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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a very obvious cowpath that Twitter could pave. I just don't get why they haven't done it yet.

Twitter doesn’t understand what makes it successful so it is loath to change anything.

The sad part is that Twitter started as a SMS relay, ans SMS has had a system for splitting and joining long messages for ages...

That's what Moments is supposed to be for. People can make their own, but I rarely see it.

Because twitter is Craigslist.

It’s a slippery slope. If they do this, what’s next? Where do they stop? What’s it going to take for users to finally be satisfied?

(Edit: Don’t understand the downvotes. Don’t understand a lot of downvotes lately. Do I have a target on my back?)

It's entirely reasonable to want to be able to read a series of tweets that are meant to be read as one long tweet/block of text the way it was intended to be read. I don't understand how you think this is an unreasonable request, especially when tools exist to correct this issue with the max-character limitation Twitter has, or what "slippery slope" this could have.

You're getting downvotes because you're advocating something that makes entirely 0 sense from a usability perspective. And commenting on why you're being voted in a particular way is wholly against the guidelines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

If a series of tweets can easily be put into a defined order for consumption then why not just lift the max character limitation and let people make tweets as long as they want? Seems like it’d be an easy slide down that slope once you’re on it.

There is no slope. Either the limitation is there, or it isn't. What comes after to call this a "slippery slope"?

And clearly the existing limitation is a pain in the ass, or else services that "unroll" multi-tweet text wouldn't exist. The limitation is completely arbitrary and clearly not entirely helpful, so a request to lift it is entirely reasonable.

I can easily imagine a series of changes that ultimately turns Twitter into something like Medium.

> Either the limitation is there, or it isn't.

Well, if you can compose multiple Twitter messages into a long one, the limitation is kind of just half there.

The difference is all about the contributors.

Each having a low limit, or one having a low limit makes for specific conversation dynamics.

Long form, or free form is a different thing.

Equating them is over simplifying both the request and dynamics in play.

Would that be an issue? The character limit is clearly a pain point for some users (graph here[1] of average tweet lengths -- many people abandon their tweets if they hit the limit), so why not alleviate it? Especially given that it doesn't appear to impact other users' behaviour: only 5% of users actually used the extra space during testing of the increase from 140 to 280 characters [2].

This discussion reminds me of when Instagram stopped enforcing that all pictures be square, a (mostly) ideological limit that made using the service harder.

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-opens-floodgates-on-28...

Would it be a bad slope for them to go down?

PS: I can't tell, because I have no idea what people see in Twitter in the first place.

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