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Comment by PhilipA | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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?

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...

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

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

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