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Comment by calinet6 | Hacker News Reader

This is great. It's just perfect.

The service purposefully limited to naturally content-light context-light 180-character quips—whose intent is to broadcast and be broadcasted to unfiltered—achieves its destiny.

The result is natural and unavoidable. I'm so happy we're beginning to realize it.

Seriously though, this is one of those unmeasurables that's difficult to nail down. Sure you could blame it on changes to the UX, or on the user-base itself, or any number of other reasons. But in the end, you've gotta look at the nature of the form of communication itself and its parameters and assumptions, and make a conclusion at face value.

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It's 140' but yeah, you nailed it. Synthesis ability is a good thing. In longer constructs, that is. We don't base our lives on aphorisms alone. Sometimes we really need to be verbose. Sometimes we really need to read "à la recherche du temps perdu". Twitter is just heading to its natural destination, a place where people share links and headlines and quick comments of little to no value. All the "revolution instrument" narrative is plain bullshit, too. A high percentage of what you'll have on your timeline is nonsense in no particular order. Only thing I save: lists. Useful for news gathering, but not much more.

I watched a Noam Chomsky youtube video recently, where he said something similar about TV news. The amount of time you get is only about enough to throw out some half-baked soundbite i.e. "XXX are terrorists", "All benefit claimaints are scroungers" and if it doesn't reiterate whatever the perceived wisdom of the day is, there's no way you'll get enough time to make a point.

I don't use twitter but i imagine the 140 character limit must be much worse. Facebook might be generally vacuous but at least there's enough space and persistance of thread that it's possible to have something of an intellectual discussion.

I think a character limit is a good idea, but it should be closer to 400 or something. It should force people to be concise, but not force people to divide their message in multiple posts. I don't really know where the sweet spot is, but I don't think it's 140.

I imagine you could design a UX which encouraged people to keep their messages short, but enabled longer elaboration when necessary.

App.net's 256 characters is a very nice 'sweet spot' for me.

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