
Twitter to Stop Counting Photos and Links in 140-Character Limit - davidbarker
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-16/twitter-to-stop-counting-photos-and-links-in-140-character-limit
======
askafriend
The fact that it took this long for them to make such an obvious change speaks
to how afraid they are (were?) to challenge core assumptions about the
product.

~~~
downandout
Imo, it shows that, like many of us, they don't really understand why Twitter
became so popular. That being the case, they don't know what they can and
cannot safely change.

~~~
vit05
To me, Twitter works because many people prefer to read 100 headlines and know
a little about everything, than reading just a big essay. Have a variety of
views, rather than just one.

It is better for the reader, not so for the writer. Because of that, I do not
understand why they focus so much on getting more writers (login) than readers
(views).

~~~
ggggtez
That's some assumption you make with no evidence. I'd sooner assume people
like reading 100 people who agree with their inner biases or views.

------
krinchan
There's a lot of weird misunderstandings about how Twitter worked in the early
days. I.E. "SMS encoded in 7-bit is 140 bytes." Something about native photo
urls. A lot of this, I think, is because people lack context of what the
social media and technological landscape looked like in 2006.

Twitter basically started on SMS, back in the day. There wasn't really an app
because there weren't major smartphone platforms outside of PalmOS and
Blackberry. A lot of my friends made SMS posts to Facebook or LiveJournal, but
you never got comments or responses back, so it was very one-way.

That's where Twitter really hooked you back then. You signed up, registered
your phone number, and tweets got sent as SMS messages to your phone. The 140
limit provided 18 characters for a username, colon, space, and the tweet.
There were commands for following, blocking, etc. and later, direct messaging.

So you got tweets back from people you followed when you sent out a tweet. It
really, truly was, as other folks have said in here, mass SMS.

You'd meet someone at a bar, and just send follow NewFunPerson to the Twitter
short code and bam, their tweets were texted to you.

All the other stuff that people like about microblogging was just a side
effect. Twitter was written to get to people's phones back when the only
universal for mobile platforms (in the United States at least) were that you
could send a text message. That immediacy, the ability to blast out something
quick _and_ get the replies back on your phone was everything.

Also, at a time when Facebook was still struggling with the fact that
"Friends" were a two-way street (Following and Pages weren't a thing yet), the
one-way nature of the follow relationship allowed you a lot of access to
celebrities with minimal effort on the part of the celebrity. You just found
Britney Spears, hit follow, and done. She (rather, her publicist) did exactly
nothing to get you there, and now you know there's a new single coming out
exclusively at FYE tomorrow. Cha-ching.

Twitter seized upon all the weak points of Facebook, made do with what was
available in mobile, and hit gold. After that, when mobile apps hit, Twitter
took all those interesting "side effects" of their 140 character limit and
built on those instead, pivoting to emphasize microblogging, hashtags, and
immediacy, since SMS wasn't there. And, to be honest, these things are very,
VERY likely something that you get _because_ of 140 characters.

So yeah, Social Media History 101.

------
ComputerGuru
What I find stupid is that the length of usernames counts in the message. A
message to @myfriend can be longer than a message to
@myfriendblessednaycursedwithalongername

~~~
djsumdog
It made sense during the time period it came about. You have 160 characters
for an SMS. 140 allows 20 characters for @names, commands, etc.

When my friends and I first started using Twitter, we basically used it as a
group chat, similar to Hangouts/FB today.

~~~
Sniffnoy
My understanding is that actually there is no extra 20, it's precisely the
length of an SMS. SMS is 160 characters, yes -- but in a 7-bit encoding (which
is actually transmitted as a 7-bit encoding, not padded to octets like ASCII).
That makes 140 bytes, which is what Twitter allows (or presumably originally
allowed; I guess now longer characters still only count for 1 rather than
multiple).

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
No, there's an extra 20.

SMS messages are 140 bytes: 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70
UCS-2 16-bit characters.

Twitter used 160-character text messages, where 140 characters were the tweet
itself, and the rest was the username.

------
rdancer
I wonder what they will do once people start using
[http://the.links](http://the.links)
[http://to.write.longer](http://to.write.longer)
[http://messages](http://messages)

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
Anyone wanting to bypass the 140 limit is already doing so using an image with
text in it. And anyone who spams really long messages using URLs is going to
see their followers count drop pretty rapidly.

~~~
intoverflow2
> using an image with text in it.

yep....

[https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248](https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248)

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Bootvis
I hope they only zero-count the first link. That allows 140 characters of
commentary + the link and limits abuse.

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eecks
Will-this-be-the-new-hashtag.com

~~~
niccaluim
Long URLs are truncated and ellipsized, e.g.:

this-is-a-long-url-with-a-very-very-very-domain-name.com/and-a-sorta-long-
path-component-but-still-long-enough-to-trigger-shortening

is displayed as

…with-a-very-very-very-domain-name.com/and-a-sorta-lo…

~~~
nickfrostatx
Given how important domain names are for security, it would be concerning if
domain names get truncated.

I could craft:

evil.net/this-is-a-very-very-long-path/bankofamerica.com/account-
settings/blah/blah/blah

Which, depending on how this is implemented, might render to

...bankofamerica.com/account-settings/blah/blah/blah

~~~
niccaluim
The domain and path are truncated separately. Your example would be displayed
as evil.net/this-is-a-very-very-lo…

~~~
ludamad
So evil-bank-of-america.net would do?

~~~
niccaluim
That wouldn't be truncated, no. It's not long enough.

------
ldong
The beauty of twitter is to tweet with concise messages. I'd be disappointed
if this 140 characters restriction got removed.

~~~
mavrc
I find it quite frustrating. I can easily say what I want on other platforms
because I can write what I need to without worrying about every single word.

Twitter makes me stop and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and finally get
something that fits in 140 and makes sense for the most part after the third
read if you understand me and all the context surrounding the thing I said.

I suppose it's at least partially generational for me but it seems so
inelegant. Like we're in a global bit shortage.

~~~
harryh
It doesn't matter that you find it frustrating. It matters that by forcing you
to be concise twitter improves the reader experience.

Twitter is optimized for readers, not writers.

~~~
CodeWriter23
Twitter is optimized for superficial reading. Some ideas are more complicated
than a one-liner.

~~~
harryh
Yes. Totally fair point.

------
robk
I'm sure the spammers and hashtag abusers will be delighted at this change.
More opportunity to stuff a tweet #with #all #sorts #of #extra #hashtags. /s

~~~
unlinker
I think hashtags still count towards the limit.

~~~
corin_
He's not saying they don't, just that now there will be more characters
remaining for extra hashtags that would previously have been used up by the
image/links.

------
bbody
A very good idea, I just hope it isn't abused with Tweets full of links.

------
riffic
Good, they should have done this a long time ago.

It always would have been trivial to remove URLs from the data and throw it
into metadata, where character limits do not matter.

Shame it took 2446 days for this basic idea to come to fruition:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804977)

------
hiram112
Real question. I avoided Twitter for years, and finally bit the bullet
recently.

The problem is my feed is out of control. Is there a way to filter it?

For example, I want to only match the travel deals by regex (my city), the
politics stuff by popularity, etc.

I was under the impression that Twitter closed off their API to 3ed parties,
so maybe this is no longer possible.

On a side note, my current company recently switched to a MicroService
framework based on Twitter Finagle / Finatra. At first, I was grumpy (damn
Hipsters, another failure a la Node and Mongo), but as I learn more about it
and Scala, I'm really impressed!

~~~
hackaflocka
This is a long standing problem with Twitter.

For me, the best way to deal with it has been "Lists" (note: they're hard to
figure out and use, and the interface and location of lists is different on
every platform).

Twitter has long known that feed management is a major issue for users
(especially new users). Unfortunately, they seem unhurried to do something
about it.

------
mrmondo
A lot of people are quick to jump on the criticise Twitter bandwagon here -
but I think A) this is a good compromise between giving people what they want
and a bit more freedom without losing the core aspect of the service and B)
there are plenty of people that like Twitter the way it is and now no longer
use sites like Facebook because Twitter is good at what it's good at - sharing
small pieces of information, globally, without intruding on your life.

------
6stringmerc
Could this be seen as some kind of attempt to hold-off Snapchat/Instagram
photo-sharing competition and keep attention in their platform? Personally I
don't like the image taking away from the limit, feeling pretty indifferent on
the links part. Overall my impression is that this would be a reasonable
change, whereas taking a hammer to the 140 limit as a general concept might
not be a proper avenue.

~~~
flyt
I doubt it. The sharing models and overall experience of Snapchat sharing and
Twitter are radically different and this doesn't change it in a meaningful
way.

~~~
ProAm
Twiiter is in a fight for its life right now, this is definitely an attempt to
retain current users and encourage usage.

------
intoverflow2
Would be nice if pic.twitter.com links didn't link to videos with sound too
that auto-play with sound when in their mobile app

------
altitudinous
This sounds like the number of photos could be unlimited as number of photos
is also affected by the 140 char limit. This kept the quality of photos /
videos high. So could expect galleries of rubbish / low quality attached to a
tweet?

But maybe this is discussed. I haven't RTFA.

------
ck2
How are they technically going to SMS the photos and links within 140
characters then?

------
brianbreslin
I would venture to guess that fewer and fewer of their users are on sms
interfaces for Twitter, and more than 90% are on smart phones. Thus the
character limit isn't as big of a deal.

------
chestervonwinch
Stackexchange comments behave the same way, and it has always bugged me. Maybe
they will notice this and change the char count behavior in comments as well?

------
JulianMorrison
They should just quit with the limit. It was an amusing "brand". But it's
become a millstone, blocking thoughtful posts and promoting shoutiness.

------
oh_sigh
Expect to see t.co/links-that-look-like-this

~~~
darkstalker
You can do that already. Storing arbitrary data in long URL's has been
possible since the introduction of URL shorteners (play.rust-lang.org uses
this extensively)

~~~
oh_sigh
Yes, but if URLs don't count against your char limit, then it becomes more
attractive. Previously there would be no point in trying to hide data in short
links, because they still counted against your character count

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pmlnr
This is how you break backwards compatibility.

------
Animats
Also, I think Unicode characters only count as one character. This is now
totally disconnected from SMS.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Yes, they count the number of normalised Unicode code points. They don't care
how many bytes they take up.

------
Thrymr
They should count the words in photos of text posted to get around the limit,
though.

------
listentojohan
Nice update - Been missing this for a loooong time.

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eng_monkey
Wow, disruptive technology!

------
c3534l
I predict Twitter's character limit will either double every two years or it's
user base will.

------
smegel
When all else fails, turn your product into a spamvertising platform.

------
slantaclaus
RIP twitter

------
realitycheckxxx
Twitter popularized those URL shortening services. It is now kinda like
Chinese foot binding tradition(making feet shorter to conform to social
expectations) - was popular for some time, but then it went away. The same
could happen to URL shortening companies out there.

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mceoin
WHY IS THIS NEWS???!

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aaronsnoswell
Why did this make the front page of HN?

~~~
return0
You mean, compared to the other tech-irrelevant stuff that fills most of the
frontpage?

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stephenitis
This is long over due. Can they fix this...

When a Tweet starts with a @username, the only users who will see it in their
timeline (other than the sender and the recipient) are those who follow both
the sender and the recipient.

".@someone Hello I want to respond to you but in public!"

~~~
msbarnett
That's not a bug/something that needs fixing? The exponential increase in
noise would make twitter even less useful.

The last thing my timeline needs is to see all of the crap the people I follow
are saying to people I don't care to follow.

~~~
stephenitis
I believe I was more commenting on the behavior of the period and @ ".@" to a
average user I think the understanding the intention and the ability to
quickly pick up this feature/behavorial cue is a toughie.

~~~
nicky0
What is your suggested fix?

~~~
HappyTypist
Visual indication on the compose tab with popover that explains the concept.

