
Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets - hodgesmr
http://recode.net/2016/01/05/twitter-considering-10000-character-limit-for-tweets/
======
dangoor
Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to
have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to
see the rest.

To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter
is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some
thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts
on... read more" tweet would be much nicer.

If they implement the feature like that, which is implied in the article, this
would be a big improvement to Twitter in my opinion.

~~~
prawn
One thing I've wanted to see tried with Twitter is the idea that you have your
typical stream of tweets (vertical), but that any tweet can have depth (by
swiping horizontally). Your "my thoughts" example would indicate "1/8"
automatically, updating as it was created.

Means that someone can read as usual, or delve for the full series of tweets.
They could provide an indication to the writer of what percentage of people
read to which depth, for example.

It could work well for presenting news articles (sentence or paragraph at a
time), photo galleries/essays, slidedecks, stories, advertising, etc. Using a
news article as an example, some people will be interested in just the
headline, others in the first three bits, a few in the full story to its end.

~~~
wf
This is a really cool idea. It's a really simple solution to the same problem
that would be really beautiful and easy to use on mobile especially. It
doesn't quite reach the same depth, but I think it's a good way to start.

~~~
prawn
Always had it on my list to build a prototype of the concept and pitch it to
media companies. Baffles me that they do so much work plugging Twitter handles
for newsreaders, journalists, etc but then use a platform that hardly helps
them.

------
AlwaysBCoding
To the people thinking 10,000 characters means suddenly everyone will write
blog posts instead of tweets... Have you ever tried blogging? Writing blog
posts is insanely hard and time consuming. You'd be an outlier if you could
write one good blog post a day. It's not like every tweet is suddenly going to
be an essay. More likely tweets will just be slightly longer (200 characters
or something) and then there will be the occasional longer post. This is great
because the hacks we were using beforehand (tweetstorms, replying to yourself,
posting images of text) were all ridiculous for such a basic use case.

~~~
altern8
You don't necessarily have to write them yourself. You can just copy and paste
from different sources multiple times a day.

~~~
personjerry
Wait, are you telling me I can copy paste content on the Internet and get
credit for it?

~~~
JetSpiegel
I believe this is called "Programming" in certain enterprise circles.

------
bad_user
Twitter's limit is too low, but it does have a certain appeal, and I'm
following a lot of smart people that express a lot in 140 chars. Would be
happy if this limit was raised to 250 chars.

But raising to 10,000 chars would probably kill Twitter for me.

~~~
mozumder
A lot of the characters could be separated out into their own data fields.
There's no reason to have links & hashtags in the main character text.

~~~
tuxracer
#Then #people #would #just #write #really #long #tweets #like #this.

~~~
passionfruit
They could start counting hashtags against the character limit after a certain
number of them.

------
cpeterso
Twitter could charge 1¢ for each character over 140. That will encourage
people to (still) be concise, but also monetize people (or companies) that
want to say more.

~~~
evanpw
The best suggestion I've seen is 1¢ for the 141st character, 2¢ for the 142nd,
4¢ for the 143rd, etc. Going slightly over 140 costs a trivial amount, but it
would be stupidly expensive to tweet anything really long.

EDIT: I found where I stole this idea from:
[http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6207.html](http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6207.html)

~~~
baddox
Ah yes, only $100k for a 160 character tweet.

Edit: mental math botched. I thought I remembered the powers of 2 better than
I actually did. 160 characters would be about 10k, and 100k would buy you a
whopping 163 characters.

~~~
tomswartz07
If they make the limit infinite, you'd end up being paid -1/12 of a cent.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6XTVZXww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6XTVZXww)

~~~
owenversteeg
Nope! [http://goodmath.scientopia.org/2014/01/17/bad-math-from-
the-...](http://goodmath.scientopia.org/2014/01/17/bad-math-from-the-bad-
astronomer/)

~~~
openasocket
Incorrect, there is actually some well-established mathematics dealing with
divergent series as summing to finite values via analytic continuation. These
results have to be treated with care, because they are inconsistent under
certain algebraic manipulations, but the techniques are "real" enough that
their results are used in particle physics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularization_(physics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularization_\(physics\))

~~~
owenversteeg
"The sum of the series 1+2+3+4+5+6... = -1/12" is patently false, without a
previous assertion that we have assumed the Cesàro sum of a series is equal to
the series.

Even mathematicians working with Cesàro sums surround such statements with
"this holds __only if __we interpret the infinite sum defining Z to be the
Cesàro sum... " [0]

Precisely none of the times I've heard the "1+2+3+4...=-1/12" bullshit has the
person stating it prefaced their statement with "this holds __only if __we
interpret the infinite sum defining Z to be the Cesàro sum... "

If you say that "1+2+3+4...=-1/12" without stating your prior assumptions, you
suddenly allow anyone to make any assumption whatsoever, no matter how obscure
it is. In your imaginary world, someone could walk into a store and claim that
"this 95 cent pack of gum is free" because they just made the unstated
assumption that all non-integers do not exist, and seconds later they could
return it for a full refund of $0.95 after making the unstated assumption that
in fact the rational numbers do exist. Numbers, and in fact the entire system
of mathematics fail to work at all once you allow arbitrary, unstated
assumptions no matter their obscurity. And in fact, the assumption that non-
integer numbers do not exist is made far, far more frequently than the
assumption that the infinite sum defining the sequence is the Cesàro sum.

The only difference is that assuming the non-integer numbers do not exist is a
defensible assumption in many, many scenarios... but Cesàro summations are
only invoked about twelve times a year, in pure math or advanced physics
papers.

[0] Madras, Neal. "A Note on Diffusion State Distance." arXiv preprint
arXiv:1502.07315 (2015).

------
colmvp
I like Twitter because it forces people to be concise. There are already
plenty of places on the web where people can post long thoughtful articles or
op-ed pieces.

~~~
Bud
It forces people to not write a complex English sentence, is what it does. You
literally can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting. Which is
annoying.

There's concision, and then there's nuking the concept of the paragraph.

I for one welcome our new longer-Tweet overlords.

~~~
bad_user
The length of your entire message: 285 chars

Length of " _You can 't express complex thought without multi-tweeting_": 56
chars (took " _literally_ " out, because that's incorrect).

~~~
theseatoms
"Literally" is not incorrect.

[http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally](http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/literally)

"Literally" can mean "virtually," or "figuratively."

~~~
pklausler
We need a new word that non-figuratively means "literally", then.

~~~
derefr
You don't need to throw out a word just because it's become an autoantonym[1];
many words are. To cleave; to hew; to screen; etc.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-
antonym](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym)

~~~
pklausler
My favorite: "oversight".

------
potatolicious
I must be the only one who thinks this is a good idea (not the 10,000-char
limit in specific, but something much higher than 140-char).

Some of the most interesting ideas I've seen on Twitter were in tweetstorms,
which is a pretty nasty and ugly hack itself. Proponents of the 140-char limit
usually cite some notion of terseness and thought-density, but I see more
half-formed ideas and deliberate grammar/spelling mangling to make things fit.
That's not terseness, that's gray-matter-powered lossy compression.

But I'm also one of those crazy people who uses Facebook like others use
Twitter - I don't write whole essays but 140 chars is like thinking through a
straw.

(Side note: I also have a pet theory that Twitter's problems with epic
shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people
arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or
less)

~~~
forgetsusername
> _I also have a pet theory that Twitter 's problems with epic
> shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people
> arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or
> less_

I'm pretty sure those arguments and "shit-storms" are occurring everywhere
there is written text on the internet, regardless of character limitations.

~~~
potatolicious
Sure, though I feel like it's worse on Twitter than in most places for a few
reasons: it's really easy to retweet and disseminate someone's post, and the
public nature of accounts/tweets makes it very easy to dogpile.

On Facebook you might get some flak from your uncle, on a forum you might get
into a tussle with another poster, but there are natural limits to the
severity and the scale. On Twitter many of these limits are stripped away -
it's _very_ easy, and very common, to retweet someone "look at this fucking
idiot" and invite your circles to pile on, many of whom will have never heard
of the offender before.

This is also how harassment and abuse on Twitter is worse than other platforms
- on Facebook you might get into a flamewar with your uncle and face awkward
family dinners for a while, but on Twitter a dogpile is millions of users
large, and you're statistically guaranteed to get a few people with legitimate
screws loose in that bunch who might actually SWAT you or stalk you or
otherwise take things way, way too far.

Add this to the fact that Twitter's length limits discourage nuance and
encourage soundbites and you get IMO the worst intersection of soundbite
culture, outrage culture, and massive built-in virality.

------
Laaw
I've begun wondering if there's a market for recreating original technologies
that have evolved beyond their original intent.

For example, a new site that allowed you to broadcast up to 140 character
messages.

~~~
pjc50
I keep joking to people that I want to start rotatedfloralheartbullet.com
(.com), a social network where you're only allowed _one_ character, but you
have the whole unicode space to choose from.

~~~
cpeterso
Evan Williams founded Blogger (no character limit) and then Twitter
(140-character limit). After rotatedfloralheartbullet.com's one-character
limit, the logical conclusion is Bitter with one-bit posts. :)

~~~
Laaw
1

------
nikolay
I can't believe that there are so many backers of the old limit! Don't you
guys hate that you have to always compromise on punctuation, select shorter
(but less precise) synonyms, and other just to fit into the story that Twitter
was trying to push all this time, but which wasn't the reality (of people
using Twitter via SMS)? Okay, now, Twitter goes to another extreme - from too
short, to too long. I'm fine with shorter message, but 140 is way too short.
Modern phones combine SMSs into a bigger blob. Use that and just make a limit
of 5 SMSs or something along these lines.

~~~
prawn
I actually really enjoy the process of having to re-write my thoughts to have
them fit. Reminds me what is crucial and what is superfluous. (139 chars)

~~~
rconti
u r so rite! 140 char limit limits my thoughts 2 that which is critical.
without it id waste tons of space expressing my brilliant thoughts (140chars)

(speaking of crap formatting, I still can't get used to HN comment
formatting.. apparently no way to make a line feed or a list, at least, none
that's documented)

But seriously, it's ironic that Twitter limits tweets to 140char but the site
and mobile app are some of the worst wastes of screen real estate I've ever
seen. I keep trying to find it of some value but I just can't do it. Either
nothing shows up in my feed, or I follow "must follow" people and get to hear
them go on about random crap I don't care about. My real actual Twitter mobile
app feed currently looks like this:

* retweet

* promoted tweet

* while you were away (1)

* while you were away (2)

* while you were away (3)

* while you were away (4)

* while you were away (5)

* actual tweet in proper chronological order (1)

* actual tweet in proper chronological order (2)

* people you may want to follow (1)

* people you may want to follow (2)

* people you may want to follow (3)

I had to scroll down 4 entire (iPhone 6) screenfuls of tweets before I got to
the chronologic list of recent tweets I actually want to see, and even then,
saw only 2 of them before the next chunk of junk! The light grey bar on a
light grey background is poor delineation between sections, as well. It blows
my mind that a mostly-text medium with such a strict character limit manages
to have vastly worse information density than Facebook.

I use them differently, too, of course. Facebook feels more personal; I'm
friends with real-life friends, and am a member of some groups for fun. Most
of the updates feel personal to me.

Twitter I use to follow "important figures" and some friends.. but no friends
tweet, and the important figures never say anything interesting.. or at least,
if they do, I can't get to it, because the UI is such garbage.

------
nlh
I feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the
spirit of Twitter's original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply
as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but there's
a "see more" button/icon/etc. that expands the tweet to longer form.

That would seem to solve both issues -- short-and-sweet for those that want
it, and longer as necessary.

(Note this idea has been baked for approximately 15 seconds, so I'm sure I'm
missing quite a bit.)

~~~
JoshTriplett
> I feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the
> spirit of Twitter's original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply
> as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but
> there's a "see more" button/icon/etc. that expands the tweet to longer form.

That would also provide a better first-party equivalent to services like
TwitLonger, as well as the common practice of posting a snippet and a longer
text-as-image.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I'd like it if they added text attachments, like you can currently attach
images or videos. This way the core tweet itself is still 140 characters. It'd
be a nicer version of images full of text.

------
Animats
Microsoft Word used to have a summarization engine. You could specify a
maximum length, and it would remove sentences, in a surprisingly intelligent
way, to get to that length. Twitter readers now need such a feature. Just
because someone sends huge tweets doesn't mean they have to be displayed.

~~~
smt88
I think it's very risky to do something like that with someone _else 's_ words
without consulting them.

Imagine a satirical tweet with exactly the wrong "unnecessary" sentence
removed. Suddenly your life is ruined because you said something that makes
people angry.

~~~
derefr
It could render the summary live to the poster as they edit their post. Then,
if you see a "bad" summary, you can go back to the drawing board.

Not as nice as being able to write the summary yourself, but certainly an
interesting single-player game.

~~~
smt88
My only concern is that we'd get into a frustrating game of clickbait, since
the summary wouldn't necessarily have to reflect the content.

An example is the "Facebook is dead" link on HN recently. The article was
about someone quitting Facebook, rather than an argument that Facebook is
losing trendiness.

Now imagine a Twitter where _every single tweet_ is similarly bait-y.

------
enginn
You see this now, whole paragraphs of a noteworthy book punctuating a
timeline, people taking screenshots of text, or otherwise cluttering up my
Twitter with textual soundbites in the guise of a JPEG

a.) These are not very accessible

b.) I am too lazy to transcribe / OCR these

c.) It defeats the purpose of Twitter

d.) It would be far more handy to have big text blobs like this in a Tweet's
JSON schema Something like

    
    
        {  textBlob: '...book quotes galore...'}
    
    

b.) Images as text are a huge waste of resources. A lot of bandwidth could be
saved by persuading tweeps to use a text-blob instead of an image (Free
bandwidth people, that's what we all want is it not?!)

~~~
dilap
But imposing those extra costs to being verbose encourages people to be
concise, unless they REALLY need the extra words.

Make the words cheap, and twitter will turn into just another prolix platform
in a sea of noise.

~~~
derefr
Not if there are tools that abstract away all the difficulty. Type 10K chars
into a box; hit post; magically the first 140 show up as a text and the rest
as an image.

~~~
dilap
No, you've got my point backwards:

Absent external effects, it's easier to write a long message than write
concisely.

Twitter in its current form imposes an artificial cost on long messages, which
encourages you to do the extra work to write something short.

Remove that cost, and you'll get more lazy, long messages.

That's my theory, anyway.

------
boomzilla
The Twitter engineering team is probably hating this decision. I bet a lot of
their infrastructure is built around the assumption that tweet.txt is short :)
This has huge implication on the data schema, caching, search, etc.

~~~
acjohnson55
If that's the case, that's their own fault. Seriously.

As an engineer, you can hardcode your assumptions or make them parametric. I
get that 140 chars has been a core part of the Twitter identity, and maybe
there are some infrastructural aspects that have to be hardcoded to optimize
for that. But if they've got `140`s sprinkled all over their code base because
that was the assumption of the day, god help them.

------
jasode
Well... some back-of-the-envelope math. Assuming average characters-per-word
of 4.5[1] and also add 1 for space/punctuation for a word unit of 5.5:

    
    
      10000/5.5 = 1818 words.
    
      1800 words @ 250 wpm average reading speed is ~7 minutes.
    

A 10,000 char (7 minute article) expansion looks to me like a "micro-blogging"
platform rather than "tweeting". I'm guessing it all goes back to Twitter
trying many things to become bigger than traditional Twitter. Hence the
previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513237)

(It goes without saying that not every "mega" tweet will use all 10,000
chars.)

[1][https://www.google.com/search?q=average+characters+per+word](https://www.google.com/search?q=average+characters+per+word)

~~~
justJanne
By the way, your statistics are for English.

For German, where we have 14.3 characters per word on average[1], we get:

10'000/14.8 = 676 words.

676 words @ 250 wpm is 2 Minutes 42 Seconds.

A 2½ Minute article is very short, like a short comment in a newspaper, and
would fit very well into a microblogging site.

[1]
[http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/durchschnitt...](http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/durchschnittliche-
laenge-eines-deutschen-wortes)

~~~
Zitrax
Wouldn't average characters per sentence be a slightly better measure? In
German and other Germanic languages it's common with compounded words, thus
word XY seem long but would in English just be written as X Y.

~~~
kuschku
Probably, but then, on Twitter, people abbreviate words in english or leave
them out in ways that aren’t possible in German.

It’s hard when you need 3 or 4 tweets for a simple sentence explaining why
Sony DCP projectors used to be easier for piracy than competing products.

------
tptacek
Presumably, post-140 Twitter will be pretty much the same as classical 140
twitter, but instead of 3/4 of all twerps ending with links to properties
outside of Twitter, a huge chunk of those will link to more content inside of
Twitter.

The only major change in post-140 Twitter would be the death of the
Andreessen-style twerpstorm.

~~~
minimaxir
> The only major change in post-140 Twitter would be the death of the
> Andreessen-style twerpstorm

You'd think that's the case but I'm not so sure about that.

The hidden secret of secret of Tweetstorms is that they take up the space of
multiple tweets, which means that people can retweet more times (people do
retweet entire Tweetstorms!) and occupy the entire space on their followers'
timelines.

Although, if you Tweetstorm when a 10k character limit exist, the shenanigans
would be obvious. Anyone who pulled this would instantly get an unfollow from
me, of course.

~~~
WorldMaker
Also, I feel like "Tweetstorm" are also closer to the raw metal of how people
actually think out loud (or at least anecdotally how I tend to think out
loud), building from the last thought a small fragment at a time. To some
extent that's what I appreciate about Twitter is sometimes capturing the raw
point-to-point (scattered) thought process over blogs where one has a tendency
to expand, revisit, and rewrite, obscuring the thought process but building a
better narrative in the result.

I like the idea of going back, "merging tweets" into a collection, and then
writing a narrative on top of it, connecting dots and building revisions that
complete it as a "post". I guess kind of like Storify.

------
rjohnk
If this happens, Twitter will cease to be Twitter.

In keeping with the bird analogy, messages will be that annoying parakeet in
the pet store rather than spring time finches.

~~~
adevine
I originally agreed with you, but after thinking about it I think the devil is
in the details of how this is released. That is, Twitter's uniqueness is that
it is geared towards short, real-time "bursts of consciousness", but people
with lots of followers still occasionally put out long "blogs in tweet form"
with multiple tweets.

If Twitter keeps the focus on the short bursts, but still has a separate way
to do "Twitter blogs" or whatever, I think it could work. If Twitter just
unconditionally changes all Tweets to 10k it seems like it would kill what
makes Twitter unique in the first place.

------
tedajax
Good.

My biggest issue with Twitter's 140 character limit is it removes all
opportunity for nuance. Within 140 characters you can just barely voice and
opinion or thought in the most basic terms. Yes you can split your thoughts
into multiple tweets but people will typically only focus on the first tweet
that really expresses the basis of an idea and that's what will get shared the
most. Allowing more wordy and nuanced tweets probably won't solve the social
media over reactions that seem to flare up, but maybe it'll help if people
aren't forced to awkwardly clarify their positions with a bunch of tweets that
have to be read from the bottom up.

~~~
mrpoptart
brevity is the soul of wit

~~~
cableshaft
Not even a legend like George Carlin was witty 100% of the time.

------
minimaxir
Jack Dorsey just posted a longtweet-as-image which implies that the story is
true:
[https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248](https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248)

His comments about searching/highlighting imply that this feature might be
like Medium.

~~~
teaneedz
I think Twitter is going to do it. I agree with his tweet:

> Given how much the best users of twitter hate the idea of a 10k char limit
> for tweets, it will definitely happen. :(

So as long as it's going to do it, can I request that it support Markdown?
Medium doesn't really support it other than through an API.

~~~
teaneedz
typo above. not _his tweet_ but _this tweet_ (which BTW would look better in
MD

------
jgrahamc
I think they should have a weekly character limit and let users use those
characters as they want. That way you get a limit to prevent just reams and
reams of characters in tweets, but allow flexibility with how you tweet.

~~~
minimaxir
Why would Twitter implement a feature that makes you use the the service
_less_ after you've hit a quota?

~~~
jgrahamc
So they can charge premium users for more characters.

------
Wingman4l7
Makes a lot more sense to just "fix" what they've already got -- stop counting
@ mentions, hashtags, and URLs as characters. If URLs didn't count, that'd
mean the death of URL shorteners, which would mean no more link rot.

~~~
gregmac
Yeah, I'd like to see this ... so long as they #limitTheNumber of #hashtags
and @mentions you use #so #you #cant #cheatthesystem.

~~~
Wingman4l7
People will always try to cheat, they're doing it now with [continued 1/2]
-style tweet-chaining.

Counting @ mentions means that any reply is immediately handicapped
_(although, for a broadcasting-style platform, maybe that was the whole
point)_.

------
zuron7
I think they should increase their character limit linearly with time. Kinda
like Gmail storage back in the day. Twitter wouldn't be twitter without short
messages. Or maybe allow users to skip the limit once a day.

------
digitalneal
Might be interesting if they 'gamified' this character limit.

Your limit increases the more engagement you have.

Or maybe everyone starts off with 10k but the limit decreases based on
engagement. Might be a way to reward people who create interesting content.

Although I'm sure someone at fiverr would be offering a service to counteract
that idea via bots seconds afterwards.

------
izzydata
140 seems pretty short, but 10000 seems very excessive. Why not something
closer to the hundreds. 500 maybe?

------
lukethomas
Seems like the major benefits are:

1\. 140 char tweets aren't indexed very well by search engines. Writing blog
posts or 400+ char tweets? Way better. More indexable content. More user
growth. Wall street is satisfied for a few months.

2\. The notion of expressing yourself (or whatever you want to call blogging)
is easy to explain (WordPress, Tumblr, Medium). I'd argue that it's much
easier to explain blogging than Twitter. By introducing something less
ambiguous it should help user growth.

As much as I would hate 10k char tweets, I can see why they are doing this.

Minor changes to the current product won't drive the growth they and Wall
Street are looking for.

------
OoTheNigerian
We built [http://writerack.com](http://writerack.com) to help take care of
this problem.

It is puzzling why Twitter refuses to encourage 3rd party applications to do
peripheral things while they still get the data.

That way, they focus on the core experience for most of their users.

10 000 and it becomes a poor attempt at medium. 140 characters allows text to
be like images where you can skim.

Occasionally, you see tweetstorms and decide if you want to "view more"

Anyway, it's their turf.

Do check out [http://writerack.com](http://writerack.com) and have fun with it
until it is no longer useful :)

------
chjohasbrouck
Restricting users to 140 characters wasn't just a good idea because of SMS
character limits, it also forced users to create content that had a far
greater chance of being shareable.

The traditional blogging platforms that came before Twitter generally failed
as broad-base social media platforms because of the walls of text people would
write. If you're an average person, nobody wants to read your wall of text
about some childhood experience, but people might be interested in your one-
liners about news, celebrities, friends, etc.

I think the changes that are causing them to consider a 10,000-character limit
are:

1\. A larger percentage of Twitter traffic is celebrities/marketers, and
people trying to connect with celebrities/marketers (not friends connecting
with friends). Character limits don't matter for this traffic because
quality/virality is either guaranteed (celebrities/marketers) or irrelevant
(consumers trying to connect to celebrities/marketers).

2\. It's difficult to sell text as short-form shareable content now that
everyone's sharing images, gifs, and really short videos. If the text isn't
going to be shareable, they might as well lift the character limit and expand
its utility as a general feature.

Personally I like the idea. The way I use Twitter is to see what public
figures and organizations are saying publicly, so a higher character limit is
100% upside for me.

------
ddingus
This is going to kill Twitter for me. A few more characters is likely a good
move. 256 seems nice.

But, I don't use Twitter for long form content. I do use Twitter as a way for
people to get me interested in long form, or to raise awareness of something.

If my feed gets clogged with long form, I'm moving on. Too much info, wrong
use case.

Seems to me Twitter could gather a lot more value out reconsideration of how
hostile they have been to the ecosystem that grew up around Twitter.

------
return0
\- Tweets are not titles. Soon they 'll have "Click here to read my thoughts
on X" / "Click here to read my response to Y" situation. That's not twitter,
it's RSS.

\- Content creators/websites that use twitter to funnel users to their
websites will not use this feature.

\- Tweetstorms can be solved much more elegantly (e.g. click to expand
"continuation tweets")

\- A tweet is a single sentence. Human brains have limits.

------
andreasklinger
From what i understand they wont remove 140 tweets but will introduce their
own variation of "posts".

Every media distribution site atm seems to try to also own the content.

Twitter's value isnt that you have to write short messages but that others can
scan dozens of ideas/tweets of multiple people in a very short time. They wont
take that away. Most likely you will even have to attach a 1400 tweet to the
post.

------
ohyes
Woah, woah, woah! 10,000? If anything tweets are too long! They should reduce
the size if anything. 16 characters and a selfie should suffice for all inter
human communication.

If we increase the character limit how does it foster innovation in the realm
of human to human interaction? I mean, they might as well be old school print
media at this point, slightly democratized to allow celebridiots to poorly
market themselves and occasionally post something offensive which will create
media outrage.

How will news anchors have segments where they "read people's tweets"? We
don't have a segment called "Anderson Cooper reads the New York Times."
They're direct competitors!

It's crazy! It makes no sense, Twitter has gone too far this time! People will
just keep typing their stupid thoughts to fill the tweet up to the stupid
limit because they have to be entertaining in long format. I don't have time
for that shit!

------
cpeterso
How deep is the 140-character limit hard-coded or assumed throughout Twitter's
codebase and beyond? How much would break if the Twitter front-end simply
stopped limiting submissions to 140 characters? There is Twitter's web front-
end, the server backend, Twitter's native apps, third-party clients, feed
reading scripts, …

------
resca79
Twitter is considering to allow message longest that 140, but I don't think
that the problem is the character limit for the kind of interaction of twitter
users. There are other problems not so big but that make the user experience
not fluent for a simple app like Twitter.

Writing posts with more that 140 can potentially get many FB users,
nevertheless TW should take care of the its current users. I notice many
incoherences of the web app, for instance the top menu, on left where pop/up
and navigation are mixed.

Second, the mobile app is very wired I receive notifications about message or
followers that appears on my notification tabs randomly.

In conclusion, I love TW and I'm not a FB user, but I'm honest my twitter
timeline is a bunch of Ads and I follow Twitter just because I love the
concept of it.

------
webwanderings
Facebook is a walled-garden, Twitter is not. The humans in the middle of these
two giants, are all confused.

Meanwhile, Twitter needs to figure out how they are preventing spammers and
spam-bots from infiltrating the environment where humans supposed to
tread...only if, they wish humans to use their service.

------
hackuser
This sounds like Weibo, a very popular service in China. There is some history
of such a thing being very succcessful.

However, I've never used Weibo. Can any describe the differences between Weibo
and longer-form Twitter, and talk about Weibo's strengths and weaknesses?

------
Zikes
This entire article is ~954 characters, less than 1/10th of the proposed
10,000 maximum.

------
cdnsteve
The problem isn't character limit.

The problem is missing interesting Tweets. My timeline is flooded with new
tweets. Better flagging to read later, algorithms that say you might find this
most interesting, filtering would be welcome and are needed.

~~~
dacox
I still don't really understand Twitter. I have an account and have followed
~50 people and organizations I find interesting, and all I see is floods of
re-tweets of people I have no interest in.

~~~
Wingman4l7
You have to turn off retweets manually for every single account you follow,
unfortunately.

~~~
dacox
Hmm, interesting. Annoying that it is manual, but if it can be automated,
Twitter might actually be interesting to me.

------
Pxtl
It sounds more like you'll be able to attach a long-form text document to a
tweet just like you can attach a photo. The tweet itself, as presented in the
normal view, is still constrained in length.

~~~
irremediable
Yeah, this isn't even that new -- currently people get the same effect by
posting images of text. Allowing them to attach text is a logical improvement.

------
sherifmansour
I find it fascinating that almost every single significant product change
Twitter has made has effectively been a result of end-users or third party
developers attempting to fix the core product experience. \- @mentions \-
Retweets \- Mobile clients \- periscope \- Image effects

Now long-form tweets trying to fix the redicilous problems of having to
screenshot text to fit your message in, agonizing over short URLs or character
by character shortcuts just to get a tweet out.

Any significant innovations or leaps forward from Twitter that we're not what
people have been trying to do?

------
joshstrange
Meh, I doubt it would bring me back. 90% of my friends are on FB and the lack
of a limit (or one I've ever hit) is quite nice. I'm able to write out full
sentences with much less ambiguity or "text-speak" and while FB isn't my
favourite company ever I'm going to go where my friends are at the end of the
day. I don't write pages and pages or even multiple paragraphs most of the
time but 1-2 sentences is normally not enough to express a full thought and
because of that Twitter just doesn't work for me.

------
rodionos
They might extend the message limit to 10K characters, but they won't be able
to stretch their users' attention span which is probably is bound by 2 or 3
sentences anyway.

------
ThomPete
Finally! I have been wanting them to remove that for a long time now.

Twitters biggest problem is that they are a protocol router more than a
destination. And so while people use it to find content they consume this
content somewhere else out of reach for twitters add engine.

Now that people will start writing on twitter this will mean a lot more time
is spent on twitter consuming content on twitter and reading ads on twitter.

With this they get to keep the protocol part while keeping users longer on
their platform to consume content.

~~~
riebschlager
What you see as Twitter's biggest problem, I see as one of its greatest
strengths.

We already have five-craptillion blogging platforms and I feel this change
would morph Twitter into yet another one.

I can understand the motivation, but I'm not a fan of social networks tendency
to be THE PLACE WHERE YOU DO EVERYTHING NOW.

~~~
ThomPete
I am talking about Twitters biggest problems from the point of whether it will
survive you talk about it from the point of whether it's a better product
experience.

------
MarkPNeyer
the 160 character limit on twitter helped me learn to speak more concisely.

I've had an account since 2009, but didn't start using it until 2014. It was
work at first - I didn't "get" it - but i stuck with it, and gradually i
enjoyed it more. All my tweets went through to faceebok, where they recieved
more positive feedback than my typical facebook posts.

People can read 160 characters of text quickly, and enjoy it. Long paragraphs,
not so much.

------
mrb
If Twitter is finally willing to increase the limit, maybe they should
consider options to monetize it. Like my suggestion from years ago that they
should sell a $1 per month subscription for users wanting to double their
limit: [http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=65](http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=65)

------
Raed667
TweetDeck (before it was sabotaged by Twitter) used to have a cool feature
like this where if you "tweet longer" you get a link attached to your tweet.

Twitter killed this years ago when it acquired TweetDeck.

This is funny because everything Twitter has been doing lately has been mostly
done (and stripped down ever-since) in TweetDeck years ago!

------
13thLetter
Unless they're going to create some sort of limit on how much Twitter mobs can
dogpile people, doxx them, and call their employers to get them fired, no
thanks. You'd have to be crazy to post on Twitter and take those risks, no
matter how anodyne you think you're being in your tweets.

------
viraptor
There's quite a few ideas that were created because of the limit. For example
Micro SF ([https://twitter.com/microsff](https://twitter.com/microsff)).
Constraints can fuel creativity, it would be sad to see this go.

------
dmingod666
Reminds me of a company that was doing innovation in radio and figured out a
way to beam still images with the radio waves. Only problem is they were on
their way to re-inventing TV if they did a little more innovation..

All that's needed now is markdown or html support...

------
sgdesign
A good solution would be having a 10000 character limit, but formatting
under-140 tweets differently so they stand out more. This would encourage
people to keep things short, while giving them a way to publish longer posts
if they really want to.

------
twlng
Ah... we built [http://www.twlng.com](http://www.twlng.com) as a way to work
around the Twitter limit.

Without the ability to format the longer text, 'Tweets' will just end up being
unreadable.

------
teaneedz
2016 is the year Twitter jumped the shark.
[https://ello.co/teanee/post/0M0OKQLGuxdtXpjHKXAq1w](https://ello.co/teanee/post/0M0OKQLGuxdtXpjHKXAq1w)

~~~
npunt
Link also says 2016 is Ello's year. Trolling, irony, or sincere? You decide!

~~~
teaneedz
sorry ;) I guess I came across as trollish, but I really loved Twitter and
it's difficult to see it on its current path. There were so many historical
and important industry news items I learned first on Twitter. Twitter owns the
in-the-moment. However, I'm passionate about UX and see something really cool
being built at Ello. I've dealt with all the platforms and Ello to me is very
unique. Deep down, I want Twitter to still succeed, but I see too many bad
product decisions coming from a company that lacks clarity and UX passion.

------
homulilly
Increasing the limit beyond the current arbitrary 140 character limit is good,
but 10000 characters is a bit much. I'd rather see a small increase (maybe
160, 200?) and removing links and @'s from the count.

------
elevensies
I think they should allow each account to be increased to 280 for $280/year.

------
mschuster91
Okay what's differentiating Twitter from fucking Facebook now?

Only the facts that there's (currently) no policy against pseudonyms, bots and
multiple accounts and that there's no useless crap games like Farmville.

~~~
ppod
I think that the crucial difference between twitter and facebook is not the
length of the posts, but the fact that twitter is broadcast, or "publish-
subscribe", while facebook is semi-private through reciprocal permission (by
default).

~~~
AlwaysBCoding
And the publish/subscribe model being a possibly superior alternative to a
two-way opt-in friendship model, is probably the reason for twitter's success
not the 140 characters. So by keeping the subscription model but allowing for
longer content, I think it's a win-win.

------
Houshalter
I've never used twitter and don't understand the appeal at all. How can
anything worthwhile be said in 150 characters? Even this comment comes in at
171 characters, jesus.

------
theseatoms
I can only see this being beneficial to the platform and/or ecosystem if they
restrict the default displayed size of tweets, requiring users to click-
through to read more.

------
return0
Twitter should add the option to put the long-form articles behind a paywall,
pay the author and withhold a fee. Solves their monetization problem in one
go.

------
Estragon
If they do this, I might start to see some value in twitter. The 140-character
limit has a strong anti-intellectual effect on the discourse there.

------
SixSigma
They were at 23.15 On Dec 31st

Opened at 22.64 on Jan 4th, going as low as 22.19

Opened at 22.79 on the 5th and closed 21.90

I think this rumour was irrelevant to the price change

------
yzh
How about not setting limit to any length, but using a text summary generator
to reduce the tl;dr version to 140 characters?

------
srameshc
It would be an interesting experiment to watch. It can take Twitter much ahead
or it will break Twitter completely.

------
pinaceae
oh yes, the spam it allow will be beautiful.

twitter spam has been of limited value due to the constraints.

would be more useful to move links, @mentions, etc. out of the character
limit.

but hey, if they do it, it opens the opportunity for another unicorn that will
be the snapchat of twitter.

------
auvi
The first thing I thought of while reading the title was: is it April 1
already?

------
a3n
If 140 characters was brilliant, than 10K characters is unbelievably
brilliant.

------
_pmf_
#unexpected #amazing #surprise #dorseydoesit #humanitysaved

Seriously: Jack Dorsey is definitely worth his 100 millions if he can come up
with innovations like this; raising the number of character? Holy shmoly, what
a genius! A veritable dare devil!

------
zobzu
The 140 limit is the reason I like twitter. It forces conciseness and some
kind of quality.

10k blog posts with 140 charsbof content to decipher.... No thanks. Showing
the first 140 only with a "read more" button does not fix that.

Rip twitter

------
ZanyProgrammer
I'd really like to be able to edit Tweets.

------
sidcool
So the microblogging phenomenon is over?

------
limeyy
I wonder how much theyll charge with their gnip rip-off company for us to
query these long tweets.

------
obiefernandez
this will be the real beginning of the end for twitter. stupid

------
vishalzone2002
i think this is the death of link shortners

------
NTDF9
So what's the difference between twitter and tumblr then?

------
grillvogel
this is awful, and its really funny to me that all the people complaining
about the 140 character limit are doing so via long unfocused babbling rants

------
kfrzcode
I support this.

------
CrowFly
I feel bad for Twitter because they have a popular product that's hard to
monetize. That being said, I wonder if any of the Twitter execs who think of
this stuff actually use Twitter.

~~~
hyperdunc
I don't feel sorry for them. Twitter is a great idea and valuable platform. It
would be better implemented in a decentralized way - perhaps with it's own
protocol.

By running it as a business and they're trying to force a square peg into a
round hole and slowly undermining its value.

------
venomsnake
We already have that - it is called tumblr. Also the social media outragists
will have slightly harder time pulling things out of context - think about all
the other media which income comes from producing outrage over tweets ...

------
ksk
I have a semi-serious business idea for Twitter. They should charge
verified/celebrity users a huge amount to be able to fill in whatever number
they want in the followers box. If you're advertising on twitter, you will
know the actual number so you're not paying extra. It\ would reduce or
eliminate the services that "help" with inflating your follower count, and
vain people who care about this stuff get to see a large number next to their
name.

~~~
recursive
That would make followers even more meaningless.

~~~
ksk
How so?

~~~
recursive
Right now, twitter can claim that the number labeled "followers" is the number
of followers. If they adopt your scheme, they can't. They'd basically be
lying.

