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Comment by SquareWheel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

Most of the time, it's not about the characters but more about the words. If you want to say more in only 140 characters you have to fit more words in, which means using shorter words... and that's why 99% of Twitter users sound like idiots, even though most of them probably are not.

Doesn't seem to be working. I'm fairly verbose, nothing I ever want to say fits in 140 characters. I'm better off not reading what DOES fit. (140)

This version reads to me as almost irritated, as if you're ranting about something.

This might be a situation I'd abandon the post completely because there's no way to communicate my post in the proper tone and context.

To be fair, I WAS ranting :)

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...

Maybe. I already saw someone post a heated reply to one of Trump's tweets, and the 280 character limit made it read more like a mini-essay. Seeing a whole feed of that would make me even less likely to read Twitter, because it would look just like Facebook.

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