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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

You say "limitations" like it was a bad thing. But Twitter has a history of turning arbitrary limitiations into interesting social media experiments.

Breaking it up allows each sentence to be reshared more easily, which seems like it has interesting possibilities. (A simple variation on Ted Nelson's "transclusion" back in the day.)

Anyone wanting to write an essay in the traditional way could post somewhere else (perhaps Medium) and share the link. They don't do it, suggesting that maybe that's not what they wanted to do?

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> Breaking it up allows each sentence to be reshared more easily, which seems like it has interesting possibilities.

That's not a result of the length restriction; it's how quoting works -- right here in this very comment, I've chosen to only "reshare" one sentence from your comment.

As for the interesting possiibilities that could arise from mixing and matching transcluded tweets: either the mixing and matching are going to be done manually by someone assembling a series of quotes (a process not unique to twitter) or it's going to be the result of whatever order they show up in your timeline -- I think the results of that could be interesting if it was a random process, or if there were any way to influence the order apart from whatever twitter thinks will maximize user engagement.

Yes, cut-and-paste is a traditional way of quoting. Resharing a Tweet is easier, particularly when not using a mouse or keyboard. It also automatically cites the source.

Resharing part of a series is somewhat interesting since the author controls how their series gets cut up, instead of leaving it up to the reader.

None of this is anything you couldn't do before, but changing what's easy to do in a UI also changes what's common on the network.

The limitations are not arbitrary but an artifact of its original purpose and design. A lot of those "interesting social media experiments" have been conducted before, with the same outcomes - at a time when SMS was still free and SMS-boards were thriving.

I'd argue it isn't Twitter with this history, so much as society.

Good thing about extreme limitations is it also makes exploitation harder. Though, there is money in exploiting social channels, so I'd expect that to follow quickly.

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