
Tweeting Made Easier - coloneltcb
https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/tweetingmadeeasier.html
======
squeaky-clean
> Historically, 9% of Tweets in English hit the character limit.

More like 9% of posted tweets hit the character limit. I bet a much higher
number hits above the character limit and then are trimmed down to fit. It
doesn't sound like they consider that, and so it leads to it seeming like only
a small number of tweets are limited by 140 characters when I'm sure a muuuch
larger number of tweets could benefit from using "you" instead of "u" and
such.

~~~
jimktrains2
Or just broken into 2+ tweets.

~~~
mortenjorck
Or broken into 10, 20, or more tweets.

Which, to me, is the disappointing thing about the new character limit: it
does nothing to address this emerging usage pattern, one might even say
emerging form of communication, of the tweetstorm.

It seems pretty clear that tweetstorms enable a certain mode of marshaling
thoughts and communicating them in an off-the-cuff way that blogging services
never identified or understood. And yet Twitter's product org doesn’t seem to
understand it either.

~~~
microcolonel
Maybe something intermediate could be done, but I think the tweetstorm format
allows for interjections at fixed intervals, which can be helpful.

~~~
viraptor
Didn't really think of this before, but yes - this is very useful and it would
be a shame to lose this feature.

~~~
mortenjorck
That’s part of the missed opportunity I see: far from losing this ability, a
proper tweetstorm feature should embrace it, making it easier to navigate and
interact with.

~~~
visarga
> easier to navigate and interact with

On the contrary, it's harder to navigate because it is intermingled with all
sorts of boxes, whitespace, tags, icons and hidden menus. Everything is hair-
triggered by a touch making the whole page unstable. Tweetstorms fork into
secondary threads that are hard to follow, unlike HN or reddit, and use 3
screens for content that fits on half a screen.

~~~
digi_owl
For some reason Twitter had decided to attempt to make their page behave like
a UI rather than a forum or similar.

Thus we only get a single linear reading, and it wastes space by being
presented as a floating "windows" above the main page.

Never mind that it is damn hard to see the full image, as no amount of
clicking will actually make it fill the whole screen. Only bringing up the
tweet "window" and then right clicking the image gets anywhere close.

~~~
rainbowmverse
At least they stopped requiring 100% of my processor to display them like when
they first switched to the floating, easy to accidentally dismiss boxes.

------
CM30
Okay, I'm gonna be honest here:

Am I the only one who doesn't get all the complaints about an expanded
character limit?

Cause at the end of the day, many Twitter alternatives have far more than 140
characters available for posts. Mastodon has 500 by default, Gab has 300
characters and App.net allowed 256 characters per post before it closed down.

Absolutely none of those sites or services has been worse off thanks to the
higher character limit, nor has it hurt the microblogging feel in general.

So why are people so stressed out over Twitter having a higher amount now?

~~~
richdougherty
I personally like the way Twitter encourages brevity. I think the constraint
of 140 characters leads to more thoughtful, creative expression. So it's
really an aesthetic thing for me.

But I don't have an argument with people who want more. Having more characters
will making tweeting easier and more practical.

It's really a decision for Twitter to make - do they prioritise aesthetics or
utility?

~~~
wpietri
Yeah, I'm a big fan of the brevity. For me who I follow is about breadth, and
the longer people's tweets are, the fewer I can follow. I also think a lot of
the >140 tweets I see could easily be written in 140 if the writer worked a
little harder. As this edit of Jack's first 280-character tweet conveys well:
[https://twitter.com/caitlin__kelly/status/912795950476857344...](https://twitter.com/caitlin__kelly/status/912795950476857344/photo/1)

~~~
aaron-lebo
It's a love/hate thing. I see your edit and it looks like arbitrary whittling
down of the original which was already fine, if not superior.

~~~
wpietri
I see you're not much of a Twitter user, so I can see how you might not be
sensitive to the difference. But for me, the 140 character limit has been a
great source of writing discipline, getting me to squeeze a point to its
essence. If the 280-character version is only arguably better than the
140-character one, then it's circa half as efficient, both in terms of
character count and the reader's time. Jack's post was sloppy writing.

And that's really my beef with this change. Twitter is seeking something easy
to measure -- engagement of marginal writers -- but willing to sacrifice
things that are harder to measure, like reader burden and tweet quality.

Worse, this still won't solve the "need to post more text" problem; you can
find a zillion historical examples of people needing more than 280 characters.
Thus the unique institution of a tweetstorm, where people had to distill their
thinking into a linked set of short, punchy sentences. Thus the less appealing
practice of posting an image of text. Thus people being inspired to write
longer posts elsewhere and then respond with a well-phrased tweet and a link.
I think Twitter would have been far better served to offer text attachments
equivalent to image attachments, basically adding a real blogging feature to
their existing microblogging platform.

------
PhilipA
They are a public traded company, and for us casual users of Twitter the only
change that has been in the talk the last couple of years has been to increase
the character limit. What other companies can have this little improvement
over the time, and still be a public traded company on Nasdaq? (I acknowledge
that they might improve internal & marketing tools, but nothing us users sees)

~~~
ballenf
Comcast and other cable ISPs? They’ve increased their speeds to some but also
my price has more than doubled.

In retail, Walmart, Target and most mainstream supermarkets have changed very
little.

I think you mean to ask what tech company startup has ever remained relevant
for so long without change, maybe?

~~~
jaymzcampbell
I think I know what you are getting at with supermarkets, but with Walmart in
particular, they have been going quite heavy into serious tech, and all in-
house lately [1], [2].

Not to disagree with you, was more an interesting thing of note for me. I
didn't really picture Walmart doing this sort of stuff outside a huge IBM or
Oracle contract. Retailers of that scale have all sorts of potential
improvements to make from the growth of technology from online to mobile to
IoT (maybe) to big data analytics on purchase/loyalty schemes.

[1]: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/walmart-relies-on-
openstack/](http://www.zdnet.com/article/walmart-relies-on-openstack/)

[2]: [http://fortune.com/2017/08/30/walmart-cloud-
nvidia/](http://fortune.com/2017/08/30/walmart-cloud-nvidia/)

------
saurik
> But importantly, people Tweeted below 140 most of the time and the brevity
> of Twitter remained.

This has been the argument from an insanely large number of people for years,
and it frankly isn't difficult to test. Even in mediums that have _no_
character limit, the vast majority of users do not send insanely long
messages, and if there is any mechanism at all to encourage short messages
with a fallback to longer ones (such as hiding content behind "read more", or
making short messages much larger and more visible: Facebook now does both),
then people are even more stingy. I just scrolled through my Facebook feed and
paid attention and virtually all of the posts I saw were extremely short (I
think even all less than 140 characters excepting two or three). It just seen
someone incompetent that it took Twitter this long to figure this out: this
isn't shocking data.

~~~
notahacker
Add in the fact that anyone who has ever used Twitter knows that anything
which takes a lot of characters to convey either (i) gets abbreviated in a
confusing manner (ii) tweet threaded which is a far less user-friendly way of
using 280 chars anyway or (iii) a special embedded text image, which again is
far from user-friendly when it's just a workaround.

~~~
duskwuff
> a special embedded text image, which again is far from user-friendly when
> it's just a workaround.

Or, my personal favorite: an embedded image of the Twitter compose dialog with
the over-length tweet in it.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
Or, my personal favorite of BASE65536 encoded gzipped text.

------
microcolonel
The new indicator design sucks, they should just use the old one and change
the number to 280. I want to be able to see the exact number of remaining
characters I have at a glance, this is not possible with a tiny little
circular indicator.

~~~
rcraft
To be fair, once you hit 260 characters, it starts counting down, showing you
that you have 20 characters left.

I like the circle. It puts less emphasis on number of characters you are
using, so perhaps people won't be as motivated to use up all 280.

------
digi_owl
What is sad about all this is that Twitter got its start as a sms relay, and
sms has long had a system for stitching multiple messages into a singular long
one. But rather than adapt that system early, Twitter now insist on dreaming
up their own...

~~~
brlewis
Sad, or fortuitous? I don't think even the founders realized this was a
feature, not a bug. Big media loves Twitter because it forces everything into
sound bites. Twitter would not have taken off having the same functionality as
everything else.

------
phr4ts
What if Twitter made character limits a level game - just like HN voting
Karma?

Level 1 users get 140 chars. Level 2 - 160 chars, 3...

~~~
ryanx435
So my feed would be filled with extra long tweets from bots and people who
have nothing better to do but tweet all day to level up, and people who only
tweet when they have something important to say would be limited to 140 .

Hmmmmmmm

------
jes5199
I can't quite explain it, but this change has given me conscious access to a
feeling about Twitter-the-product that I only had at a subconscious level
before now: complete, overwhelming, extraordinary rage.

------
r721
>Highlights are below and in our additional blogs about our experimentation
process, extensive data analysis, research, and design work.

Don't miss those:

[https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2017/Experimenting-
To-Solve-Cramming.html)

[https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2017/Our-
Discovery-of-Cramming.html)

[https://medium.com/twitter-design-research/looking-after-
num...](https://medium.com/twitter-design-research/looking-after-number-one-
forty-20da627e1f2e)

------
lyonlim
Curious how Twitter detects when it's Chinese or Japanese to restrict the
length to 140 chars. What if it's a tweet that starts with English, then
includes Chinese characters? Is that what the progress indicator is for, to
let Twitter detect the language?

~~~
darkengine
They've made CJK characters (including fullwidth characters of any kind,
without exception for Latin letters or Arabic numerals) count as 2 characters.
In a mixed alphanumeric/CJK tweet, the CJK part will simply count doubly
towards your character limit.

~~~
kurthr
Interesting... of course 70 characters of Mandarin would be the equivalent of
over 400 characters of English. I suppose that plus goog-Translate would be
another even less readable way to avoid the limit... since Chinese language
speakers by and large just use WeChat.

------
Illniyar
It's interesting to look at it from a different angle. It took them years with
a planned deployment of several weeks to increase the character limit.

In a small or even medium sized startup, this kind of decision will be a
single product manager's decision and most likely be implemented in a day or
two at most.

This kind of rigidness, bureaucracy and slowness is what makes big companies
play catchup with small startups.And Twitter is at the top percentages of
technologically competent, modern companies - imagine such a change in banks,
or chain stores.

~~~
FanaHOVA
This has nothing to do with bureaucracy, this has to do with making sure the
changes don't ruin the feel of your product and alienates your power users.
It's not like they decided a year ago and then had to wait 6 months for
somebody to sign a piece of paper.

~~~
Illniyar
No, but I'm guessing there were many meetings, committees, getting approval
from the top, etc... involved. That is still bureaucracy.

------
agumonkey
Surely 280 chars is better to extract data for twitter to get revenus.

~~~
wongarsu
Fewer creative abbreviations will certainly make natural language processing a
lot easier.

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drtse4
I've never seen a company put out so many announcements for a feature that if
you think about it, from the point of view of what it offers, it's really a
minimal change.

------
no_gravity
To see how the 280 char limit feels, I tried to compose a tweet with the full
280 chars. Piping it through wc tells me it's actually 295 chars:

[https://twitter.com/marek_gibney/status/928184393755250688](https://twitter.com/marek_gibney/status/928184393755250688)

Maybe some chars or chars in links count for less then 1?

~~~
jakub_g
My empirical test shows that links are treated as if they had a fixed length
of 23 characters (even if they are shorter or much longer)

~~~
zimpenfish
No need for an empirical test - they have an endpoint that tells you.

[https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/developer-
utilities/co...](https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/developer-
utilities/configuration/api-reference/get-help-configuration)

(via
[https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/tco](https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/tco))

------
phil248
In the end, I'll just always be impressed by how Twitter got billionaire
aristocrats and elder statesmen to use the number 2 to me the words to, too
and two.

Other than that, all the character limit did was make reading and writing more
difficult. That's the opposite goal of all language education and should be
considered a borderline crime against humanity.

------
joelrunyon
Does "tweeting" need to be made easier?

I realize that they want their "userbase" to grow, but users has never seemed
the right way to measure twitter. Tons of people read tweets, etc on news
sites without having an account.

Seems like there are a lot of other things they can do besides "making
tweeting easier" to improve twitter.

~~~
ProAm
When a company has been so stagnant with innovation, sometimes you just have
to do something/anything to stay on the radar and remain technically relevant.

~~~
wongarsu
Twitter could stop development today and they would stay relevant for years to
come. Tweets don't get quoted in the news because of some great innovation,
but because the basic idea and implementation is solid enough and has Twitter
has a massive network effect.

The bigger reason why they want to be seen as improving and innovating is
likely to keep shareholders happy. From a profit standpoint the company is a
lot less solid, leaving ample reason to play with perception.

~~~
ProAm
Twitter would be profitable tomorrow if they laid off half the employees. The
company is so bloated for product they deliver. It should be a money printing
machine.

------
Touche
From a business perspective doesn't more characters = fewer tweets visible in
the viewport = ads are less seen?

~~~
tedmiston
Great counterpoint below:

> Surely 280 chars is better to extract data for twitter to get revenus.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15649155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15649155)

------
cptwunderlich
How to lie with graphs. It looks like a majority of the tweets hit the limit,
yet the text clearly states only 9% of English tweets hit the limit. If you'd
zoom out, it simply wouldn't look like a problem (which I don't think it is).

------
armandososa
I don't if this ui change was previous to the new character limit, but the
Tweet editor on the web now has a progress indicator instead of displaying the
number of characters left. I found that interesting.

~~~
Gaelan
Parallel. Probably has to do with the different handling of different
charsets, and therefore not being able to give a simple "N more codepoints"

------
mekazu
Many of the comments made here are < 140 chars. Others are more.

------
spiderfarmer
It’s the first “product” blogpost since March, where they changed the default
avatar. What have they been doing in the meantime?

~~~
moomin
I can think of two things the entire company has done that stick in my mind:

* Ban Rose McGowan. * Changed the T&Cs so that famous people can threaten to murder people.

~~~
test1235
local paper-famous, or Jesus-famous?

~~~
moomin
The T&Cs aren't clear. They merely say that the rules have an exception for
things that are 'newsworthy'. You'll appreciate this is a loophole so wide you
could drive a bus through it.

------
ForFreedom
So it lightens the load on their servers with less number of tweets.

------
mark212
This is a horribly written announcement. The headline should be "Limit on
Tweets is Now 280 Characters for Most Languages," or something equally pithy
and the first sentence should be a short restatement of that.

Then -- and only then -- go into the details of the test and how this
(probably) won't lead to loquacious tweeting etc etc. But my God. I had to
read it three times to figure out what this post was supposed to be
announcing.

~~~
tyrust
>This is a horribly written announcement.

Because it's not an announcement. The first sentence of the post links to the
announcement:
[https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/...](https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/Giving-
you-more-characters-to-express-yourself.html)

~~~
mortenjorck
That’s the initial announcement of the test back in September, not the
announcement that they’re making the change permanent and rolling it out to
all users, which is indeed the buried lede at the end of the first paragraph
of today's “Tweeting Made Easier” post.

~~~
tyrust
I wouldn't call a fact in the first paragraph a "buried lede".

------
jijji
if you can post without having your message ghosted

