
Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules - hackergirl88
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/twitter-moves-away-from-140-characters-ditches-confusing-and-restrictive-rules/?ncid=tcdaily
======
detaro
official announcement: [https://blog.twitter.com/express-even-more-
in-140-characters](https://blog.twitter.com/express-even-more-
in-140-characters) (running discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11761583](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11761583))

------
donretag
"After all, Twitter is a great big, public conversational platform — the fact
that you could follow chats between other users you cared about was part of
its draw."

Insane. For me it is the complete opposite. Having to read a personal
conversation between two people is perhaps the primary reason I do not use
Twitter. Far too much noise. And they should count hashtags as double (the
other main reason why I cannot stand Twitter).

~~~
giarc
If you think twitter is bad for hashtags, I recommend staying away from
Instagram.

~~~
donretag
Do not use Instagram either, but for other reasons. :)

I tried using Instagram. Downloaded the app and created an account. It
promptly emailed everyone in my address book notifying them that I created an
account. Deleted the app and my account. Never again.

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t0mbstone
I almost completely ditched Twitter because I got sick of attempting to
condense my thoughts into blurbs a toddler with ADD could understand.

On twitter, I have thousands of followers and I'm lucky to get even one reply
or mention.

On Facebook, however, I have about 300 friends, and I can post an actual
paragraph along with a photo or a video. I often get 30 likes and 20 comments
on the posts.

Facebook does a much better job of facilitating real conversations, and yet it
still allows people to post 140 character blurbs (if they want to).

I get it though. Twitter is what it is, and there are tons of people who love
it. I'm not one of those people.

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fayimora
The way I understand it, the 140 character limit still holds. They just
stopped counting things like mentions and URLs.

~~~
robmcm
But if they didn't use a misleading title you wouldn't have clicked the
link...

~~~
fayimora
haha I thought about that too. Clever but slightly misleading. Surely they
could have come up with something true and equally attractive but then again
it's the battle of " _who gets the story out first_ "

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teaneedz
Removing the ".@" syntax is a mistake. I don't always want to broadcast
replies. I still don't understand why URLs are still included within the 140
char limit either. Can someone explain that better than the article?

~~~
ecesena
Urls where fixed to 22, then 23, lately 24 chars. It's the length of the
actual shortened url.

I've been working with people helping social media for a bit, and one common
issue in preparing a list of tweets to schedule is making sure the length is
ok. So you end up with silly xls files where you have a url column, a text
column, etc. and weird formulas to compute the size.

I think Twitter just wants to simplify the life. You can send 140 chars of
text/comment. Mentions, urls, images, etc. are not counted because normal
people aren't counting like that.

~~~
apetresc
He was asking why URLs ARE still being counted as part of the length – Twitter
seems to have excluded everything except for those. Your reply demonstrates
how arbitrary that distinction is :)

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tptacek
I don't know if this was the original Techcrunch title, but it is
extraordinarily misleading. The proper title is the current article title:

 _Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive
rules_

~~~
dang
Thanks, we restored the original title.

Submitters: please do not rewrite titles unless they are misleading or
linkbait:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Please especially don't rewrite them to make them _more_ misleading and
linkbait. (Submitted title was "Twitter ditches 140 character limit".)

~~~
Tomte
Apropos character limits: maybe you could stop counting (2001) etc. towards
the 80 character limit in submissions?

Because a few times I have left out the year since I couldn't find a good
shorter title, and then you added the year afterwards. I would have done that
myself. :-)

~~~
dang
We can't get around that limit any more than you can!

Currently the only thing that's allowed to exceed the limit is "[pdf]" but
yes, it should probably include "(year)" and "[video]".

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acaloiar
I get why this is news to many people, but when you get down to it, a company
removed its own arbitrary limitation. It's really difficult to give a shit
about such things.

EDIT: I'm aware of the original reasoning for the limitation, so perhaps
"arbitrary" is not the best adjective.

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AlphaNico
Interesting move toward the end of the 140 character limit. Let's see how it
goes but I'm pretty sure people will still complain about the limitation,
until they really ditch it...

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mettamage
Silly question perhaps (I'm a Twitterer): but can't you now do hacky things
like @insert_complete_message_you_want_to_tell?

~~~
sumitgt
Maybe not that since that would not be registered username.

[http://but.you.might.be.able.to.do.something.like.this](http://but.you.might.be.able.to.do.something.like.this)

~~~
pilif
no, because URLs are still counted (probably because of this workaround).

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fayimora
Wow I have been using Twitter since 08/09 and I never knew about the ".@"
reply.

~~~
jug
There was nothing special to them though. Convention was just ".@user" but you
could also have used "Hello @user!" The point was to force Twitter from
treating it as a recipient-only message.

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rochak
About damn time!

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id122015
are bots going to be confused because there is no limit now ? or are they
going to step up to the next level and write essays ?

