Tweeting Made Easier | Hacker News Reader

Tweeting Made Easier

blog.twitter.com

142 pointscoloneltcb138 comments

> Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit.

More like 9% of posted tweets hit the character limit. I bet a much higher number hits above the character limit and then are trimmed down to fit. It doesn't sound like they consider that, and so it leads to it seeming like only a small number of tweets are limited by 140 characters when I'm sure a muuuch larger number of tweets could benefit from using "you" instead of "u" and such.

Or just broken into 2+ tweets.

Or broken into 10, 20, or more tweets.

Which, to me, is the disappointing thing about the new character limit: it does nothing to address this emerging usage pattern, one might even say emerging form of communication, of the tweetstorm.

It seems pretty clear that tweetstorms enable a certain mode of marshaling thoughts and communicating them in an off-the-cuff way that blogging services never identified or understood. And yet Twitter's product org doesn’t seem to understand it either.

Maybe something intermediate could be done, but I think the tweetstorm format allows for interjections at fixed intervals, which can be helpful.

Didn't really think of this before, but yes - this is very useful and it would be a shame to lose this feature.

That’s part of the missed opportunity I see: far from losing this ability, a proper tweetstorm feature should embrace it, making it easier to navigate and interact with.

> easier to navigate and interact with

On the contrary, it's harder to navigate because it is intermingled with all sorts of boxes, whitespace, tags, icons and hidden menus. Everything is hair-triggered by a touch making the whole page unstable. Tweetstorms fork into secondary threads that are hard to follow, unlike HN or reddit, and use 3 screens for content that fits on half a screen.

Yep, I think Tweetstorms are right up there with colds and bad dates for negative experiences. Or, better said:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7bekig/an_inte...

For some reason Twitter had decided to attempt to make their page behave like a UI rather than a forum or similar.

Thus we only get a single linear reading, and it wastes space by being presented as a floating "windows" above the main page.

Never mind that it is damn hard to see the full image, as no amount of clicking will actually make it fill the whole screen. Only bringing up the tweet "window" and then right clicking the image gets anywhere close.

At least they stopped requiring 100% of my processor to display them like when they first switched to the floating, easy to accidentally dismiss boxes.

Sort of like how you can "interject" via quoting in email? ;)

That's, increasingly, apparently not understood by the average correspondent. Anything other than a continuous block of text preceding a quoted reply ("top posting") may cause confusion.

Don't worry about it, if you are ever confronted, simply explain it. It is a tradition worth defending.

I've found top-posting the type of email fixes this, no failures yet:

Please see my responses inline

> can we make the page do this

yes np

> Does the flux capacitor have enough jiggawatts to make this work?

It does if we don't add anything new

> etc

With the right client support (collapsed tweetstorms and stats), readers could delve as deeply into a topic as they were interested, and writers could see how far most readers cared to delve. That's seemed like a no-brainer development in Twitter for some time to me. Entire articles could be written and released in such a format.

This is the company that dreamed up lists, only to hide them behind multiple layers of UI rather than provide the ability to display them in columns front and center.

In particular as they could just as well have lifted the inline signaling that sms has for stitching multiple messages together to form a long one.

After all, the start of Twitter was as a sms relay.

Twitter is experimenting with a feature that lets you compose tweetstorms [1]

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/10/16284526/twitter-experime...

https://github.com/liuggio/sized140 ...

Tweet survivorship bias.

I'm sure they have (or could have) analysed that.

How do they know if someone was going to tweet a longer sentence, like for example:

"Donald Trump is the worst president ever this country has ever had. He stole the election with help from the Russians and is running this country into the ground."

But knowing that they only get 140 chars, they just decided to tweet "Trump sucks! :-( And he's in bed with the Russians"?

You don't have to hit that 140 char limit too many times until you start self-censoring yourself and write shorter messages.

> How do they know if someone was going to tweet a longer sentence

Analytics

Analytics != mind-reading. Unless they send every single keystroke and character deletion, they can't track that.

That works for users using an official Twitter client who actually typed in the tweet and then edited it. It doesn't account for people who decided to enter something shorter because they knew what they wanted to say would hit the limit.

True, but to an extent you know how people type, start something then stop, hesitate.. an awful lot can be retrieved from an input field.

I was referring more to people who mentally edit what they want to say before they even start typing because they know it would be too long.

Sure on that point nobody can, but between no knowledge and mind reading there's a huge amount of stuff website can gather.

So editing is now called "self-censoring"? What a time to be alive. /s

The network tab in Chrome does not seem to indicate they are collecting data for this. I would expect some sort of network activity as I type/reach the character limit, but I spot nothing.

they could store that info locally and send it when you submit the tweet. you would lose information on any non-submitted tweets though

That was my theory, maybe they don't after all..

(maybe Child is right, it's not real time data harvest but slower gathering)

Do you really believe twitters product managers did not considered people might be cramming to tweet?

No, we believe that the product manager is voluntarily not talking about it.

Thank you, someone who gets my point. I'm sure Twitter are smarter than this, but why do they assume their readers lack critical thinking.

Twitter only used to show you tweets from people you followed, in chronological order, each tweet exactly once. Those product managers then decided to pepper your timeline with tweets you "may have missed", tweets from people you don't follow but that were liked by others and passed a randomized test, and all this out of order and with duplicates. Of course you cannot turn any of this off (except by using another than the official web client).

So no, I wouldn't trust the product managers to make intelligent decisions.

Why would someone use any app or page from twitter though? Great alternatives have existed from the very beginning, and they are still much better than the official clients. I haven't noticed any commercial messages, any "suggested" tweets etc. Just nicely rendered chronological timeline (I use tweetbot for iOS)

Honestly for me it's because they (desktop replacements) all seem to split everything into multiple columns. I dislike that design and just can't seem to gel with it.

As for mobile I've actually not had any problem with the official iOS app after setting my account to display tweets chronologically

They don’t support all of twitter’s features, like group DMs, thanks to twitter closing off their API. It’s quite annoying.

Right. I never used any other features than the original twitter features (read a firehose of chronological tweets and reply/post from time to time). I did notice that when they introduced the "Poll" feature, it's not in the API though. Third party clients just show the question but not the alternatives (Makes you look kind of dumb replying in text to the question too which is annoying).

The very next sentence says:

> This reflects the challenge of fitting a thought into a Tweet, often resulting in lots of time spent editing and even at times abandoning Tweets before sending.

The whole idea of extending the limit is based on what you describe, and this post shows that it had the desired effect, without introducing other bad things.

I'm not sure what your point is.

> I'm not sure what your point is.

My point is I bet it is not 9% but closer to 99% of tweets that are negatively affected by 140 characters, and their way of measuring this is very flawed.

But their test phase with 280 characters has indeed proved the opposite: Median and mode of tweet length are still roughly the same as before, judging from that graph.

This number doesn't come from thin air, but was calculated based on the assumption of log-normal distribution if there weren't a limit: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...

Perhaps the majority of longer form tweeters have already left the platform or altered their tweeting behavior?

Look at the graph. It clearly isn't the case.

Okay, I'm gonna be honest here:

Am I the only one who doesn't get all the complaints about an expanded character limit?

Cause at the end of the day, many Twitter alternatives have far more than 140 characters available for posts. Mastodon has 500 by default, Gab has 300 characters and App.net allowed 256 characters per post before it closed down.

Absolutely none of those sites or services has been worse off thanks to the higher character limit, nor has it hurt the microblogging feel in general.

So why are people so stressed out over Twitter having a higher amount now?

> Absolutely none of those sites or services has been worse off thanks to the higher character limit, nor has it hurt the microblogging feel in general.

> So why are people so stressed out over Twitter having a higher amount now?

The answer to your question is that they disagree with your preceding statement.

I've seen a fair bit of criticism about said services in regards to the content, but never the character limit. Can someone who dislikes the limit on Mastodon or Gab explain why here?

Twitter has a lot of problems, the 140 character limit was not even in the top 5. That's why people are annoyed. Twitter's house is on fire with cougars eating people in the backyard and people dying of cholera in the front yard, now the owners rush back from vacation in a big white van... only to open it up and reveal a bunch of pink plastic flamingos, which they proceed to use to decorate the yard (in between cholera corpses). It's mystifying and infuriating.

Well, the 140 character may not be a problem for existing users, but it’s also a great reason not to use twitter if you don’t have a desire to cram arbitrary thoughts into arbitrary formats.... what kind of discussion can you have in that medium? Not a very meaningful one....

It’s certainly amusing to see people get angry that the experience is less stressful.

Just saying—it seems pretty obvious this is at least in part to increase attractiveness of actually using the platform. The content certainly ain’t gonna do the trick.

Or to put it another way, the last person to see how shitty it is is someone who already uses the site.

For users of some non-english languages, the 140 character limit was a lot more problematic than anything else.

If you try even comparing German text with english or even japanese on twitter, you'll notice one big issue immediately: You can barely put 3 German words into a tweet, while Japanese can fit an entire novel in.

Twitter has numerous engineering teams. The pink flamingo team had an easier task than the ones putting out fires, slaying cougars, and curing cholera.

1: Apply water until fire is out. 2: Build a fence. 3: Treat acute cases with rehydration therapy, keep your poop out of your drinking water.

None of these are complicated. But they do require consistent application of effort until the problem is solved.

Several of them might require the expenditure of money (or a temporary decrease in revenue) and such solutions are difficult because they make investors nervous.

Love the analogies. All of Twitter's problems stem from its being taken over by marketing wonks who drove out the techies. This led to naïve attempts at monetization (such as closing off the API), and naïve monetization is always user-hostile.

I think it shows that Twitter doesn't know why it became successful. 140 characters was an accident of technology, but Twitter previously didn't want to mess with their special sauce.

Sometimes I start to believe in some sort of conspiracy that all the people working in media were the early investors and now they push the service 24/7 for the stock price :)) it's amazing how much publicity they get.

I personally like the way Twitter encourages brevity. I think the constraint of 140 characters leads to more thoughtful, creative expression. So it's really an aesthetic thing for me.

But I don't have an argument with people who want more. Having more characters will making tweeting easier and more practical.

It's really a decision for Twitter to make - do they prioritise aesthetics or utility?

Yeah, I'm a big fan of the brevity. For me who I follow is about breadth, and the longer people's tweets are, the fewer I can follow. I also think a lot of the >140 tweets I see could easily be written in 140 if the writer worked a little harder. As this edit of Jack's first 280-character tweet conveys well: https://twitter.com/caitlin__kelly/status/912795950476857344...

It's a love/hate thing. I see your edit and it looks like arbitrary whittling down of the original which was already fine, if not superior.

I see you're not much of a Twitter user, so I can see how you might not be sensitive to the difference. But for me, the 140 character limit has been a great source of writing discipline, getting me to squeeze a point to its essence. If the 280-character version is only arguably better than the 140-character one, then it's circa half as efficient, both in terms of character count and the reader's time. Jack's post was sloppy writing.

And that's really my beef with this change. Twitter is seeking something easy to measure -- engagement of marginal writers -- but willing to sacrifice things that are harder to measure, like reader burden and tweet quality.

Worse, this still won't solve the "need to post more text" problem; you can find a zillion historical examples of people needing more than 280 characters. Thus the unique institution of a tweetstorm, where people had to distill their thinking into a linked set of short, punchy sentences. Thus the less appealing practice of posting an image of text. Thus people being inspired to write longer posts elsewhere and then respond with a well-phrased tweet and a link. I think Twitter would have been far better served to offer text attachments equivalent to image attachments, basically adding a real blogging feature to their existing microblogging platform.

> Having more characters will making tweeting easier

That's exactly what I don't want. When I tweet, I have to take a minute to try to make my idea more concise. I make multiple passes over it and end trimming a lot of the unnecessary words.

In short, the author has to spend a bit more time, but saves a lot of time for every single person who has to read the tweet.

Whenever i had to make my idea "more concise" it was because i was explaining something complicated and had to sacrifice nuance. Often this led to people failing to understand the point, resulting in unnecessary back and forth where i then supply the nuance after the fact. More recently it led to simply giving up and not even trying in the first place.

> I think the constraint of 140 characters leads to more thoughtful, creative expression.

Leads 2 cryptic and weird abbrev.

I never see this type of abbreviation on my timeline.

Out of 69043 tweets I have in my current timeline archive, 160 (0.23%) of them contained ' u '; of which only 30 (0.04%) were from people I follow, the other 130 (0.19%) were retweets.

Any constraint has the power to encourage more thoughtful, creative expression. Even the most draconian censorship regime sometimes results in beautiful works designed to work around it. But 140 is just an arbitrary number picked for technical reasons a long time ago. There's no reason to think that 140 hits the right balance between brevity and expressiveness. We've simply adapted to this arbitrary limit, in a sort of Stockholm syndrome.

Had they picked 100 characters when they first started, and then decided to increase that to 140, we'd be having this exact same conversation.

Maybe there's a sweet spot for the length of a tweet in any given language that we could find out by map-reducing some big data. But it's unlikely to coincide with the arbitrary limit imposed by SMS, so I'm happy to see Twitter experimenting with a different limit and carefully monitoring how it affects usage patterns.

> I think the constraint of 140 characters leads to more thoughtful, creative expression

No, it leads to long tweet storms.

> I think the constraint of 140 characters leads to more thoughtful, creative expression

In english, esp. with the emoji's and shortenings line "4 u" == "for you". Other languages rarely have this kind of option unfortunately.

140 is more than just aesthetics. The enforced brevity is what makes so many people regular readers of a tweeter that would not be regular readers of a blogger or of a serial essayist. If Trump pushed out five ten minute reads per day, only people paid to condense them into shorter forms would read them (journalists and analysts). And that's supposedly the most important person in the world, the impact of a switch to longer forms would be even bigger for other Twitter celebrities. The brevity vs. depth tradeoff is also a tradeoff between reach and depth.

On a certain level of abstraction, Twitter's achievement is an implicit contract between writer and reader that promises a certain standardized answer to the brevity vs depth question that greatly helps brevity to fulfill its potential of generating reach. Tweaking that contract, even by a mere 140 characters is huge (Twitter, of all entities, should know how important 140 characters can be).

> So why are people so stressed out over Twitter having a higher amount now?

I will have to get myself one of them new, fancy phones that can string together multiple SMSes now, if I want to keep up with the other kids!

Even old feature/flip phones supported breaking SMS into multiple messages. I would use them all the time.

You caught me exaggerating! :-) My phone can actually put together 3 messages. (Not that I use Twitter.)

Yeah, IIRC, I was actually on your side / making a light-hearted joke/factoid. That my old phone could handle larger messages than Twitter is pretty sad for Twitter.

I actually just saw a news article that a guy is saying "Twitter enabled larger character lengths... so nazis could spread their propoganda without as much split tweets." and I was like "Uhh.... okay there..."

We're living in a time where literally nobody can be satisfied with your business decisions and whatever that ONE person is, they'll have a "journalist" platform to spew their crazy ideas to millions of people.

Anyhow, have a great day!

> Cause at the end of the day, many Twitter alternatives have far more than 140 characters available for posts.

How many of those have more than a trivial handful of users?

On the smaller side, Mastodon: https://joinmastodon.org/

On the larger side, Facebook. You might not think of Facebook as an alternative, but they're in direct competition.

As long as the users on the platform are not trivial to each other this should not alter the comparability of those platforms to Twitter. UX wise.

What I dislike is the whole whining thing. If you don't like the new limit, leave Twitter and create your own platform with blackjack and hookers.

People will complain about pretty much every single change.

They are a public traded company, and for us casual users of Twitter the only change that has been in the talk the last couple of years has been to increase the character limit. What other companies can have this little improvement over the time, and still be a public traded company on Nasdaq? (I acknowledge that they might improve internal & marketing tools, but nothing us users sees)

You are not the user. You are a consumer of promoted tweets, which are paid for by the users.

Change doesn't need to happen for the sake of change. It was an amazing product and they've made it worse with changes like the algorithmic timeline, so the less they do the better, from my perspective. Though I have no opinion either way about 280 characters.

> They are a public traded company, and for us casual users of Twitter the only change that has been in the talk the last couple of years has been to increase the character limit.

I think that's a bit hyperbolic.

But, that being said, it annoys me that they haven't even put enough effort into this change to update the documentation.

> Note that the current best definition of the algorithm for counting characters on Twitter is described in the page on the twitter-text Tweet parsing library. This documentation will be refreshed shortly to reflect the most recent changes.

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/counting-charac...

Comcast and other cable ISPs? They’ve increased their speeds to some but also my price has more than doubled.

In retail, Walmart, Target and most mainstream supermarkets have changed very little.

I think you mean to ask what tech company startup has ever remained relevant for so long without change, maybe?

I think I know what you are getting at with supermarkets, but with Walmart in particular, they have been going quite heavy into serious tech, and all in-house lately [1], [2].

Not to disagree with you, was more an interesting thing of note for me. I didn't really picture Walmart doing this sort of stuff outside a huge IBM or Oracle contract. Retailers of that scale have all sorts of potential improvements to make from the growth of technology from online to mobile to IoT (maybe) to big data analytics on purchase/loyalty schemes.

[1]: http://www.zdnet.com/article/walmart-relies-on-openstack/

[2]: http://fortune.com/2017/08/30/walmart-cloud-nvidia/

It isn’t relevant to compare a tech company to two retail giants - it is comparing apples and oranges. How much hasn’t the other large tech companies you might compare them to evolved over the last couple of years?

They've been making pretty noticeable moves in broadcasted video. Not sure if the only thing they've talked about is the character limit.

> But importantly, people Tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity of Twitter remained.

This has been the argument from an insanely large number of people for years, and it frankly isn't difficult to test. Even in mediums that have no character limit, the vast majority of users do not send insanely long messages, and if there is any mechanism at all to encourage short messages with a fallback to longer ones (such as hiding content behind "read more", or making short messages much larger and more visible: Facebook now does both), then people are even more stingy. I just scrolled through my Facebook feed and paid attention and virtually all of the posts I saw were extremely short (I think even all less than 140 characters excepting two or three). It just seen someone incompetent that it took Twitter this long to figure this out: this isn't shocking data.

Add in the fact that anyone who has ever used Twitter knows that anything which takes a lot of characters to convey either (i) gets abbreviated in a confusing manner (ii) tweet threaded which is a far less user-friendly way of using 280 chars anyway or (iii) a special embedded text image, which again is far from user-friendly when it's just a workaround.

> a special embedded text image, which again is far from user-friendly when it's just a workaround.

Or, my personal favorite: an embedded image of the Twitter compose dialog with the over-length tweet in it.

sweet

Or, my personal favorite of BASE65536 encoded gzipped text.

The new indicator design sucks, they should just use the old one and change the number to 280. I want to be able to see the exact number of remaining characters I have at a glance, this is not possible with a tiny little circular indicator.

To be fair, once you hit 260 characters, it starts counting down, showing you that you have 20 characters left.

I like the circle. It puts less emphasis on number of characters you are using, so perhaps people won't be as motivated to use up all 280.

Well that sounds like an easy browser extension to write :)

I think they're tweaking it still in A/B testing. I've seen both.

What is sad about all this is that Twitter got its start as a sms relay, and sms has long had a system for stitching multiple messages into a singular long one. But rather than adapt that system early, Twitter now insist on dreaming up their own...

Sad, or fortuitous? I don't think even the founders realized this was a feature, not a bug. Big media loves Twitter because it forces everything into sound bites. Twitter would not have taken off having the same functionality as everything else.

What if Twitter made character limits a level game - just like HN voting Karma?

Level 1 users get 140 chars. Level 2 - 160 chars, 3...

So my feed would be filled with extra long tweets from bots and people who have nothing better to do but tweet all day to level up, and people who only tweet when they have something important to say would be limited to 140 .

Hmmmmmmm

I can't quite explain it, but this change has given me conscious access to a feeling about Twitter-the-product that I only had at a subconscious level before now: complete, overwhelming, extraordinary rage.

>Highlights are below and in our additional blogs about our experimentation process, extensive data analysis, research, and design work.

Don't miss those:

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...

https://medium.com/twitter-design-research/looking-after-num...

Curious how Twitter detects when it's Chinese or Japanese to restrict the length to 140 chars. What if it's a tweet that starts with English, then includes Chinese characters? Is that what the progress indicator is for, to let Twitter detect the language?

Try it! I wonder, too.

They've made CJK characters (including fullwidth characters of any kind, without exception for Latin letters or Arabic numerals) count as 2 characters. In a mixed alphanumeric/CJK tweet, the CJK part will simply count doubly towards your character limit.

Interesting... of course 70 characters of Mandarin would be the equivalent of over 400 characters of English. I suppose that plus goog-Translate would be another even less readable way to avoid the limit... since Chinese language speakers by and large just use WeChat.

It is a brain-dead solution: any Unicode scalar value not matching /[\u0000-\u10ff\u2000-\u200d\u2010-\u201f\u2032-\u2037]/ doubles the cost. [1] The primary range ends at U+10FF because it conveniently excludes virtually all CJK characters (Hangul starts at U+1100) with relatively low error rates. Yet, it's still brain-dead.

[1] https://twitter.com/FakeUnicode/status/928030981805588480 (used to be /[\u0000-\u10ff]/ during the test period)

It's interesting to look at it from a different angle. It took them years with a planned deployment of several weeks to increase the character limit.

In a small or even medium sized startup, this kind of decision will be a single product manager's decision and most likely be implemented in a day or two at most.

This kind of rigidness, bureaucracy and slowness is what makes big companies play catchup with small startups.And Twitter is at the top percentages of technologically competent, modern companies - imagine such a change in banks, or chain stores.

This has nothing to do with bureaucracy, this has to do with making sure the changes don't ruin the feel of your product and alienates your power users. It's not like they decided a year ago and then had to wait 6 months for somebody to sign a piece of paper.

No, but I'm guessing there were many meetings, committees, getting approval from the top, etc... involved. That is still bureaucracy.

Surely 280 chars is better to extract data for twitter to get revenus.

Fewer creative abbreviations will certainly make natural language processing a lot easier.

I've never seen a company put out so many announcements for a feature that if you think about it, from the point of view of what it offers, it's really a minimal change.

To see how the 280 char limit feels, I tried to compose a tweet with the full 280 chars. Piping it through wc tells me it's actually 295 chars:

https://twitter.com/marek_gibney/status/928184393755250688

Maybe some chars or chars in links count for less then 1?

I believe links don’t directly count towards the character limit anymore, along with any mentions.

I might be wrong but I believe for a time (maybe still?) only the automatically shortened URL length (t.co URLs) counts

My empirical test shows that links are treated as if they had a fixed length of 23 characters (even if they are shorter or much longer)

No need for an empirical test - they have an endpoint that tells you.

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/developer-utilities/co...

(via https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/tco)

In the end, I'll just always be impressed by how Twitter got billionaire aristocrats and elder statesmen to use the number 2 to me the words to, too and two.

Other than that, all the character limit did was make reading and writing more difficult. That's the opposite goal of all language education and should be considered a borderline crime against humanity.

Does "tweeting" need to be made easier?

I realize that they want their "userbase" to grow, but users has never seemed the right way to measure twitter. Tons of people read tweets, etc on news sites without having an account.

Seems like there are a lot of other things they can do besides "making tweeting easier" to improve twitter.

When a company has been so stagnant with innovation, sometimes you just have to do something/anything to stay on the radar and remain technically relevant.

Twitter could stop development today and they would stay relevant for years to come. Tweets don't get quoted in the news because of some great innovation, but because the basic idea and implementation is solid enough and has Twitter has a massive network effect.

The bigger reason why they want to be seen as improving and innovating is likely to keep shareholders happy. From a profit standpoint the company is a lot less solid, leaving ample reason to play with perception.

Twitter would be profitable tomorrow if they laid off half the employees. The company is so bloated for product they deliver. It should be a money printing machine.

From a business perspective doesn't more characters = fewer tweets visible in the viewport = ads are less seen?

Great counterpoint below:

> Surely 280 chars is better to extract data for twitter to get revenus.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15649155

How to lie with graphs. It looks like a majority of the tweets hit the limit, yet the text clearly states only 9% of English tweets hit the limit. If you'd zoom out, it simply wouldn't look like a problem (which I don't think it is).

I don't if this ui change was previous to the new character limit, but the Tweet editor on the web now has a progress indicator instead of displaying the number of characters left. I found that interesting.

Parallel. Probably has to do with the different handling of different charsets, and therefore not being able to give a simple "N more codepoints"

Many of the comments made here are < 140 chars. Others are more.

It’s the first “product” blogpost since March, where they changed the default avatar. What have they been doing in the meantime?

I can think of two things the entire company has done that stick in my mind:

* Ban Rose McGowan. * Changed the T&Cs so that famous people can threaten to murder people.

local paper-famous, or Jesus-famous?

The T&Cs aren't clear. They merely say that the rules have an exception for things that are 'newsworthy'. You'll appreciate this is a loophole so wide you could drive a bus through it.

So it lightens the load on their servers with less number of tweets.

This is a horribly written announcement. The headline should be "Limit on Tweets is Now 280 Characters for Most Languages," or something equally pithy and the first sentence should be a short restatement of that.

Then -- and only then -- go into the details of the test and how this (probably) won't lead to loquacious tweeting etc etc. But my God. I had to read it three times to figure out what this post was supposed to be announcing.

>This is a horribly written announcement.

Because it's not an announcement. The first sentence of the post links to the announcement: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/...

it is an announcement of the results of their test that started with your link.

That’s the initial announcement of the test back in September, not the announcement that they’re making the change permanent and rolling it out to all users, which is indeed the buried lede at the end of the first paragraph of today's “Tweeting Made Easier” post.

I wouldn't call a fact in the first paragraph a "buried lede".

if you can post without having your message ghosted

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