
Jack Dorsey addresses Twitter's character limit - TheBiv
https://twitter.com/jack/status/684496529621557248
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Indyan
If you need a thousand words to say something, put it on Medium or Tumblr or
any of the hundreds of other blogging and social media platforms. I dont mind
a minor tweak of the char. limit, but the rumored 1000 word limit is way too
much.

The beauty of Twitter is its brevity. It forces people to cut out the flab and
be concise. This in turn makes the entire steam easily glanceable. Huge walls
of text will take away much of what makes Twitter special.

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blankenship
That makes sense to you (a web user who wants to use multiple platforms, and
likely already does) but not to Twitter (a business whose financial interests
are best realized the longer you stay within the walled garden of their
product.) Twitter doesn’t want you to leave their ecosystem, so they’re
considering changing the boundaries of the ecosystem.

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a_shane
Which is all well and good, but when you take away too many of the features
which make that ecosystem unique, there's less incentive to use it over
anything else.

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bishnu
Twitter is chasing growth. They are not adding this feature because the
current user base demands it, they're adding it because they think they can
use it to bring more people in.

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zobzu
exactly :/ and its the kind of move you dont come back onto, argue upon for
the next 5 to 10 years which either result in:

\- twitter becomes another FB/tumblr/medium/whatever. shareholders happy,
money flows better, old twitter users gone.

\- twitter slowly dies while arguing it was a good choice and writing 10k
letters of excuses

Neither result interests me.

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randycupertino
"\- twitter becomes another FB/tumblr/medium/whatever."

It's it that already? How is it different/special? Seriously most of my
friends on twitter just reblog the same exact stuff they post on instagram and
facebook. They all seem analogous to me at this point.

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JBReefer
Twitter seems angrier and more prone to witchhunts than the others.
Gamergate/Justine Sacco/whatever seem like they're more likely to happen when
the boundary between chatting with friends and public statements is blurry.

I feel like Twitter is not going to make it because it feels very hostile to
_any_ beliefs. I'd bet that it will be seen as leading to
Instagram/Medium/Weibo/whatever, much the same way that the BBSs led us to HN.

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yggydrasily
"What if text was actually text?"

Imagine if you traveled back in time to the 90s and showed this to someone and
said this was coming from the CEO of two multi-billion dollar 21st century
companies.

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a_shane
I'm actually in the process of updating my quote template for my content
marketing services at the moment, and looking over it again it's basically a
bunch of gibberish and nonsense that wouldn't have made sense when I was
growing up. Weird.

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schnevets
Twitter wants to be Tumblr; They want to be an amalgamation of people's
content, including photos, surveys, tweets, posts, and anything else people
can come up with.

I would definitely use the service more if longer text posts were allowed, but
make sure you set them up as separate "entry" types. Tweets should be in large
font, while text should be smaller, and maybe a different background color
(and possibly filterable).

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krmmalik
Its interesting to see both responses to his tweet and the responses here.
Pretty much everyone seems dead set against the idea. Personally i'm cautious
about the implementation but im not against the idea. I post on FB far more
than any other platform. It's not because I have more friends there. In fact I
have more followers on twitter. Its simply because FB doesnt limit what I want
to say. I completely get that brevity is a huge advantage. Honestly I do, but
no matter how lean one is with one's words, there's only so much one can cram
in. It's the only reason I dont post more to twitter. Heck i broadcast more
out on Telegram than I do on twitter and i dont even have a large broadcast
list. Yes, these problems _can_ be solved with a blog but that introduces a
new problem of distribution. Its far easier to get a large number of people to
read your text on twitter than it is on a blog, even when you have a slick
platform such as Medium. There's just too much thinking involved in something
like that. A blog isn't something you write while you're jumping on the bus,
but an extended tweet is something you might. I know for a fact I'd tweet more
even if i had just a couple hundred more characters to play with. It doesnt
need to be a huge change. As i said. It all comes down to how they choose to
execute. This could potentially make or break twitter.

Edit: sp/grammar

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JustSomeNobody
Photographs of text are not searchable. Twitter needs your tweets in text so
that they can target ads at you and make money. If you want twitter to succeed
as a business, you'll support the increase in text length.

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ehudla
They should auto-create a blog for you, when you create a long message
(twitter.com/user/blog/), and only include the link to the blogpost in your
twitter stream.

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JustSomeNobody
Dear Twitter,

People hate change. They really do. So if you're going to make a change, do it
swiftly. Just yank that bandaid off. They'll get over it when the stinging
stops.

Yours,

Everyone not whining about this.

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ErikAugust
What are the business advantages? It has to make business sense, right?

Bigger ads? Trap people more in the ecosystem, less outbound links, maybe?

~~~
a_shane
All of the above, plus attracting new users.

Comparatively, Twitter doesn't have the same user base as Instagram, Facebook,
or WhatsApp, and I think that extending the character limit is a way of making
Twitter more accessible for first-time users.

It's also designed to bring more brands to Twitter. Right now it's extremely
difficult to promote your brand/business, include a photo, @ mention someone,
and include a hashtag. An extended character limit solves all of these
problems, making it a more attractive platform for advertising than ever
before.

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sigmar
Seems like a pretty strong suggestion that they will be increasing the
character limit (if only through a "show more" button).

Very telling that he used "if we decide to ship what we explore, WE'RE
[emphasis added] telling developers well in advance" instead of "we would tell
developers"

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jvehent
This should have been a blog post.

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steve-howard
I think it's more of a tongue-in-cheek self reference. "We've spent a lot of
time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking
screenshots of text and tweeting it." The spellcheck underline at the end was
probably not just carelessness, though I don't follow the whims of tech
royalty very carefully.

The fact that I had to tab back and forth to type up the quote drives his
point home for me.

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seliopou
Most photos of text on Twitter are not original content. They're either a
photo with no textual content (e.g., selfie), a photo of a twitter
conversation (used as a form of archiving in case of deletion), or a photo of
a physical text (used to quote a non-digital medium).

If tweet-storms are aesthetically compatible with Jack Dorsey's denim
collection, and a character limit isn't meant to replace them, then I don't
see how the expanded character limit is addressing an existing problem for
users. It's certainly not gonna replace textual photos.

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recursive
What definition of "original content" do selfies fail to meet?

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mydpy
Uh, what? Why would you address this almost a decade after launching? Why
would you call out people who post images to get around the limitation? Seems
like grasping for straws to me...

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mmatants
The reason to mention image posting is specifically to say that they want the
UX to be like a text _attachment_ rather than just a wall of text on someone's
feed. Which is a much smaller disruption to existing experience.

On that note, the fact that images are being used to show text content on
Twitter right now is laughingly unfair to folks who use a screen reader, given
how much we value HTML for its presentation flexibility.

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mydpy
Re: screen readers, this obsession with image and video on the web is
infuriating. All I want to do is consume text, especially for news. Why is
this so much to ask for?

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nhebb
They should tier it. 140 characters for a free account. 280 characters for a
cheap but paid ($) account. 1000 chars for a premium ($$$) account.

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soyiuz
Basically he is saying "we allowed pictures, but now people are taking
pictures of long texts, therefore we should lift the limit." The photos were a
mistake in the first place! The path for Twitter is now to become a Facebook
clone, without much differentiation (and with a smaller user base).

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test_account_
This is almost definitely _not_ going to actually allow tweets to be any
longer.

My bet is that it manifests as some kind of text attachment. Just as you're
currently able to attach images, video, and all sorts of random junk via
'cards', you'll now be able to attach a text post.

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jimmar
Most of the time when I see a tweet, it's when somebody takes a screenshot and
posts it in a news article. It's been years since I've logged into twitter.com
to sift through garbage looking for anything useful.

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zobzu
truth is, except for this single tweet, i just skip images-as-text. they're
the minority. with the new twitter, making this a real thing, i suspect the
amount of large messages will be enough that...i will skip twitter?

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lazyant
I don't undestand since you can insert pictures people use them to post long
posts so what's the point of having limited number of characters? EDIT: or you
can post a link to somewhere

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mandeepj
Did you even cared to visit the story link?

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lazyant
yes, saying pretty much the same I'm saying

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Alupis
It's kind of ironic Jack Dorsey used an image of text (containing several
paragraphs) to explain why the 140 character limit is a "good" thing for
Twitter.

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onewaystreet
It's not ironic, it's his point. The same people complaining about having more
characters have been using images of text to get around the 140 character
limit. Their complaining doesn't make sense.

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dublinben
>The same people complaining about having more characters have been using
images of text to get around the 140 character limit.

Are they? This claim seems highly unlikely. Do you know of any specific
critics of this new policy who have posted such images?

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hendzen
I guess Dorsey will finally get his revenge on Evan Williams.

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randycupertino
I'm out of the loop, can you fill me in? Did they have a falling out?

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soyiuz
Is there room for a constrained text-only Twitter clone?

