In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel
For those (like me) on mobile who can't read this (well):
"In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.
"When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way.
"Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you.
"When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe."
People could just use > like the internet has for ages:
> In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day.
> When the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. In the restaurant I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way.
> Late at night, I call my long distance lover, proudly say I only used fifty-nine today. I saved the rest for you.
> When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words, so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line and listen to each other breathe.
Of course, the effect is best when the poem is laid out properly (which sometimes includes using indentation). But using slashes is better than alternatives like using commas (which is ambiguous, since a comma can mean a pause or clause boundary within a line)
The browser's displaying things just fine. The problem is forums that provide custom markup implementing an insufficient subset of what HTML allows for. In this case, HN provides formatting for blocks of code, but not quoted blocks of prose.
Oh, and HN is still using tables within tables within tables (within...) for their text formatting. I'm sure someone here will defend that. looks at calendar
Anyways, flying cars everyone! We're going to be the VC for flying cars!
But then, the poem will be 124 words (by changing "thirty two" to "eighteen"), so we will have to change 125 to 124. Then, he will be able to say "I love you" an exactly 18 times. So now we are 3 words shorter (by removing "and a third"). So it comes 121. With 121 words, he will be able to say "I love you" exactly 17 times. So, there you go. Change "one sixty seven" to "one twenty one", and "thirty two and a third times" to "seventeen times".
It's actually "thirty-two" which, by the rules established in the poem, counts as one word only. It works with 125 words by chance. The author missed an opportunity for a neat hack.
In the first verse, there doesn't seem to be any pattern to the lengths (in syllables) of the lines; 10, 7, 8, 8, 12, 8. I'm not sure the meter would really be damaged that much by reducing the last line by one syllable.
At first I didnt understand why either, but looking at poem more and thinking about if I were writing it; I think he did it so he could use the "Thirty two and a third" line. It's much more dramatic and stimulating ("...I love you, I...") than just saying "twenty-five times".
Edit: Oops, I think I screwed up my math. It would be 22 times.
Edit: misquoted! worked in a record store too long. :)
EDIT: Nevermind, I shouldn't comment late at night. Keeping the comment intact in case someone is currently responding, so context is preserved.
EDIT2: It would work with the actual number of words in the poem (125) though, he would have to say "Eighteen and a third times". 59+11+18*3+1 = 125
OLD COMMENT: What do you mean? "Thirty-two and a third times" means exactly that, and not 22. He used 59 words that day, plus the eleven for the first part of the call, plus 32 times 3 ("I love you"), plus a third of "I love you", which is just one word. Makes 167.
In this case, it makes sense because the author was trying to preserve the line breaks in the original poem, which give cadence to the writing and are integral to the work.
Don't blame the commenter. Blame HN for having broken <pre> blocks (or at least for consuming single line breaks otherwise).
May I suggest this reading of a Charles Bukowski poem. It's helped me to get out of bed a number of times, when the days look so foreboding. http://youtu.be/yVisTfbVSFE
> When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello.
Actually I often do this with unknown callers, it usually confuse them especially when it's advertisement, they usually wait for someone to speak up, but at least it's easier way to save your breathe if someone who is calling you doesn't even know your name to ask "is mr. XY there?", then you can just hang up.
Thank you very much for sharing. Touching. Did not expect something like this in the comment section. You definitely made my day with this beautiful poem.
Great poem. And what I like about HN is that the first dozens of comments on the poem are about technicalities like how it is displayed in the browser, the mathmatics of it etc., not its interpretation :-)
I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140 character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc?
Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going to dilute their brand if they abandon it.
I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 140 characters that matters, it's also all the other times when people don't feel social pressure to write up longer, perhaps more thoughtful messages, that's important here.
I agree with you that the 140 is iconic and it's probably not a good idea to abandon it. What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.
That way you don't lose the iconic 140 characters thing, and you don't have any problem to solve by making weird compromises where the user names or media URLs don't count toward the 140, blurring the lines of what 140 means and losing the "creativity loves constraints" factor.
> What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.
>What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.
Indeed, especially as people have been already doing this by sharing longer posts as pictures of text
I was even thinking things like links to Twitlonger and Pastebin could be used for embedded text, the same way twitter knows how to handle imgur & youtube links and embed their content with tweets.
Better solution is to let users solve a complicated CAPTCHA when they want to tweet longer messages. That way, there is no social pressure to make long tweets (no reasonable person can pressure you to solve boring CAPTCHAs), while it's still there if you need it.
Or, phrased differently, they should make it harder to tweet longer messages.
I feel like the core value proposition is something like "public expressions that can be consumed quickly and produced with little forethought". I think it's important that Twitter gives you the excuse to be less precise: there isn't enough space.
It's a small thing sure, but if you look at the differences between the popular social platforms, it's all about small differences. If Twitter loses that which distinguishes it from everyone else, that may give them an initial boost when it's a new feature, but then the novelty will wear off and maybe they will have lost what makes them unique.
I'd like to compare this to Hollywood. It feels like the kind of alteration a studio might come up with by relentlessly screen-testing a movie using test audiences. It's one way to guarantee a bland, non-specific result, that won't command any lasting mindshare.
Clearly moving from 140 characters to 280 characters isn't yet that just-like-everything-else end result, but it somehow feels like a step in that direction to me.
Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish. When the platform limits his words, that works in his favour - no nuance can be conveyed, his utterances are sharp, authentic sounding, plausible.
Give him 1000 words to make his case, and suddenly he's stuck. His thoughts were never that deep, and they don't stand up well to being expanded on - there wasn't any substance to begin with.
Twitter is what it is in large part because of that 140 character limit. It allows boofheads of all stripes to sound convincing, because the platform was tailor made for short blasts of hot air.
> Imagine an idiot (any idiot) blurting out bileful rubbish.
There's no idiot shortage on Twitter (or elsewhere), but I'll bet an overwhelming majority of the people who read your sentence above thought of the same person.
Wow. I tweet very infrequently, and agonize over exactly what to say and how to phrase it so that it is intelligible and interesting in 140 characters.
Then again, I only have a few hundred tweets and endeavor to make each one count.
Twitter with no character limit is just a blog site. There are plenty of blog sites, none of them close to as successful as Twitter. The character limit is key to holding on to the modern zero-attention-span user.
The exact number 140 is legacy, but the super-brief "microblogging" format is vital.
There are plenty of blog sites, none of them close to as successful as Twitter. The character limit is key to holding on to the modern zero-attention-span user.
There's a slight fallacy here: that no single blog site is as successful as Twitter does not mean blogs as a whole aren't, and therefore that you need the character limit to be successful. I don't have any hard data, but my anecdotal experience matches that: almost nobody I know uses Twitter, whereas every computer/smartphone user I know reads blog posts at least occasionally.
Nobody I know voted for Trump, but here he is president. HN readers and their close friends are nowhere near being a representative sample of internet users.
Things fall into place by accident. I'd say there's no telling what would happen.
Imagine what this is going to do to president Trump. His short quips had a striking impact. He'll never again need to end a message with the one word sentence "JOBS!"
It's hard to compress your thoughts and present it in limited time or space while still keeping its essence and power. This is why lot of tweets are iconic: They are presentation of very strong ideas and opinions in tiny amount of space. You can wear them on t-shirt or thumb it out on smartphone while using just few seconds you have. Larger char limit means diminishing of this quality from writers part and also higher cost from readers part. The 140 chars might be accidental limit but it was just the right balance given the amount of tweets that already exists and able to express intent in that much space.
Can you explain what you mean by this? If you're talking about the 'title' of each search result, it looks like it's capped at a way lower number of characters than that.
For what it's worth, your message required a lot more attention from me than it would have, if you had used the word "number" rather than the strange glyph "#". I guess you were doing this with some sort of meta humour because the story is about twitter, but the point was inversed. Your attempt to abbreviate things to make them more legible, made them less so.
The lesson above applies, incidentally, to pretty much everything twitter.
Well, apologies. I got the impression that your argument was that you make a messages easier to understand by shortening them. I just gave you a concrete example of when a message got harder to understand because it was shortened.
But good job on deliberately missing the point as a discussion strategy. That too, was very twitter of you.
I don't use Twitter myself, but I think the reason behind the limit is that SMS can send 140 bytes in each message. When sending regular text messages a 7-bit alphabet is usually used, for 160 characters in total.
The SMS limit was decided when an engineer working for German Telecom decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences. Twitter based their limit on the SMS limit (140 + user address).
> decided on the limit after typing up a bunch of sample sentences
From what I heard, the SMS limit was actually a protocol limitation: it piggybacks on signaling messages, which have a small size limit (this is also why SMS can sometimes work even when everything else doesn't). Quoting from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS):
"Messages are sent with the MAP MO- and MT-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signaling protocol to precisely 140 bytes (140 bytes * 8 bits / byte = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet, the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UCS-2 alphabet. Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual short message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters."
That's not what is meant. Twitter was originally an SMS service, which would text you whenever someone you followed posted a tweet. In order for you to be able to tell who had posted each tweet, the message had to contain the poster's username. This is distinct from the username of whoever they were replying to.
Mastodon [0] has a default character limit of 500, which individual instances can turn up or down as they see fit (Mastodon is a federated network). Hundreds of thousands of people use it and the social dynamics work just fine, or even better, with the additional breathing room for expression. To me Twitter's attachment to such a low cap feels like an anachronism.
I've been using it for about 2 weeks now and I love it. If you pick a cool instance related to your interests and toot to your liking, you often get responses almost instantly from people reading the local and federated timelines, and you get tons of new people to follow as well. It just feels so much more open to meeting new people than Twitter does.
It doesn't just feel like an anachronism, it is one. The cap was chosen to conform to the 160 character limit of SMS (140 characters in the tweet and 20 characters for your Twitter handle).
Visiting that site requires clicking "Get Started" which then directs you to a list of instances, from which you choose a server and sign up (not sure because in the age of 140 chars don't have the attention span to follow through). Without doing that there's no content short of a bunch of reasons why Mastodon is open and free, but the average user doesn't care about that. It's kind of preaching to the choir which means that the choir is gonna dominate it.
Maybe the goal isn't mass adoption, or maybe adoption would be a long term result of smaller communities getting popular, but wish it'd just get to the product a lot quicker than it does.
You could point people to https://mastodon.social, the "flagship" instance, or directly to any other instance's homepage. There's something of a word-of-mouth aspect here, in that instances targeted toward particular communities can be more attractive to people within those communities than general-purpose social networks.
There's an instance chooser wizard at https://instances.social/, but I can see someone looking at that and calling it too complicated as well.
I poked the owner and he updated mastodon.social to say this and be more clear...
> What is mastodon.social?
> This page describes the mastodon.social instance - wondering what Mastodon is? Check out joinmastodon.org instead! In essence, Mastodon is a decentralized, open source social network. This is just one part of the network, run by the main developers of the project It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!
It helps. But now, if you scroll down on the generic signup page that each instance greets you with, there's a "look inside" box with recent messages from users of that instance.
I really wanted to like Mastodon, but their "default" instance is just too restrictive on speech. It's basically a tumblrina safe space network. I'm saying this as a mostly-liberal, not your average OMG LIBTARDS ARE SNOWFLAKES person.
If a social network, even a federated one, wants to gain traction, it needs to be a bit more open. Yeah, nazis are obnoxious assholes, but I'd rather have a network with them on it (and just ignore them) than have to constantly worry "am I saying the 'wrong thing'??" each time I post something.
I mean, the whole point of distribution seems to be that you can say what you want and it can't get shut down. Mastodon's ideals are at odds with its goals, IMO.
Then you don't understand what distribution means. If you want to use mastodon you don't have to go to the main instance, you can go to another instance that allows what you want. Theresr httsp://instances.social to help you with that. Here's the result:
The issue with such "free speech" instances not being the norm is that the instances which do allow "hate speech" are going to be clustered with unsavory individuals.
If toleration is not encouraged at the core, it is a useless service because I don't want to spend my time in a safe-zone where I have to preface anything I say with "I don't mean to offend, but I think..." any more than I want to hang out with a group of half fascists.
You could try not having half the things that come out of your mouth be easily construed as offensive, I guess? Seriously, I'm on mastodon.social and I've never once felt a need to preface anything like that.
You could try not having half the things that come out of your mouth be easily construed as offensive, I guess?
Who is the gatekeeper for what is offensive and what is not? Why would you even accuse a stranger of having half the things coming out of their mouth being offensive?
If you haven't experienced the vitriolic "safe-space" syndrome present in modern heavily-moderated social networks, give it time and you certainly will. When, for example, I get reported and called a "future rapist" by a gang of radical feminists for stating that there should be legal consequences for false reports of rape / domestic violence, then there is a problem.
It was such occurrences that ultimately led to me leaving all social networks in the first place. The moderation is too heavy-handed and skewed in the direction of political correctedness to the point where if you disagree with someone you are labeled a nazi and silenced / blocked. It's a sad state of affairs.
> The issue with such "free speech" instances not being the norm is that the instances which do allow "hate speech" are going to be clustered with unsavory individuals.
Hang on, I don't follow. Are you saying that free speech = hate speech = things from unsavory individuals?
No, that's a gross oversimplification. The post I was replying to had a link to an instance search including the flag "hatespeech=true". That's why I protested, for the same reason as you, because free speech != hate speech.
I totally agree with you that such instances may (and probably will) be "split" from the bigger federation, but that's the whole point of distribution. At that point we'll see multiple networks, each with their own rules and tolerance, and that is how federation thrives.
Took a look at your post history. It's rather negative and angry and projecting. This kind of anti-social speech is detrimental to a healty community and if you represent the average person on Mastodon then I will stay far away.
I have no idea what was written here before it was flag-killed, but "negative and angry and projecting" doesn't describe my experience with people on Mastodon. Very much the opposite.
It would seem to me that the solution to the problem described in the blog would be to reduce the number of characters allowed for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese users. The whole appeal of twitter, I thought, was if you said what you wanted to say the system forced you to reconsider how you said it until you got down to the bare essence of what you were trying to convey. I'd be in favor of a maximum number of tweets per day, too.
They found out that Japanese Twitter users don’t run up against the character limit, and are less frustrated as a result. The point is to make everybody else less frustrated, not to make the Japanese as frustrated as everybody else.
Yeah, you can type a lot more in Japanese. Most characters stand for at least two US characters, which is most likely how they came up with the 2x decision.
A lot of Japanese people use Twitter quite effectively as a micro-blog. This is harder in English because of the character counts. So it could be that "Japanese-style twitter" is the true product vision, and it's not working in English
The original 140-character constraint was an external restriction from formatting, it could be that 280-characters is, in fact, the "right" number of characters for the service they want.
So many people complain about the overly-terse nature of tweets. This can help tackle this and get to a better product.
You're missing the fact that Twitter's engagement is way higher in East Asian countries and that's because they can pretty much use Twitter as a normal blog. On the other hand in the countries with very long words (like Hungary and Finland) Twitter is not very popular. It's been clear for a while and I'm surprised they haven't implemented this sooner.
Must be true, as a native speaker of Croatian, I find most Tweets in English understandable, not in Croatian, however. People tend to send 4 or 5 tweets instead.
Doing this distillation seemed to be too much trouble for many users. You see people splitting things to multiple tweets, using images or simply posting links.
Trying to for example summarise interesting stuff you seen online to 140 chars is hard. Every increment in the character count makes it a bit easier. 140 to 280 has much larger effect that say 280 to 420, so I don't see slippery sloap here.
Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint. The limit for Asian languages should have been adjusted downwards as early as Twitter launched (though I suppose that's actually somewhat hard to do from a technological viewpoint, as people might mix Western letters and Asian symbols).
And then they point out that in Asian countries people tweet more, so alright, who cares about history, do what works best.
But you shouldn't just be looking at how many tweets are written. People are going to post more, just because it's easier to post something. That doesn't mean that people actually read these longer tweets just as much.
Like, there is a feedback loop here, people would also start to tweet less, if they didn't bother reading tweets, because many tweets are also responses to other tweets, but still, this reasoning seems quite a bit oversimplified.
>"Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint."
I don't believe this is correct but rather 140 characters limit was chosen because SMS will break a message greater than 160 characters into two messages. 140 characters leaves 20 characters for a username.
In Japan at least, the anonymity factor was at least as strong as the information density factor (TWTR > FB for a very long time there because people there generally don't want to tie their irl identities to online accounts).
The 140 character limit was chosen based on sending 8bit SMS messages. If it was chosen from an English speaking viewpoint, they could have chosen to base it on GSM 7bit SMS, which would allow 160 characters.
Was the default SMS 8bit in the US at the time or?
Asian languages would require UCS2 encoded SMS messages, which can contain 70 characters as far as I remember.
When I type an actual SMS, the 160 limit seems to be reduced if I add non-English characters, like emoji or possibly even just an em-dash. So they could simply have followed SMS more closely, 140 bytes or something.
From the standpoint of not wanting to alienate users, I can see why they might be hesitant to go this route; it's much more likely to piss people off if you take away some of their characters rather than giving them more.
There is precedent of treating CJK characters as "double-width", but it's anachronistic in a world of proportional fonts and UTF-8.
CJK users also don't use CJK characters exclusively. There's almost always single-byte characters mixed in, such as URLs and numbers, and in the case of Korean, even punctuation. If some characters count as 1 and others count as 2, it will result in fluctuating limits that are hard to grasp intuitively.
If you used CJK before UTF-8 was popular, you would know that people had absolutely no issue counting some characters as 2. It’s entirely natural. In typical proportional fonts CJK characters still occupy about twice the width of a Latin character.
> the system forced you to reconsider how you said it until you got down to the bare essence of what you were trying to convey
... and stripping away context and nuance, and ultimately providing such a paucity that people these days have trouble recognising context and nuance. Twitter's played a major hand in the damage to people's attention spans and ability to interpret communications effectively. Recognising subtext no longer seems to be a thing anymore.
>> I'd be in favor of a maximum number of tweets per day, too.
A while back, I spent a few days hashing out a concept for a social network that would impose posting limits. The initial obvious approach is a single post per 24 hours, to really make each person think about whether hitting send is worth it. However, I cast this aside as being too restrictive.
Introducing the concept of categories: you can post once per 24 hours, but per user-defined category, up to some maximum category limit per account. You could post once about your cooking hobby, once about your programming hobby/career, once about the news, etc. Your followers could subscribe or unsubscribe to your individual categories; someone can opt to see your cooking and news posts, but ignore your posts about programming.
The concept starts to collapse at the "policing" stage. People would cheat by using all of their categories to spam a single topic, or to bypass followers' unsubscribing from a topic they just must be heard on. This necessitates a moderation system whereby followers could vote on posts, or report those which are miscategorized. With such a system in place, the possibility exists to increase the limit to 2-3 posts per day in categories for which someone receives overwhelmingly positive (or nonnegative) feedback. Dealing with users' and bots' vote manipulation is of course a never-ending battle.
The concept completely disintegrates when you consider who, as a publisher of content, would choose such a platform. A lot of people love sharing their every thought, meal, personality test, quiz, BuzzFeed article, etc. Such people would never opt in to a platform that limits their ability to do so - and why should they? Companies, celebrities, and other popular figures rightfully depend on being able to communicate whenever it suits them, so this concept is utterly useless to them.
Thus the market is tiny, to the point of being non-existent, for limiting the publishing side of the equation. This pushes the entire problem to the side of the readers/followers. We as consumers really just want to be able to intricately tailor what we see. I'm hoping we will soon have AI that can appropriately categorize posts, so I can filter out every single post having to do with personality tests and quizzes, BuzzFeed-like links, anything and everything having to do with US politics (I'm not American), animal abuse (I'm really tired of "save the animals"), and the constant stream of photos from new parents parading their children. I stopped using FaceBook entirely because their filtering options are just not adequate. Nor do I expect FaceBook to ever offer such filtering, as it would nullify all the mindless drivel that keeps their users engaged with their platform.
Lastly, I considered a monetization strategy whereby a user could pay (heavily) to post above their allocated limit. It sounds useful if you imagine people using it very rarely to push out that one extra gem that surely all followers would love to see. Of course, "pay to play" has no place in a social network designed to reduce the number of posts, and I couldn't come up with a solution to have my cake and eat it too. A "pay per post" strategy would be the foundation of a standalone concept - one for which no market exists.
tldr; A social network that limits publishers' ability to maximize engagement will never gain traction. What we need, as consumers of social networking, is the ability to perform advanced categorization and filtering of existing content. Don't get your hopes up - FaceBook and Twitter will never allow us to skip straight to the "good stuff", as viewing only a dozen posts a day would decimate their engagement stats, including ad views.
Lots of cynicism around here. For me, the 140 character limit really was very frustrating. I tweet rarely, but when I do I often spend 2-3 minutes trying to fit the message into the character limit. Often I just abandon it completely because there's no way to make it fit without having to send multiple messages.
This change seems completely reasonable to me, if not a bit delayed.
Doesn't seem to be working, does it? I'm a fairly verbose person and nothing I ever want to say fits in 140 characters. And the stuff I see on twitter that DOES fit into 140, well, I'm typically better off not reading it. (222 characters)
Most of the time, it's not about the characters but more about the words. If you want to say more in only 140 characters you have to fit more words in, which means using shorter words... and that's why 99% of Twitter users sound like idiots, even though most of them probably are not.
Absolutely. That drive toward concision is what makes it hugely valuable to me as a reader. If people want to write something longer elsewhere and link to it, they can. But even there they need to precisely summarize it so I can decide whether it's worth the time.
For me that writing process was the most fun. Trying to get an idea to fit in 140 characters and still be grammatically correct is a pleasant challenge. Expanding the character limit may make that easier and therefore less fun - or maybe it'll just give more characters to edit and rearrange.
They gave the statistic that 9% of tweets were at the character limit. That's the wrong statistic though. What they need to check is something like "met or exceeded the limit during composition" because I'd suppose that more tweets are affected by the limit than only 9%. Most of those affected tweets are simply pared down to less than 140 characters.
I don't know...the 140 character limit forced you to be creative in how you condensed your thoughts, but it also provided an easy-to-consume stream of content for readers. My fear is that by doubling the limit, that stream is going to take more effort to consume and lose its differentiation from Facebook.
Writing with thousands of characters is more efficient than writing with just 26. (82 characters)
I admit my Japanese is not so great, and the comparison is somewhat unfair because of the subtleties of counting the characters. Still, the point here is that Twitter is more constrained in some languages than in others. If people are not having the problem you described in China or Japan maybe the problem is not too terrible...
Maybe. I already saw someone post a heated reply to one of Trump's tweets, and the 280 character limit made it read more like a mini-essay. Seeing a whole feed of that would make me even less likely to read Twitter, because it would look just like Facebook.
I'm convinced there is no one at twitter that understands why they succeeded as a company.
Their management team continually makes decisions that are reminiscent of shuffling around deck chairs on the titanic. I get the feeling that they only exist due to inertia which is a death sentence for most tech companies.
No one in silicon valley will say the reason, but it's blindingly obvious. It was dumb luck. Luck plays a part in every success and failure and Twitter was about 98% luck. There was and is no vision or strategy that explains this. No lessons to learn. Pure zeitgeist that is bound to crumble sometime after Trump leaves office.
I think it was a convergence of luck, the solving of a specific problem that was relevant at the time (sms messages), well timed celebrity adoption (Shaq was an early twitter user) and the idiosyncratic constraint of 140 characters which distinguished the platform from alternatives and contributed to a unique feel.
It's large part luck, but the particular features play a role, too.
No one understands why they succeeded as a company. They haven't. They created a really popular product. That's completely different from succeeding as a company.
This blog post and Jack's subsequent praise of all the hard work that went into this groundbreaking product decision is exactly why they haven't succeeded yet as a company.
280 would be the absolute maximum. I think their hope is that the number of English tweets that reach that amount is very low; at the same time they allow users to tweet easier.
It is clear that people want to use Twitter to say things longer than 140 characters as the rise in popularity of long threaded Tweets would attest. It is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their iconic 140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform.
One of those options was announced publicly with an official blog post and one of them was slipped into an app unannounced likely as part of a/b testing. Maybe they eventually implement both, but at this moment their preference between the two is clear.
> One of those options was announced publicly with an official blog post and one of them was slipped into an app unannounced likely as part of a/b testing.
Both of them are currently being tested on a limited group of users; but that’s true only one got a blog post.
In the very early days of Gmail (2005-ish) they had a constantly-increasing ticker on the front page showing you how many bytes of storage your account had access to. In my head I'm imagining such a ticker on Twitter's home page as well, but ticking up to show you how many characters your tweets can be. Given their current rate, the ticker would be incrementing at 0.00000037 characters per second. This way we'd have access to 281 characters by next month!
In my judgement it's not worse at all; we live in a world in which the content that actually has an impact on people is hidden no longer behind publishers but online centralised platforms; it is only appropriate that those publishers be held to a good standard by its users, as much as it is possible. But that's not the case; the situation is that the people who distribute the content are only beholden to the law and shareholders, both of which have very little to do with the largest and most socially important interest, which are the users.
Not that I support it, but if Twitter were a paid platform they would have more accountability to the users, not beacuse they have finally realised their place as a setter of massive trends and social control, but because the users hold the shareholders ransom by way of threatening to take away any profit.
Because their service is being used to further negative outcomes. Their job isn’t directly stopping Nazis any more than a bar owner’s primary job is stopping drunk drivers but that doesn’t mean they aren’t fueling the problems, especially given their tendency to skimp on actually enforcing their TOS.
Don't think it's a trump thing , or even something specific to the US. I remember a few years ago, our french prime minister tweeted his condolences to the victim of a terror attack in France.
I think it's fairly reasonable to tweet condolences or important news. Twitter is widely used and as a government you probably want to spread information as quickly as possible.
Tweets are probably made along side more traditional forms of communication.
But Trump is just something else. The sheer lack of self control. This is not the behaviour of a leader of a first world nation or for that matter, an adult.
It’s clear that the commenter is referring to expected or acceptable behavior of someone in that role. Like if a 30 year old human threw a hissy fit over not having enough cake to eat, you might say they’re not acting like an adult.
Trump leveraged a TV show and a Twitter account into the presidency beating two most powerful American political dynasties in the process. Why would you believe that his current tweets are caused by lack of self control?
As a government, the need for instantaneous communication is pretty much confined to secure channels. The need to respond immediately was a sloped we slipped down by racing to the bottom.
Indeed. If you recall when Trump announced his transgender ban on the military, he had a ten minute delay between part one and the actual subject of the message.
"After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow....."
During those ten minutes, even folks at the Pentagon were wondering if Trump was about to announce a strike on a foreign power or something of that gravity... and surely folks in other countries' governments were wondering the same.
A cut-off tweet could, indeed, lead someone to believe a strike is imminent.
It certainly would not be the first war, unwanted by both parties, started by miscommunication. It's easily done. Imagine you and someone else are pointing guns at each other - did the other person's buddy just say 'shoot' or 'shucks'? Are you going to wait to find out? And what if your buddy says it - you probably want your buddy to think hard about what they say and to speak very clearly and slowly.
That's why diplomacy is a profession which requires great skill and expertise, and why escalation is rarely used as a tactic by the professionals. Flying bombers which could contain nuclear weapons near the other side's cities, for example, might make jumpy people pull the trigger. Radars, nervous radar technicians, and their nervous superiors do make make mistakes.
A surprisingly large number of wars do start with errors. Off the top of my head:
The destruction of the ship the Maine by the Spanish started the Spanish-American War, even though the ship likely wasn't destroyed by the Spanish.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Vietnamese attacked U.S. Navy ships. started the Vietnam War, even though there was no attack (it was radar error).
Iraq's WMD program and alliance with Al Qaeda started the Iraq War, even though there was no program or alliance.
I thought he was going for something along those lines, then somebody got through to him and so he ended it up with something nonsensical, hence the delay.
Ex-twitter eng here. Twitter has been debating this change internally for at least 5 years now. They were afraid to pull the trigger because no one inside knows why they've had the success that they've had and they're afraid to change too much (lest they pull a Digg).
This move isn't made out of desperation, but it's probably being done right now because they've nothing to lose by randomly trying things.
Isn't it obvious? Twitter is a dopamine pump combined with a misunderstanding machine that has gamified the cult of personality.
Familiar readers feel a reward for their constant interpretive skimming of aborted thoughts, outsiders project the worst kind of interpretation to feel superior, as it automatically turns everything you post into a shareable post card with your face on it.
This doesn't solve the main pain points with length (megathreads and screenshots for quotes), but harms brevity that made Twitter varied and quick to read.
People post huge "threads", which are a UI mess, and are much much longer than 280 chars. So now instead of "[1/15] Thread…" we'll have "[1/7] Thread…" rants.
And people post screenshots of articles which again are longer than 280 chars.
Twitter used to float idea of 10K limit: https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/140-to-10k/ A 10K char "attachment" to a tweet would have allowed people to stuff their megathreads and articles there.
Twitter needs to keep moving forward. There have been several features that feel like the core of their platform, but based on their revenue growth, they may be holding them back. Personally, eh, 280-length tweets feel weird and long and I don't see the need, but I'll probably get over it. If they can change how Twitter is used open up new audiences and conversations, this is good.
The character limit is a core aspect of what makes consuming content on Twitter so engaging vs. other platforms.
Will this change improve engagement number or ad revenue? I sincerely doubt it.
An actual useful change would be versioning functionality so that users can edit tweets to correct typos or factual errors while not erasing the record.
Have they gone into any detail about how exactly they're going to enforce different limits for different languages? If it's by the localization of your browser/app, what's stopping someone from changing their language to English and then typing 280 Japanese characters? If it's by doing some sort of language recognition on the tweet, how will it deal with mixed content?
Sometimes, things that look obvious and simple require a lot of work and research to build so that it will fit the product and won't damage the community and momentum.
This isn't one of those times. Seriously, what in the world took so long.
It’s also dumb when I have to read 3 tweets in a sequence by the same person trying to get a single point across, each one with a different set of comments, likes, and retweets.
Im not sure this will fix it though, maybe it will help. I feel like the same could be accomplished with an expando at whatever limit they set. That way when I browse twitter the tweet boxes are still the same size as originally, and if i want to read more I can tap the expand box button.
They could fix this by fixing how they thread tweets. Currently they thread tweets, but it's grouped in a weird way and sometimes someone that isn't the person that threaded them is in the middle of the thread. Also, instead of making people manually put (1/x) they could just create a counter and put them in sequential order treating any time the author only replies to themselves (which is how you thread) as the thread, but any reply to someone not themselves as outside of the thread. I'm sure that's complex, but I believe it could be done with some logic.
I enjoy being able to choose a specific statement and spin off a whole debate from there.
I often think Twitter’s main problem is their inability to play this to their advantage.
What if they could organise threads where if the author changes their mind in an earlier tweet (the premise), then the later tweets would no longer follow and stop forming a valid argument.
Yet Twitter is much more popular in Japan, where the higher information density of the written language effectively gave them this feature from the start.
Twitter is used very differently in Japan than elsewhere, and in ways that seem tightly bound to aspects of Japanese culture. I'd be very careful about assuming that higher word count is really the key difference.
It shows that it can be successful if you use it like it's used in Japan. It does not show that it can be successful when it is used like English speakers use it.
Twitter is unusual in that it is a pretty spare tool. They've added a number of small features in support of how people were seen to be using it. But what mainly defines it is the ways people use it, not the tool itself.
Meanwhile Facebook has added tons of features that no one wanted based on pure speculation and they've done much better. People will change how they use Twitter as Twitter changes. If that weren't true, no one would care about this.
They have introduced and removed many things because they have a culture of continuous experimentation, most of it very small. Twitter is much less good at that, and this is definitely not the sort of small, quiet experiment that has done so much good for Facebook. So instead of this being a step toward Facebook-style experimentation, I'd say it's a step away.
I agree this will change how people use Twitter, so I'm not sure why you're saying that in a way that seems contradictory.
Many of your comments have been about how 280 characters won't work well with the way English speakers currently use Twitter. As this won't be the way English speakers use Twitter going forward, none of those comments matter.
If you're just saying, almost tautologically, that users will use Twitter before and after the change, and that use may evolve, sure I don't dispute that.
However, what you started out saying was that Twitter was even more popular in Japan, a place where the word count is higher. Given the context, it seemed like you were implying that this could or should make Twitter even more popular.
I'm saying that's poor reasoning, because Twitter's use in Japan is distinct not for reasons of word count, but because the culture of use is deeply different. There are deep sociological differences, likely driven by the substantially different Japanese culture, plus a different early history of use than in the Anglophone Twitter sphere.
280 may be better for English-speaking Twitter and it may be worse. But Japan proves nothing about English-speaking Twitter because actual use is too distinct.
I'm not saying that Twitter will necessarily be more popular in the US with a higher word count, just that Japan is an example proving that Twitter can have a purpose with a higher word count.
"But in English, a much higher percentage of Tweets have 140 characters (9%). Most Japanese Tweets are 15 characters while most English Tweets are 34"
Why is 34 characters considered most tweets when the chart shows 140 characters higher than "34"? As labeled, the hump is lower than spike at 140 characters.
They might be binning the data to form those conclusions (because you are right, the graph does not support those statements). If they bin at each character +/- 5 characters it looks like 34 (+/-5) would be max.
Everyone is criticizing this decision, but I think it's useful to point out that I've heard a lot of users say that Japanese Twitter has significantly fewer misunderstandings and toxicity and is a generally friendlier place than English Twitter.
This might be a lot of the reason Twitter is trying this out.
The 160 character limit was a balance between "limit should be as low as possible for bandwidth reasons" and "users must be able to express simple messages". The former isn't an issue anymore, so there's not longer any obvious reason why 160 should be the limit.
The increase wasn't arbitrary. And neither is the initial 140 limit...
Originally, our constraint was 160 (limit of a text) minus username. But we noticed @biz got 1 more than @jack. For fairness, we chose 140. Now texts are unlimited. Also, we realize that 140 isn't fair—there are differences between languages. We're testing the limits. Hello 280!
According to your article, 160 characters was a product of technical limitations later justified by postcard and Telex research, not the other way around as you claim.
Presumably there are going to be a lot of broken 3rd party plugins on people’s sites(design wise at a minimum).
Should there have been more of a warning period?
> We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).
If the only justification they had was that three languages can convey more information than the rest why not reduce the characters for the three "cramming" languages?
A few years ago I suggested Twitter should roll out an optional $1-per-month plan to let users tweet 280 characters.¹ If 10% of their MAU sign up, this would up their revenue by 17% (extra $400M yearly.)
A Chinese character is much more dense than two roman letters. When I was texting in china during the SMS phase, I got around 16 or maybe 20 characters before it was broken into extra messages.
No way. Maybe someone Chinese knows the limit better, but I definitely couldn't send a 70 character message without it having been broken up into 3 or 4 texts.
In the interest of being fair, let's compare bytes:
日日是好日 (15 bytes)
Every day is a good day (23 bytes)
It's not just how one counts "characters;" some languages are written more compactly than others. I would not be surprised if Hebrew is also a bit more compact than English, as it is typically written without vowels.
I like it. Will reduce the amount of 1 out of X tweets from the same person. It will allow tweets to become quite a bit more expressive, without becoming Facebook-like novels. And hey, when Twitter doesn't try new stuff, people complain. When Twitter does, they complain as well.
PS: This post would perfectly fit in a next-gen tweet ;)
This is as earth shattering as when Macromedia Director went from 24 layers to 48 layers!!!
Yet Director still didn't have enough layers to make an animated map of all 50 United States of America (or a car insurance turkey with 50 clickable tail feathers). So we got Flash!
And in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images containing large blocks of text which is worse for everyone than just removing length limits.
> And in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images containing large blocks of text
The blog post explains how that’s not true with their Japanese example:
> Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese.
If Japanese people feel they have enough space to write their thoughts, why wouldn’t the English ones with a bit more space?
The point is that their analysis is garbage. They looked at the length of tweets, and what percentage of tweets hit the 140 character limit. But the reality is that users impacted by the limit either send multiple tweets (1/n, 2/n, ... n/n) or attach an image containing a block of text. How do you measure that?
Multiple tweets or attaching an image of a block of text are both annoying for users. If in one language users are more likely to be annoyed than in another, why not fix the problem?
The irony is that both Biz's [1] and Jack's [2] tweets announcing the change could convey the same message with a third of the characters. In fact, they'd be better written. The need to carefully think, rethink, edit, and reedit your tweets so they fit in the limit lead to much higher quality.
Luckily the demoscene graphics showcase platform https://www.dwitter.net still enforces the 140 character limit! Keepon making those webgl canvas graphics!
"We didn't grow at all last quarter, but things here at Twitter are A-OKAY (please belive us)! We can still grow, all we need to do is destroy/modify the one thing that made us unique and successful!"
I remember reading the story of an ex-twitter employee who was not very happy about innovating with "140 characters". People learned the art of crafting content with 140 character. Many of the reply-to-self and 1/2 tweets are going to be history. So does people write on the notes, screenshot and share. I believe it's more about building a better graph with more content intake, than giving voice to express. Twitter is always a tool polished by its users and several inventions made due to constraints. Let's see how people are going to take the 2x tweets.
Factoid of the day: the 140-char limit originates from the SS7 MAP signalling protocol used for SMS, which allows a message payload of precisely 140 bytes.
You can actually cram up to 160 characters into an SMS if you use a 7-bit character set, but Twitter apparently wanted to support European languages and went with the 8-bit version. However, allowing 140 double-byte chars (Chinese etc) blows through the actual limit of 80, requiring concatenated SMS to send.
I’m glad Twitter is changing things up. Technically this means doubling everything (database, cache, etc) which I imagine was an undertaking.
But...
Is this really what’s preventing Twitter from growing? I don’t think so.
I use twitter for both personal and company reasons and I can see how it’d help the latter. I don’t see how it helps the former. To me, the whole purpose of the feed is to get the “gist”. 280 characters is wayyy more than that.
I wish they spent their efforts on improving/building useful things (including better targeting for ads) or bring back the tweet counts.
So congrats, but to me it’s a sign things aren’t chirping anymore.
I've often wondered what effect, if any, the higher information density of Chinese/Japanese/Korean has on peoples' minds and the way people think. Anyone ever heard of any studies on this?
Because this is more important than something you delegate. It's the biggest change to the company since the company was created. It's not like Twitter does 10 products, and it's like "bring Phil up to talk about this one". This is Twitter. If it was discussing random licensing deals with the NFL, fine, you can, and probably should, delegate that in order to signal its relative importance. But for this to be treated like something of that magnitude is wrong.
Any reason not to simplify that measure and make it 280 chars for all? They might not use it in Japan but what's the point of limiting them if they apparently don't use the space anyway?
Forcing brevity is the whole point of twitter. They've found that they are limiting the English twitter with 140 characters, but 140 characters seems to be working well for Japanese.
Another cool feature could be not enabling people to start nuclear war on the service.
This might get down voted as trolling, but the real trolling is going on between Donald Trump and North Korea. The fact that twitter continues to allow the racism, bigotry, sexism, antisemitism, climate change denial and warmongering of the most high profile account they have to go unchecked is ridiculously unethical. Instead of taking a stand against the erosion of Western ethical standards they're profiting from it
Are you kidding? You really think that Twitter should be censoring the president of the United States?
That is beyond ridiculous. His tweets are instantly newsworthy - would you object to CNN writing about them?
And if you've gotten to the point where your political philosophy is to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, you've basically removed all possibility of ever understanding about half the people in the country.
Surely there's a distinction to be made between a government censoring its citizens free-speech, and a private service allowing The most powerful man in the world to use its platform to excuse white-supremacists and increase tension between hostile nuclear powers?
Surely?
This is not censorship we're talking about, and it's not free-speech. It's about having a set of rules on your social network and enforcing those rules. Unfortunately, twitter seems to have none.
There is a difference, which is why I didn't talk about the 1st amendment or government protected free speech, so you seem to not be replying to my actual comment.
All I'm saying is, if your rules imply that you need to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, then there's something wrong with your rules. Also, let's be clear on this - even if Twitter for some insane reason decided to censor President Trump, it's not like he has a lack of microphones around. As much as we techies love Twitter and other companies, there really are other solutions around, and I think POTUS specifically would be able to get his message out even without Twitter.
> you seem to not be replying to my actual comment.
Sorry, I was sort of replying to both yours and the comment below it. neither of them mentioned free speech but it was sure to come up.
> if your rules imply that you need to censor the democratically elected leader of the US, then there's something wrong with your rules
So if I run a micro-blogging service and I make a rule which says "hey, nobody's allowed to be racist on here, ok?" and then Donald Trump signs up and says something racist, my rules are wrong because he's the president? Where's the logic in that? If the president breaks the law, is there something wrong with that law too?
So we're clear here, twitter does not have any such rule. I'm suggesting it should.
> You really think that Twitter should be censoring the president of the United States?
Given his output that frequently and flagrantly breaks their TOC? Yes. And I'd go further - they should permaban him for the things he's repeatedly said over the last 5 years.
I'm currently living in China, and I see things disappear from social media ALL THE TIME. It's not pleasant or proper, it's just scary to have someone else decide what you can or cannot see.
Say whatever you want, I'll make my own decisions about whether I'll believe you, hopefully without the aid of censorship, thank you very much.
Honestly, I don't see why they shouldn't change to 280 characters. I mean, Mastodon instances allow 500 by default, Gab.ai allows 300 by default...
And neither find it takes away from the microblogging aspect one bit. Pretty sure a lot of other Twitter alternatives allow for messages of around those sizes too.
Yes, it means doing away with a bit of tradition. But generally, my experience there is that the tiny amount of characters has hurt more than its helped. So easy to lose necessary context in that space.
So they are making the roads wider, which will only increase pollution. Twitter's one saving grace was it at least enforced some concision to the tides of ill-informed opinion.
I'll be impressed with Twitter when they actually show they care about the security and safety of their users by implemented end to end encryption for their DMs...
The analysis was really interesting. I wonder if there's cultural bias as well - i.e. English speakers tend to be more verbose because we have a need to speak more
Hah, in Japanese and Chinese a lot of words are single characters. To use your post as an example, "analysis", "really", and "interesting" will probably be one character each, they're several UTF-8 bytes, but Twitter counts those still as single characters...
In Japanese those three words could be translated as 分析、本当に、面白い respectively, 8 characters in total - i.e. the same length as just "analysis" in English.
In my opinion, the best balance would be to keep the focus on short, succinct, 140 character tweets, but to also give the option to add a "read more" section to any given tweet.
So you could eliminate tweet storms and give people a convenient outlet for longer-form thoughts, without just bloating everything. I expect 240 characters will largely result in people just using more words to say the same thing.
They shot themselves in the foot by putting this ridiculous limit! Make it 500, or, better yet, limit the number of words, which makes more sense, but I don't use Twitter much if at all, because I hate broken English, missing punctuation, and having to restructure your thought to fit into the SMS limit of the '90s!
Well glad to see Twitter is finally tackling humanity's woes. I'm sorry for the vitriol, but what kind of value is this adding to anyone's life? It seems to me like another way of having the hunched-over-zombies-with-lit-faces spend even more time 'connecting' with other humans.
I hope this isn't actually language-based, else it'll be awkward for tweets that mix languages, or multilingual users who have their UI in one language and tweet in another.
It would make more sense to simply count CJK characters twice, like the “double-width character” days of old.
> Most Japanese Tweets are 15 characters while most English Tweets are 34
Doesn't the graph shows that most English tweets are 140 characters instead? The first peak on the English curve is indeed on 34 characters, but it's lower than the 140 peak.
You're right about the mode, but the quote is also correct in the sense of the area under the curve. Most English tweets are 34+/-n characters, where n gives you more than 50% under the curve. It rapidly falls off from 9% on the 140 character side.
@Jack said "Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!"
I can think of many reasons, why a limit is somehow hardcoded/assumed throughout the entire system including the history and probably a lot of optimizations around it. You can not think of any? In databases you also have limits, like character limits, like 16k for a varchar or something. Or memcaches with bucket sizes and so on. It is not just changing a number, i can imagine.
(ex-twitter engineer) I left before this project got started, and do not have any insider info on how they did it. Given what I know about the number of places tweet length assumptions were built into, it must have been a large, cross-team effort. It likely required thoughtful problem-solving.
Take, for example, search. An early iteration of Twitter search relied on this limit to pack term positions into 8 bits (Source: https://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/publications/Busch_etal...). 280 > 256, so if this was still around, the whole approach had to be rebuilt, and the indexes recreated. That's ... non-trivial. And that's just one subsystem.
And i can imagine, when they just doubled the amount of possible characters, they just correlate these tweet buckets now. Like, maybe each tweet already had space for attributes/opcodes, so one can express things like "deleted". Maybe there is another attribute now: "has successors". And in the API one just return many tweets as one. In that way, one does not have to rewrite history. But who knows!
Why you are being down voted: As far as I know in most databases TEXT and BLOB types have no "arbitrary" length parameters but are stored at the end of the database file making access slower especially on spinning rust, VARCHAR(x) can only be x characters long but is stored inline with the table so it's much faster. If you know the length of a string won't exceed a relatively small number of characters VARCHAR is the right tool for the job.
Fun fact: Postgres is one of the few databases to do this right. "varchar" is just an alias for the "text" data type, which has a limit of 2GB (last I checked). A small amount of text is stored inside the row, and the overflow is compressed and stored in a series of linked child rows. The system is called TOAST, and quite fast. So the underlying storage is completely abstracted, and setting a limit doesn't impact storage; it only enforces a limit on what input is allowed. MySQL's text type, on the other hand, is like a binary blob and has (last I checked) different semantics than the varchar type.
They bumped it up to 1000 from 255 a few years ago. It was a major engineering effort to support that. It's unlikely that they will be willing to do it again.
I mean, there’s good reasons to limit the size of fields in database tuples - relational databases are made for storing small to medium amounts of normalized data, you can abuse them (and I have, storing a couple million 60-200K PDF’s in a Postgres database at work) but you can shoot yourself in the foot by creating tons of 60% full pages and the stupid amount of extra IOPS those wide columns create.
Still, not allowing unrestricted text and binary columns is still silly, so I agree for the most part - but you still need to know what you’re getting yourself into when you start making wide tables.
I am sure that after a well deserved break from such amazingly hard work, they'll tackle the next increase in characters. Their solution makes it look so easy, but it isn't. /s
echo -n 'Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.' \
| wc -c
210
I'm unable to parse what is meant by "twitter hashtag hottake". If anything, hashtags are already overused on twitter, and I imagine this will make it worse (like the neverending stream of useless hashtags on instagram that nobody will ever ever search for). Are you saying the hashtag hottake is to use a single (?) hashtag to provide a meta-description of the content?
I think perhaps the problem is, try as I might, I can't really get my head around the term 'hot take' and it alway seems to lead me astray when I try to figure it out in a new context.
Hey man, Jack's been putting in 23 hour days for the last seven years to make this happen. Not cool to mock his effort.
But seriously that Tweet shows the usefulness. For them not to have tried it until now shows how scared they are to make any real changes. 1) Guess 2) this 3) doesn't 4) fix 5) this 6) nonsense? Those comments are absolute youtube quality cancer though. Goddamn tragedy that this is the pinnacle of human discourse right now.
These are the first five replies to that tweet:
Near deGrasse Tyson @DrNeilTyson 1h1 hour ago
Replying to @jack
I will reserve my full response until I get 280 characters but this is a slap in the face to everyone harmed by your lax governance
1 reply 15 retweets 109 likes
Near deGrasse Tyson @DrNeilTyson 57m57 minutes ago
Your platform has been co-opted and manipulated, turned into a megaphone for hate and propaganda.
3 replies 20 retweets 154 likes
Near deGrasse Tyson @DrNeilTyson 56m56 minutes ago
Your response? Remove the last filter forcing careful selection of words. This makes Twitter boring without making room for real thought.
4 replies 14 retweets 107 likes
Near deGrasse Tyson @DrNeilTyson 55m55 minutes ago
And yet again, another surface-level tweak that fails to deal with the rot inside this community.
1 reply 10 retweets 82 likes
Near deGrasse Tyson @DrNeilTyson 54m54 minutes ago
You have failed signally in your responsibilities to your users, investors, and frankly to all of humanity. Thanks, Jack.
"Your platform has been co-opted and manipulated, turned into a megaphone for hate and propaganda."
Yet here you are using it.....
Why do people really think that x or y company is to blame for minority opinions getting so much traction on the internet. The very definition of public speaking/communication is that it gives small individuals big voices, no matter how big or small of a following they have. They cannot be stopped from expressing their opinions unless a. The platform they use is tyrannical (picks and chooses the ideas it likes or doesn't like) or b. Is actively committing a crime ( excessive cyber harassment and doxing).
If Twitter wanted to actually fight "hate and propeganda" you would grow to hate the platform! How long untill your ideas are silenced?? I get that the Nazi and white supremacist propaganda is right at the line, but make no mistake, untill they commit acts of violence ( which of course, they have. These instances should be punished) _it is merely an opinion and does no more damage than your opinion._ If you wine about how they shouldn't have a voice, you are wasting your breath (although you have the right to do so). With the internet there are so many ways to propagate information that the Nazis and white supremacists will find a way to get their message out. Fight ideas with ideas, not censorship.
You can get so close to that line without crossing it though, plus policing 300 million users is hard enough.
The problem is that both extreme fascism and communism might actually be a very tempting response to everyday problems to a lot of people, which means that the only reason we haven't had issues with either ideology is we had a media who complied with the censorship of both those viewpoints.
Online anyone can say anything and promote anything, which means people who have problems that aren't being solved by their current leaders can easily turn to ideologies which we had all previously agreed to censor out of normal discourse.
>Your response? Remove the last filter forcing careful selection of words. This makes Twitter boring without making room for real thought.
Ehhh, one of the reasons Twitter is useless for actual conversation is that you can't express a thought. You only have just enough room to say something that you can't flesh out such that you can enrage other people. Twitter is built on anger and misunderstanding, interpreting 140 chars least charitably as possible.
Then someone tries to organize their thoughts into a tweet storm, but there's no real way to respond to it without more small bite-sized misunderstood/misunderstanding comments.
Increasing the limit is a good thing in this regard.
That the 140 char limit forced people to "choose the best words" is laughable.
Yeah, it's a parody, but why after a decade has Twitter not figured out a way to avoid giving the trolliest of trolls such exposure? It seems like 140, 200, 280, or 500 chars is the smallest and least of their problems.
For whatever reason, they do not look into impersonation reports at all. Their team is too focused on deciding the content of people's speech that it doesn't care about their actions.
they don't look into racist posts at all, either. I've only reported like 10 posts (that had overtly racist messages and calls to violence in 5 cases) and I was quickly informed that they were fine (despite their TOS). It really seems like the management has a bigoted bent.
Never implied otherwise. My point was that the CEO's post announcing such a feature has multiple garbage comments from the same individual at the very top. That it's a parody account just makes it worse.
In moments like these, I'm reminded of the scene in the Simpsons where the cartoon director asks the writers to come up with a name for the cool new dog character. He says "Come up with something catchy, like Poochy". He leaves the room and the writers say "Everyone good with Poochy?".
When I think of it, this 140 -> 280 might have been the same. But when I think harder, I can picture a bunch of engineers debating over this for many weeks.
Someone needs to make an Apple-style video of a Twitter employee talking about this latest breakthrough in human communication. Oh, and they have to use the word "courage"
Don't understand the criticism. If the world goes to nuclear war, it won't be because of a Tweet, it'll be because of a conflict going back to the 1950s, a lunatic dictator, and an elected maybe unstable authoritarian. You don't think those guys have lots of other ways of talking trash?
Is the suggestion that banning Trump from Twitter will prevent nuclear war? That sounds like armchair virtue signaling of the highest order. Or is there more to it; am I misunderstanding?
North Korea's foreign minister says President Trump's tweets about the Korean nation amount to a declaration of war and that under international law, his country can legally shoot down U.S. military planes — even if they're not in North Korea's airspace.
We pretending that the North Korean government hasn't justified a lot of crazy stuff? They probably have a good justification for the invasion of South Korea, too.
Oh, great, it only took them how many years to acknowledge the stupidity of char limit? Now they only need to throw their UI out of the window and make a proper intuitive tree style interface and they are golden.
A solution would be to give you a fixed space, then make the font smaller or narrower as you write more. It's a softer limit and it accommodates CJK because usually those characters are bigger.
I’m curious how much has to change code wise to get this to work. Or is there simply a single global variable that controls max tweet size (ignoring the fact that this is language specific).
Having known many Japanese, I feel they like to be concise and simple in their expression, they do like infer a lot and not be direct, hence no need to spell everything out all the time
As a Chinese, I was never bothered by the 140 chars limit because symbols in Chinese can convey much more information than the same length of English characters.
It's a trick to get Trump to double the rate at which he incriminates himself!
I hope he doesn't start twice as many wars.
If he takes to it, then Twitter could gradually raise the limit bit by bit, like you train a cat to shit in the toilet by slowly moving its litter box [1], and eventually he'll be tweeting in full paragraphs of complete (if not coherent) sentences.
Seems like one possible solution is to increase the character limit, but also increase the "pain" a user has to go through to use the additional characters (my ghetto solution would be to use a captcha to unlock the higher char limit).
That way people would only use the additional chars if they really needed them, reducing noise from otherwise unnecessarily long tweets.
tldr; Twitter is changing the limit 140 -> 280 characters
I wish that emphasis (bolding? anything really) on what actually changed, I read through a lot of reasoning that I didn't really care to read/find compelling.
> Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain.
When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's blog.
The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy.
Then came the bots and the spammers and the place got ruined. Twitter has a bunch of problems, but the 140 characters isn't one of them.
I agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter.
But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it. The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitter is aswell a tool to share simplistic ideas with people that already agree with you.
If the content is better, it's pictures of text and 12 tweets in a row. Right now it seems you have to fight the platform if you want to post something good. Not sure if 280 solves it, but it might become more useful, as it still restricts verboseness.
And the aim of twitter should be to be usefull, rather than twitter. As being twitter does not earn them any money.
/edit:
1) I feel german "grime twitter", a buch a trolls being extremists of all flavors insulting people with way too much ego is the best part. It's like 4chan, with less racism and slightly more grown up. And it is, as you can image, toxic garbage. And that's the best part in my view.
> It's mostly people misrepesenting and insulting other
Really? My timeline is nothing but fun, informative and new content I usually want to see. Of course there's the occasional annoying retweet or sponsored tweets.
You really need to follow only people who generally tweets what you're interested in and regularly trim people who seemed interesting but ended up annoying.
For me it is best used as a constant buzz of more or less interesting material that you can look at very very briefly every now and then (I check it less than once per day).
I think the quality of the content really depend on the people we end up following.
When I started Twitter, I started out with my school/college friends and some random tech blogs/site etc. My friends doesn't tweet a lot(Less people use Twitter in India compared to Facebook) or the sites that I follow mostly had crapy content, making my timeline looking awful. I stopped using Twitter. About a year before I came back to the platform, un-followed all of them and started following tech people. Mostly people from js/golang/python communities. Now my timeline has more quality content that I do not get time to read all of them(links to blogs etc). I do agree that at times there are some political opinions but not the majority so its okay.
I've had a Twitter account since 2008 but couldn't quite see what was great about it. Recently, I have 'followed' a bunch of Deep Learning guys and it's a whole different thing. It's even more dynamic than /r/machinelearning, maybe the best place to discuss DL online.
Agree 100%. I've tried to really get into it many times. Maybe once a year or so, I'll tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to really 'get' twitter this time."
The people I follow are some genuinely interesting people. And god writers. I subscribe to their blogs' RSS feeds. But engaging in that conversation with them is almost impossible if you don't already know them in person.
I'm not terrible at saying things either. I think I have total fewer than 50 tweets and around 300 followers. 6 new followers per tweet seems like a pretty good rate of gaining attention. But I don't know anything about these people or how to engage with them. So I don't.
Frankly, I do assign part of the blame for the rise of the internet outrage machine to twitter conditioning people's behavior, no matter how unintentional.
The formulae is simple: find something you think is distasteful. Tweet about how it's evil or racist or sexist or communist or whatever bad thing you want to make sure people don't think you are. Sit back and watch all of the other people who don't want people to think they are that thing pick up their pitchforks and go to town against your target in the manner of something I can only describe as as mindless as a holy war. Now sit back, relax, and feel good: mission accomplished.
The same things happen on Facebook and Reddit. But it's more obviously absurd on twitter. Social issues are too complex to be dealt with effectively in 140 or even 280 letters. The best you can do is point a finger at someone or some thing and throw a label at it.
It really is garbage that's lowered the standards of discourse.
Again, I don't think tha was ever twitter's intent. But that's the effect it's had.
I understand the argument that various platforms we use are simply a reflection of society as it really exists and has always existed. And I disagree with it.
Every social interaction has a reward potential. Obtaining those rewards is what generally drives behavior. The modes of interaction that we have in person generally reward positive social interactions.
Both my parents are conservative, religious people working in a university environment. As I was growing up, they would have liberal and non-religious colleagues over for dinner because that was how university professors hung out after work 30 years ago.
Disagreements were polite, thoughtful, and lengthy. This was a positive interaction for both sides of the debate. You get to sit down with someone who strongly disagrees with your foundational principles, eat dinner, and walk away respecting the other people even though you disagree.
I'm not pining for the good old days or saying that technology is bad because human interaction promotes social behavior.
But the behavioral reward is there: don't act like a dick, and you're colleagues will respect you.
With twitter, on the other hand, the only behavioral reward available is attention--measured by likes and followers. And the easiest way to get that attention high is not through genuine, respectful, human interaction. The fastest way to being a twitter super star is anti social behavior: acting like a dick.
Humans will always take the path of least resistance to the greatest reward. Whether that's using sloppy logic and false equivocations to label some thing you don't like as evil or if it's embracing the evil label, magnifying it, and claiming it as a right, either way, it represents the lowest form of discourse. And twitter is the emperor of low discourse. Facebook and Reddit are just wannabes.
That's a lot of criticism for one of the world's largest communication platforms. You might ask if I have a solution to any of that.
I don't. I'm not sure it needs a solution. Maybe twitter should just embrace what it is and accept that.
Shit. I think that was more than 280 characters. Oh well. No one on twitter would read it anyway.
I've had a different experience with Deep Learning related Twitter - I can talk to anyone and they reply back to me: authors of papers, celebs (for example, Andrej Karpathy who heads Tesla's self driving car had the time to write a line to poor me).
I'm not a active user and unfortunately don't care enough to go there, log in to check it. If feel like I tried to "get" twitter long before it was mainstream, that's all i wanted to say.
This seems to be an unpopular opinion for some reason, but I don't think the core of what you're saying is wrong. There was an article on HN a few weeks ago about how Twitter was originally meant to be the "pulse of the planet". Part of what made it feel like that, for me at least, has always been the ability to get a quick snapshot of what someone has to say.
I don't go on Twitter to read in-depth analysis or discussion (though, as has been mentioned elsewhere in the comments, Twitter has great potential for improving its ability to support real discussion). Twitter, for me, is a lot like the front page of reddit - I go to my Twitter feed to get an overview of what's going on. If I want to know more, I'm fine being linked to a blog post or article, or getting into a discussion elsewhere.
NB: Thinking about it more, I think my opinion stems from filling out one too many "describe your startup in n characters" forms...
> Sure it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each tweet read worthy.
I think most people view “have to do a bit of puzzling” as opposed to, rather than supporting, being “read worthy”. Terse stops being valuable when it goes beyond concise (as brief as possible while still clearly conveying intended meaning.)
The 140 character limit was an artifact of Twitter being designed to be usable over SMS in an era of ubiquitous SMS-equipped phones before smartphones were themselves ubiquitous.
140 characters might be one of them. There is honestly not a lot of difference in being limited to either 140 or 280 characters. In that you still cannot tell a whole story. But now you might run into the situation where you can't even finish your sentence a lot less, which is a positive in my opinion.
I really wish twitter had stuck to their guns on their previous solution to this: a built-in tool to post longer text blocks as embeds inside tweets, just like people post images of text right now, but essentially "text of text" instead of images of text.
But everybody lost their shit when twitter proposed that, so now we get 280char tweets instead.
finally you can argue with every facetious person on twitter that'll need extra detail or will take everything out of context, or that need a citation for something that should be common knowledge.
This seems rash. I feel like you should have to select something in order to have a 280 character tweet. I think the reason Twitter has worked is because of the constraints and the creativity working around said constraints. By opting everyone in immediately, I feel there may be some culture shock.
"Although we feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change will have, we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone"
I feel like this could be a good change, looking forward to seeing how it goes either way.
