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Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

I think it's time for Twitter to move away from the strict 140 letter limit. It has served them well, but not anymore. Now it's just severely restricting the usefulness of the service and if they don't fix it soon Google+ will grab a lot of Twitter-users who are limited by the limit, like myself.

I don't have the time or enough things I'd like to say in order for it to warrant getting a blog, but not everything I'd like to say fits into 140 characthers either.

It would actually relatively easy for Twitter to fix this issue. Just do it like Reddit does for self-posts. Simply enable people to embed text the same way it lets people embed pictures and videos.

It solves all the major issues Twitter is having - people will stop shortening their tweets so much that they lose their intended meaning/readablity, Google+ stops having a major content advantage due to no characther limit and the feed won't get cluttered by walls of text (unlike Google+).

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I really disagree. The forced constraints of Twitter are its greatest virtue.

I can follow 200+ people only because I know that they'll be forced to be concise in what they say and how they say it. Google+ felt unwieldily at a half-dozen people because at some point each of them would succumb to the temptation to write a 1600+ word post, and no matter how interesting I found them, it turned the act of surveying my timeline from a nearly effortless, quick glance experience into a depressing exercise in reminding myself that there were endless reams of text I was falling behind on and could never hope to find the time to catch up with.

I have the same problem with RSS readers; beyond some very low limit, it becomes dispiriting to see how much stuff I will never find the time to keep up with, so I stop using the app. Twitter doesn't have this effect on me precisely because it forces everyone to be brief and digestible.

A "New Twitter" in which I have to curate my timeline down from 200 to 6 is a Twitter I just stop using.

No offense, but did you actually read my post? Since I mentioned the exact same issue and presented a solution I guess you didn't.

As I said - clutter in the timeline wouldn't be an issue like it is on Google+, since the extra "embedded text" would be hidden by default, just like on Reddit.

Twitter currently forces you to express your entire thought in 140 characters. Or, at most, in some small multiple of 140-character posts. Usually the friction of splitting something out like that caps people at around 3 posts.

Your "self post" style idea with hidden "embedded text" would only really force people to be concise with what effectively become the "titles" of their rambling, hidden, posts. It does nothing to solve any of the problems created when you lift the arbitrary conciseness limit; the manner in which people express ideas gets flabby when they have infinite space in which to express them.

I don't want a timeline full of titles to posts I'm rarely going to click into. That's a big decrease in the value Twitter is providing to me.

A lot of the posts in my stream contain links to images, videos, and articles. In a sense, the 140 characters (minus the 20 required for a url) already are a title for something more time consuming. I'm not sure that hosting self posts would really change that, it just makes it easier. Instead of linking to my blog post, I link to a twitter provided long post.

Maaaybe this would work, but it would have to be significantly different to post long text than to post the regular 140 characters. What makes twitter great is the feed is easy to get through because everyone is limited in what they can add to it. I like that every tweet is essentially the same size. Simply lifting the limit on the regular tweet would be a grave mistake. Them becoming essentially a static blog hosting provider that you can link to in a tweet seems like not a terrible idea, though.

> It solves all the major issues Twitter is having - people will stop shortening their tweets so much that they lose their intended meaning/readablity

I disagree that this is a problem. The content of a tweet should be a short communication, not a diatribe. I think that's the non-SMS-based reason for the 140 character limit. It forces people to think about what is important for such a small space.

I like your idea of embedding text extension into a tweet, but I think this would be abused to the point where Twitter would turn into something more akin to Tumblr. This meshes well with your point about having more to say than fits in 140 characters, but less than an actual blog. Tumblr is more of an elastic-use platform, whereby one can post Twitter-length messages, a few paragraphs, or an essay. I don't think Twitter intends to compete in that market. Length isn't their goal, but succinct is.

I agree with this. I'm now based in Beijing and the local Twitter clones (the largest with hundreds of millions of users on Weibo.com) have a 140 character limit, but in Chinese. Each Chinese character has roughly the same expressiveness as a full word in English, and it's a much richer experience. Changing the limit to something like 100 words would be a welcome change IMO.

What about SMS users? The 140 character limitation is there for them. It would fragment the service for them as they would only be able to receive short tweets or receive tweets split into multiple messages.

Whereas I'm not saying they should remove the limitation, I think that should be the last of Twitter's concerns. Not sure if there's any official numbers on this, but I'd guess the percentage of tweets sent by SMS is not much more than 3 or 4%. It's what made Twitter big, but texting tweets is legacy now.

I use SMS tweets when following users who supply important time-sensitive information. I'm glad the feature exists.

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