that.

The total number of characters in an ad is 130(ish).

25 for title 35 for line 1 35 for line 2 35 for display url

130 characters total.

For what it's worth, your message required a lot more attention from me than it would have, if you had used the word "number" rather than the strange glyph "#". I guess you were doing this with some sort of meta humour because the story is about twitter, but the point was inversed. Your attempt to abbreviate things to make them more legible, made them less so.

The lesson above applies, incidentally, to pretty much everything twitter.

I'm sorry to inconvenience your day.

Well, apologies. I got the impression that your argument was that you make a messages easier to understand by shortening them. I just gave you a concrete example of when a message got harder to understand because it was shortened.

But good job on deliberately missing the point as a discussion strategy. That too, was very twitter of you.

Hey - I'm not trying to argue. I apologized.

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 SMS limit was decided when an engineer working for German Telecom decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences. Twitter based their limit on the SMS limit (140 + user address).

> decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences

From what I heard, the SMS limit was actually a protocol limitation: it piggybacks on signaling messages, which have a small size limit (this is also why SMS can sometimes work even when everything else doesn't). Quoting from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS):

"Messages are sent with the MAP MO- and MT-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signaling protocol to precisely 140 bytes (140 bytes * 8 bits / byte = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet, the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS-2 alphabet. Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual short message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters."

Excluding the username from the 140 character limit was only changed this year: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-character-limit

That's not what is meant. Twitter was originally an SMS service, which would text you whenever someone you followed posted a tweet. In order for you to be able to tell who had posted each tweet, the message had to contain the poster's username. This is distinct from the username of whoever they were replying to.

> 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?

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