
Removing the 140-character limit from Direct Messages - uptown
https://blog.twitter.com/2015/removing-the-140-character-limit-from-direct-messages
======
justinmolineaux
This tiny change could completely transform Twitter. My most-maintained
professional relationships exist on Twitter, yet my non-public conversations
(and the attention I pay to them) have nearly always been forced to other
venues due to the DM character limit. In my mind, Twitter is now an equally-
good alternative to SMS, FB Messenger, etc. You can bet I'll be DM-ing more
and SMS-ing less because of it. Thank you Twitter.

~~~
baddox
That's an interesting perspective. I don't use Twitter for DMing, but for the
services I do use to DM (mostly SMS/iMessage and Facebook) I find that I
rarely (if ever) get close to 140 characters. Yet I do find the 140 character
limit for public tweets annoying on a regular basis. I realize that's
supposedly a fundamental part of Twitter's brand or niche, but I'd much rather
see them remove the character limit for public tweets.

~~~
justinmolineaux
Thanks! That's interesting too - lifting the public tweet limit would also
fundamentally change Twitter. As an author of tweets, I think I'd like it. I
think @byuu mentioned it would promote intelligent discourse on important
subjects - I agree.

As a reader though, I don't want to lose the high-bandwidth nature of Twitter.
The headline thought/status/caption in your stream, with a link to the details
hits an information consumption optimum for me.

It's really that first DM in a conversation where I think 140 characters
causes me to leave Twitter. Maybe I'm doing it wrong - often trying to stuff
salutation + context + question into the first DM. If the convo gets past
that, then yeah, 140 is fine.

~~~
rconti
I guess I just don't "get" twitter, but despite the character limit, I still
feel like a high-res screenful of tweets still contains almost no content. The
webpage limits tweets to a very narrow column in the middle of the browser
window, and there's a ton of fluff at the top and bottom of every tweet. I've
never been successful at curating my twitter feed; I follow way fewer people
than I'd like to, and still see way too much junk.

Facebook is getting worse about "junk" too, but somehow I see far more content
per pixel on Facebook than I do on Twitter.

I'd like to think limiting content to 140 characters would make twitter more
information-dense, but it doesn't feel that way in my anecdote.

~~~
laxk
You can try to use TilePad ([http://tilepad.co](http://tilepad.co)). It is a
Chrome extension that arranges twitter timeline in columns, allows to
configure a tweet design, and much more.

------
mahouse
In my opinion this is a bad precedent. Call it a non sequitur but what if they
eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets?

I mean, the thing I liked the most of Twitter was how simple it was, but they
have started adding so many things to it (especially GIFs, Twitter Cards and
videos that auto-play) that it will eventually be Facebook!

And yes I am very concerned of something like that because Twitter is my
social network of choice since 2008 for a reason!

~~~
byuu
> what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit
> from tweets?

I get that the charm of Twitter to many is brevity.

But it might do wonders for intelligent discourse. Twitter has popularized
spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), dumbed-down vocabulary and hashtags over
substance. It may have been fine when it was just your friends chatting about
what was going on during the weekend; but it's especially egregious when it's
politicians or scientists trying to condense important subjects into
140-characters, which then get regurgitated on the nightly news. Like we're
all a bunch of 14-year olds texting each other. Even worse is when this
extreme brevity leads to entirely avoidable misunderstandings.

I think it'd really help if Twitter were based on word count instead of
character count (and didn't count articles), so people could at least write
like adults. And if you really need more than a sentence or two, then allow
for a long-form text box that'd turn into a clickable "More ..." link after
the summary message. Those that don't want to read much can simply ignore such
links, and unfollow repeat offenders.

Another fun side effect of this character rule: you can say 3-4x as much in a
single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English (example: 象 =
elephant, yet is only one character instead of eight.)

~~~
derefr
> You can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can
> in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of
> eight.)

Can you really? I thought the "140 character" restriction was due to the "160
bytes in an SMS" restriction, and therefore using multibyte unicode characters
consumed multiple "characters."

~~~
Nadya
They got rid of the SMS-related limitations ages ago, but kept the 140 limit
because it was "part of what makes Twitter - Twitter".

It's also why Twitter is really popular in Japan. 140 characters is more than
enough to hold actual conversations (even if most statements/responses are
typically 12-20 characters and the rest of the space is used for emoji)

~~~
byuu
I think Twitter's popularity in Japan, despite the fact that 140 characters
there can convey a message that's 3-4x larger than in English, is indicative
that increasing the English character count to somewhere between 280-560 (or
much better, moving to word counts instead) would not be the death sentence
for the service that many make it out to be.

~~~
laxk
Youalsoneedtointroducemaxwordlengthinthatcase.

~~~
Nadya
How would that work for non-spaced languages?

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wslh
I am a "little bit" sad this trivial thing is wasting our neurons and general
attention. I would love to see the commit that made this possible.

It reminds me when Apple revolutionized the world adding copy&paste to iOS.

~~~
mweibel
I'm quite sure that this, what you call trivial thing, requires more than a
single commit.. Might need some non-trivial data changes in the backend before
actually removing the frontend limit.

~~~
wslh
\- limit = 140

\+ limit = 16384

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calbear81
Finally, so many companies do customer support via Twitter and ask folks to DM
them the details and you're limited to describing what help you need in
140-characters.

~~~
hn9780470248775
But the enforced brevity (in the form of a 140-character limit) is probably
precisely why this works. Otherwise the same companies would be doing support
over email.

~~~
calbear81
Actually, people go onto Twitter to complain because it's a very public forum.
It's a terrible shame that in order to get some service now-a-days you have to
basically publicly shame them or find some way of getting their CEO's private
email.

------
unabridged
Is anyone else bothered by the name DM or "direct message"? For the rest of
the internet the standard name has been PM for private message or personal
message.

~~~
spacehome
DM means dungeon master.

Now get off my lawn.

~~~
staunch
Really should let us roll to see if we have to get off your lawn.

------
andrejewski
Last winter I built an application called Subtweet that built on top of
Twitter's Direct Message service, using Twitter's API as much as I could to
reduce overhead. It is bittersweet that Twitter is improving DM as it makes
Subtweet more and more unnecessary to users, but I am so happy to have all of
these features built right in. I saw this shift coming when Twitter added
multi-user DMing so I had already written the post mortem if anyone is
interested.

[http://subtweet.co/](http://subtweet.co/)
[http://chrisandrejewski.com/2015/02/07/subtweet-
postmortem.h...](http://chrisandrejewski.com/2015/02/07/subtweet-
postmortem.html)

------
danso
Five or six years ago, I was surprised (and a little annoyed) when someone
asked me to shoot him a DM because he never checks his email. So I guess this
will make conversation via DM more productive? Or will DMs just become the new
email, in terms of the same cognitive burden?

~~~
braythwayt
I don't know if this matters to you personally, but the thing about Twitter
DMs (and about FB messages, I suppose) is that there is whitelisting by
default:

If you aren't following me, I can't spam your inbox.

That is a very substantial difference for many people, and why they will use
FB messenger, Twitter, or other services in lieu of mail.

~~~
danso
This is true...and on Twitter, I've "whitelisted" a lot of people I am not
close enough at all to have them in my phonebook. And with Twitter, you have
at least some assurance (in the same way that Airbnb gives you a bit more
assurance than Craigslist) that you're contacting your intended
person...whereas with email, a search can reveal several emails for a person,
nevermind several similarly named people, each with several addresses.

------
spike021
Yesterday I was trying to schedule an AMA for a subreddit I'm a part of.. I
needed to keep sending pieces of my message over multiple DM's since this
limit still existed at the time. Painful.

~~~
stevesearer
At the risk of sounding out of touch, was there some reason an email couldn't
have been sent? I regularly use DMs on twitter, though when I know a message
will be longer I just take it to a medium made for a conversation or longer
messages.

~~~
spike021
Oh, I definitely would've preferred email. I probably could have asked but I
didn't think about it. I figured we were already having a brief conversation
over DM, we could just continue with that.

------
daigoba66
What's wrong with email?

~~~
hueving
it doesn't have a monetization strategy and it doesn't rely on a modern
single-page web interface. also, it has a low barrier to entry so any old
chump can run an email server. these are all bad things now

~~~
Retra
Those aren't bad things. Those are great things. If you feel that this kind of
functionality needs to be added to email, then you're probably making a
completely redundant product. Reinventing a shittier, proprietary wheel.

~~~
hueving
I was being sarcastic :)

~~~
Retra
Oh, sorry.

------
Mz
Yay! I do not spend much time on twitter, but my DM discussions almost always
involve breaking up a communique into several short messages to get past the
character limit. I have a friend who chooses to only contact me via twitter,
usually privately, and the limit has been a real nuisance. I am so happy to
see this.

------
Perseids
"Today’s change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter
even more powerful and fun."

Calling the ability to send arbitrary long messages "powerful", when virtually
every other internet messaging service has allowed this for ages, requires
some serious marketing reality distortion.

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rocky1138
Comically, as soon as the animated GIF showed the person's response, I closed
the tab because I didn't want to read all of it.

That was the whole point of the short messaging service of Twitter.

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mninm
As long as they are changing stuff I'd like to see Twitter move from counting
the total number of characters in a @username to having them count instead as
only a small fixed number (say 2 characters) in a similar fashion to how URLs
no matter how long or short count as 22 characters. This would put all users
on an equal footing and could potentially decrease the number of hacking
attempts on those accounts with the shortest usernames (which is apparently a
problem).

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mceoin
This is what innovation looks like.

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darkstalker
So we'll be able to use Twitter DMs as data storage?

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mtgx
Are they going to add end-to-end encryption back in, though?

[http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5523656/twitter-gives-
up-o...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5523656/twitter-gives-up-on-
encrypting-direct-messages-at-least-for-now)

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pcsanwald
I've always assumed that maintaining the 140 character limit is a marketing
decision, and they've long since removed any technical limitations that keeps
tweets to 140 characters. Does anyone know if I am correct?

~~~
harryh
You are not correct.

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drinchev
Nice. I haven't heard of Twitter product changes since ages. I don't use DM's
that much, but it looks like a logical choice.

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kevinSuttle
I can see this occasionally being useful for not wanting to switch context.
I'd rather have the ability to edit tweets, though.

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janvdberg
Finally some changes for the better! The charm and success of Twitter is
probably partly because it is a dead simple concept. But I still wish they add
more new features: [http://piks.nl/wordpress/if-i-were-the-ceo-of-
twitter/](http://piks.nl/wordpress/if-i-were-the-ceo-of-twitter/)

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jchomali
This could be great for some king of things but maybe annoying because of
spammers

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barnacs
Now people will have to live with n+1 independent, closed messaging platforms
for private messaging. Thank you, Twitter.

~~~
themodelplumber
Reminded me of MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ...in 20 years from today I guess
we'll have yet another string of service names dominating our signatures and
about-me's.

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sgustard
Never before has an ALTER TABLE CHANGE COLUMN generated so much hysteria.

~~~
skeletonjelly
What a tense x minutes that would have been...

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tonetheman
If I only knew how to direct message this would apply to me.

