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.
"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.
(maybe Child is right, it's not real time data harvest but slower gathering)
Analytics
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7bekig/an_inte...
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
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/10/16284526/twitter-experime...
After all, the start of Twitter was as a sms relay.
So no, I wouldn't trust the product managers to make intelligent decisions.
As for mobile I've actually not had any problem with the official iOS app after setting my account to display tweets chronologically