
Coming soon: express even more in 140 characters - LukeB_UK
https://blog.twitter.com/express-even-more-in-140-characters?hn20160524
======
FiloSottile
> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That
> means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people
> currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen
> by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you
> intend for it to be viewed more broadly.

This is terrible. They are introducing a way to broadcast mentions without
using .@, which is great. So why also making non-reply mentions forcefully
broadcasted, with no way to hide them!?

I don't want my @ThreeUKSupport tweets to go to all my followers.

~~~
jonathansizz
I don't understand why Twitter never implemented some sort of categorization
feature. There are many individuals that I'd follow if I could just get a
subset of their tweets in my feed.

For example, I might want to follow scientists' tweets on science, but not
their political or favourite sport team tweets. Right now it's either all or
nothing, but why can't people categorize their tweets so only people
interested in them see them? This would be better for both parties.

~~~
psychometry
Same goes for Facebook. They surely have the ability to discern political
posts from non-political ones, but the only control over what appears on our
news feeds is follow/unfollow.

~~~
golergka
Facebook feed does that for you.

~~~
Jordrok
Yes. You must have faith in the algorithm. Do not question its results.

------
zippergz
As someone who has been using Twitter since 2006, all of these changes make
sense to me, and I'm happy about them. But I can't imagine them being anything
but more confusing to any casual user. I don't know what the right answer is,
but making people remember more "rules" for what will make a Tweet show in
peoples' timelines seems like a mistake.

~~~
mhaymo
My understanding is the rules are now simpler: A reply will not show up to
your followers unless they follow the person being replied to, just as before.
All other tweets will be shown.

I seem to remember some celebrity being mocked because their first tweet was
unintentionally not broadcast as it started with '@'. I wouldn't be surprised
if many users are initially confused by this feature, so hopefully this change
will make things easier.

------
atonse
Am I misunderstanding this statement?

> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That
> means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people
> currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen
> by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you
> intend for it to be viewed more broadly.

What if I don't want a reply to be broadcast in everyone's feed? (Not that
it's private, but it's just not relevant and usually lacks context). Or are
they saying that if you want it shown to everyone, retweet it and it'll show
up to everyone?

~~~
johns
If you are replying to a tweet, they won't show up for everyone. This only
applies when composing a new tweet from scratch that starts with an @name (and
behind the scenes does not contain an "in_reply_to", which if you want to
broadcast to everyone, can now be retweeted).

~~~
eterm
How can it tell? This must use some out-of-band data to figure out whether
it's a "new" tweet or a "reply"?

Is that compatible with API consumers or the SMS interface? (Or are these both
dead?)

~~~
digi_owl
Twitter have been largely ignoring SMS for years...

If you reply via an app or their website, they attach the id of the tweet you
are replying to in their database. This is how they can show you a
conversation timeline.

Note btw that their new "retweet with a comment" system breaks said timeline
tracking...

------
SlashmanX
> When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the
> 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier
> and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they
> reach the whole group.

Hopefully this is just for replying to people mentioned in the original tweet,
otherwise spam bots could have a field day with this. I'm guessing the people
at Twitter already recognised this though.

------
vladdanilov
While quietly pulling off the ability to have PNG and GIF profile images
against what stated in the documentation [1], leaving only poorly encoded JPEG
[2]. And JPEG images are double compressed.

[1]
[https://support.twitter.com/articles/127871](https://support.twitter.com/articles/127871)
[2]
[https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/735142731945803780](https://twitter.com/vmdanilov/status/735142731945803780)

------
kfk
For the life of me, I could never understand how to use Twitter. It seems it's
getting even more difficult.

~~~
hackaflocka
I suspect that Twitter became popular because it came before Instagram and
Snapchat. If it had come after, it would be ignored.

I taught an MBA class with 11 students. They were required to use Twitter for
a group assignment.

My shock when a large majority of them had never used it, and a large minority
of the new users just couldn't figure out how to use it, and why it was
useful.

~~~
kimi
I have a four-letter Twitter handle (so I have had it since the dawn of time)
but the "why it was useful" part still eludes me.

------
neovive
These are great changes for the platform as I always felt the 140 characters
was a difficult limitation for replies.

Perhaps, it would have been easier to just increase the general limit to 160
characters; avoiding so many work-arounds and different rules. I wonder what
impact of 20 more characters would be in terms of hardware and bandwidth at
Twitter's scale.

~~~
billmalarky
>I wonder what impact of 20 more characters would be in terms of hardware and
bandwidth at Twitter's scale.

I'm sure they're concerned less with the technical impact than the risk of
changing the product somewhat drastically. The char limit is a fundamental
aspect of twitter. It forces people to create curt, easily digestible content.
Expanding that limit might have pretty bad side effects, such as people
communicating the same message they would have in 140 chars, but more
verbosely (which weakens the product).

------
pavel_lishin
The new "broadcast @tweets to all of your followers" to me reads as "now your
twitter feed will become even noisier".

On the other hand, their incredibly annoying "here's what you missed" and
"non-linear timeline" feature will help limit that, combining the chocolate
that I hate with the peanut butter that I can't stand into something
approximately edible.

I can't say that this is an objectively bad move, but it definitely sounds
like it'll erode Twitter's usefulness _to me_.

------
thedrbrian
That should stave off bankruptcy

~~~
rco8786
Twitter has enough cash to run as-is for 400+ years.

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/01/25/twitt...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/01/25/twitter-
has-412-years-fix-itself/79301680/)

------
sjmulder
I’m happy about this. It keeps the spirit of the short messages while doing
away with unnecessary technical limitations.

------
okket
So what are the new limits if links, usernames etc. do not count against the
140 character limit? It will hopefully not be possible to create "monster"
tweets with thousands of @ notifications and/or hundreds of images...

~~~
deepfriedbits
Links will still count towards the character limit for now as Twitter is
concerned with abuse/spam. What we may see at some point is Twitter not
counting the first link in a tweet against the 140, but counting subsequent
links.

As for images, here's a limit of four per post, and Twittwr groups multi into
a display with one URL. Videos, Vines and polls are capped at one.

It's possible to have many, many usernames in a reply, but I don't know if
there is an upper bounds.

------
archagon
@people @with @generic @usernames @will @soon @be @getting @a @lot @more
@tweets!

------
alchemical
For those concerned about the possible bandwidth issues or scalability issues
Twitter might have implementing their 'even more' characters, don't forget we
can post upwards of a 2-3MB JPEG and Twitter handles it just fine.

I always liked the idea of stuffing data in metadata. For me, most tweets are
insubstantial and thinly veiled metadata. There are always those claiming a
tweet 'means' something but the context is usually entirely missing, hence the
phenomenon of 'subtweets' and worse: the dreaded tweetstorm.

I could even encode arbitrary data in a JPEG if I wanted and get back data
byte for byte. I just wonder what my followers would make of such tweets and
if they are clever enough to fuzz the JPEG for meaning and context.

------
dnprock
140 characters limit is confusing. Twitter is making the rule even more
confusing by counting some characters but not others.

------
sytse
Did I understand correctly that when I start a tweet with a username it will
show up in the feeds of all my followers? That is pretty annoying, sometimes
the conversation can be public but you don't want to bother anyone with it.
Also, most people do not yet allow people who they don't follow to DM them.

~~~
viraptor
Sounds exactly like that. Yet again Twitter goes: "you know all those things
people keep asking for? let's do 4 different things and get rid of something
with no workaround available".

This is so bad it's getting hilarious. I mean, either the leadership is
completely unaware of issues people raise for years, or they are and
intentionally neither comment on nor fix them. Either way - WTF? I honestly
think they're just delusional about being too big to fail at this point.
Another social network will make them the latest MySpace though, just a
question of time.

~~~
fehguy
Going to 141 chars would solve all their problems imho

------
MBCook
Oh good, a way to encourage harassment.

Before: some @jerk keeps sending annoying tweets to @victim, but since they
aren't .@ tweets only the victim sees them in their timeline, or people who
follow both @jerk and @victim.

Now: @jerk continues to send annoying tweets to @victim, but now everyone who
follows @jerk sees the attacks, so if they're like minded they can now pile on
@victim too.

With everything that keeps going on, including celebrities leaving Twitter due
to harassment issues and having to seriously bulk up their harassment rules
and enforcement departments... you'd think they'd think about some of this
stuff first.

But wait, it gets worse:

[https://twitter.com/chrisremo/status/735115850445783043](https://twitter.com/chrisremo/status/735115850445783043)

You can now @mention up to 50 people, but ONLY THE FIRST WILL SHOW. So now you
can easily harass huge groups of people and they won't even know why they're
getting the tweet in the first place!

 _facepalm_

~~~
davb
I don't see that this change will encourage harassment. @jerk could always
have dot prefixed his tweets (as today) and have his followers see the
mention. That's not new, it's just one character less they have to type.

I'm not saying there's no issue with online harassment (there is), but this
doesn't make it any worse.

~~~
st3v3r
It's going to make it far easier. While they could dot prefix, they usually
didn't. Now they don't have to, and they get bonus visibility.

~~~
MBCook
Precisely. Before you had to be purposeful about it by adding the . before the
@.

Now it's automatic, and possibly unintended. Send a slightly rude tweet to
someone you're mad at? Maybe sarcasm that some of your followers don't see as
sarcasm? Now your friend may get harassed by your followers.

~~~
frogpelt
@jerk is usually very purposeful.

------
DonHopkins
Could somebody please write up a 140 character summary of this long one-page
blog posting?

------
johns
Details on the changes in the API:
[https://dev.twitter.com/overview/api/upcoming-changes-to-
twe...](https://dev.twitter.com/overview/api/upcoming-changes-to-tweets)

~~~
ForHackernews
I thought Twitter banned third party clients a few years ago? They still have
an API? For advertisers?

~~~
unlinker
No they did not. They rate limited it so much they made third party clients
not very useful. Also, most clients are limited to 100000 users, which is a
limit some of them hit.

------
iagooar
Such groundbreaking features, I can see their +1k engineers all working hard
for months to accomplish the goal and to hit the deadlines.

------
mcantelon
I want versioned tweets so I can edit my tweets.

------
unlinker
> New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That
> means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people
> currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.)

Conspiracy theory: they are doing this to fill our timelines with noise so we
welcome all the algorithmic changes to the holy and sacred chronological order
of our timelines.

------
st3v3r
Nobody has been asking for this. People have, however, been asking for ways to
curb the tidal wave of harassment that happens.

~~~
Karunamon
If by "people" you mean "vocal minority", and by "harassment" you mean "public
replies to public postings".

There needs to be a warning of some kind. People seem very unclear on this and
don't get that putting something into the tweet box is like shouting it on the
street corner. People can and should be expected to shout back.

~~~
jameshart
The only people who ask for anything are vocal minorities.

And when the public replies are from a swarm of shortlived anonymous accounts,
but direct a storm of abuse at an individual's persistent online identity, as
well as often any accounts with whom they have interacted... that's not just
people shouting back, that's something wholly different and unique to the
twitter environment.

~~~
Karunamon
While I have no doubt this happens (if anything happens on the internet, it's
breeding a better asshole), I question whether it happens as much as some of
the posts in this thread make it sound like.

As in, whether it happens enough to restrict the way most people interact with
the site.

As a counterpoint, most of the onsite crowing I see about "abuse" and
"harassment" on Twitter is of the "I said something publicly, responding to me
publicly is harassment" variety. And then when I go look at the timelines, I
don't see anything particularly awful.

Anyone with that mindset should start a blog.

~~~
st3v3r
Your posts are coming from someone who has likely never had to experience
that. While that's good, and I hope you never do, stop trying to downplay the
experiences of others.

~~~
Karunamon
I will absolutely not. When those experiences (were this any other field, we'd
call them anecdotes) are being used as an argument to change the way something
works for literal millions of unrelated and unknowing people, it is open to
the same criticism, scrutiny, and verification that any other piece of data
is.

