
Giving you more characters - coloneltcb
https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/Giving-you-more-characters-to-express-yourself.html
======
ppod

      In an effort to get people to look 
      into each other’s eyes more, 
      and also to appease the mutes, 
      the government has decided 
      to allot each person exactly one hundred   
      and sixty-seven words, per day. 
      
      When the phone rings, I put it to my ear   
      without saying hello. In the restaurant   
      I point at chicken noodle soup. 
      I am adjusting well to the new way. 
    
      Late at night, I call my long distance lover,   
      proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.   
      I saved the rest for you. 
    
      When she doesn’t respond, 
      I know she’s used up all her words,   
      so I slowly whisper I love you 
      thirty-two and a third times. 
      After that, we just sit on the line   
      and listen to each other breathe.
      
      The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel

~~~
bostonpete
I was disappointed to find this poem didn't have exactly one hundred and
sixty-seven words.

~~~
OscarCunningham
It's kind of weird that it doesn't. You could so easily change the "sixty-
seven" to "twenty-five".

~~~
gegtik
he used 97 words to say "I love you" 32.333 times, you're taking away 42, so
he would also have to say "I love you" eighteen and a third times

~~~
ubersync
But then, the poem will be 124 words (by changing "thirty two" to "eighteen"),
so we will have to change 125 to 124. Then, he will be able to say "I love
you" an exactly 18 times. So now we are 3 words shorter (by removing "and a
third"). So it comes 121. With 121 words, he will be able to say "I love you"
exactly 17 times. So, there you go. Change "one sixty seven" to "one twenty
one", and "thirty two and a third times" to "seventeen times".

~~~
cup-of-tea
It's actually "thirty-two" which, by the rules established in the poem, counts
as one word only. It works with 125 words by chance. The author missed an
opportunity for a neat hack.

------
jsnathan
I'm not sure what to make of this.

I suppose there is nothing inherently ideal about the (arbitrary) 140
character limit on tweets. Why not 180, or 280, etc?

Still, my first reaction was, this is .. a bad idea: the 140-character limit
is iconic, it's at the core of their value proposition, and Twitter is going
to dilute their brand if they abandon it.

I think it's not only that people sometimes feel limited by the 140 characters
that matters, it's also all the other times when people don't feel social
pressure to write up longer, perhaps more thoughtful messages, that's
important here.

~~~
glenstein
I agree with you that the 140 is iconic and it's probably not a good idea to
abandon it. What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution
to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media,
treating it the same as video and pictures.

That way you don't lose the iconic 140 characters thing, and you don't have
any problem to solve by making weird compromises where the user names or media
URLs don't count toward the 140, blurring the lines of what 140 means and
losing the "creativity loves constraints" factor.

~~~
macspoofing
> What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this
> all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media,
> treating it the same as video and pictures.

How is that elegant?

~~~
was_boring
People often using the word "elegant" when they actually mean "my preferred."

It helps give credence to the solution.

~~~
xori
It's hell'a more elegant than [https://twithelper.com/long-text-to-image-
converter](https://twithelper.com/long-text-to-image-converter)

------
mintplant
Mastodon [0] has a default character limit of 500, which individual instances
can turn up or down as they see fit (Mastodon is a federated network).
Hundreds of thousands of people use it and the social dynamics work just fine,
or even better, with the additional breathing room for expression. To me
Twitter's attachment to such a low cap feels like an anachronism.

[0] [https://joinmastodon.org](https://joinmastodon.org)

~~~
orthecreedence
I really wanted to like Mastodon, but their "default" instance is just too
restrictive on speech. It's basically a tumblrina safe space network. I'm
saying this as a mostly-liberal, not your average OMG LIBTARDS ARE SNOWFLAKES
person.

If a social network, even a federated one, wants to gain traction, it needs to
be a bit more open. Yeah, nazis are obnoxious assholes, but I'd rather have a
network with them on it (and just ignore them) than have to constantly worry
"am I saying the 'wrong thing'??" each time I post something.

I mean, the whole point of distribution seems to be that you can say what you
want and it can't get shut down. Mastodon's ideals are at odds with its goals,
IMO.

~~~
rakoo
Then you don't understand what distribution means. If you want to use mastodon
you don't have to go to the main instance, you can go to another instance that
allows what you want. Theresr httsp://instances.social to help you with that.
Here's the result:

[https://instances.social/list#lang=en&allowed=racism,hateSpe...](https://instances.social/list#lang=en&allowed=racism,hateSpeeches,harrassment&prohibited=&users=10000)

And if you really don't find an instance to your liking here, that means you
should open one that is moderated exactly the way you want.

~~~
kakarot
The issue with such "free speech" instances not being the norm is that the
instances which do allow "hate speech" are going to be clustered with unsavory
individuals.

If toleration is not encouraged at the core, it is a useless service because I
don't want to spend my time in a safe-zone where I have to preface anything I
say with "I don't mean to offend, but I think..." any more than I want to hang
out with a group of half fascists.

~~~
egypturnash
You could try not having half the things that come out of your mouth be easily
construed as offensive, I guess? Seriously, I'm on mastodon.social and I've
never once felt a need to preface anything like that.

~~~
kakarot
_You could try not having half the things that come out of your mouth be
easily construed as offensive, I guess?_

Who is the gatekeeper for what is offensive and what is not? Why would you
even accuse a stranger of having half the things coming out of their mouth
being offensive?

If you haven't experienced the vitriolic "safe-space" syndrome present in
modern heavily-moderated social networks, give it time and you certainly will.
When, for example, I get reported and called a "future rapist" by a gang of
radical feminists for stating that there should be legal consequences for
false reports of rape / domestic violence, then there is a problem.

It was such occurrences that ultimately led to me leaving all social networks
in the first place. The moderation is too heavy-handed and skewed in the
direction of political correctedness to the point where if you disagree with
someone you are labeled a nazi and silenced / blocked. It's a sad state of
affairs.

~~~
egypturnash
I've been on Twitter for like a decade now and I've never had any problems
with this "vitriolic safe-space syndrome".

I am also a trans lady so I dunno maybe you think I'm part of the problem.

------
c3534l
It would seem to me that the solution to the problem described in the blog
would be to reduce the number of characters allowed for Japanese, Korean, and
Chinese users. The whole appeal of twitter, I thought, was if you said what
you wanted to say the system forced you to reconsider how you said it until
you got down to the bare essence of what you were trying to convey. I'd be in
favor of a maximum number of tweets per day, too.

~~~
482794793792894
Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's 140
character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint. The limit for
Asian languages should have been adjusted downwards as early as Twitter
launched (though I suppose that's actually somewhat hard to do from a
technological viewpoint, as people might mix Western letters and Asian
symbols).

And then they point out that in Asian countries people tweet more, so alright,
who cares about history, do what works best. But you shouldn't just be looking
at how many tweets are written. People are going to post more, just because
it's easier to post something. That doesn't mean that people actually read
these longer tweets just as much. Like, there is a feedback loop here, people
would also start to tweet less, if they didn't bother reading tweets, because
many tweets are also responses to other tweets, but still, this reasoning
seems quite a bit oversimplified.

~~~
bogomipz
>"Yeah, this reasoning especially also struck me as weird, because Twitter's
140 character limit was chosen from an English-speaking viewpoint."

I don't believe this is correct but rather 140 characters limit was chosen
because SMS will break a message greater than 160 characters into two
messages. 140 characters leaves 20 characters for a username.

~~~
e12e
Well, it's correct in that 160 characters was chosen from a German (I presume,
possibly English/"European") viewpoint, for sms...:

[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-
text-messaging.html)

~~~
bogomipz
I've heard this story before and I think it might be apocryphal. Usually that
same LA Times piece is cited as well.

More likely is that 160 characters was what the GSM signaling channel
comfortably allowed, essentially making it free.

Its still this way today - SMS uses an out of band signaling channel and cell
phone companies charge you as data.

------
SquareWheel
Lots of cynicism around here. For me, the 140 character limit really was very
frustrating. I tweet rarely, but when I do I often spend 2-3 minutes trying to
fit the message into the character limit. Often I just abandon it completely
because there's no way to make it fit without having to send multiple
messages.

This change seems completely reasonable to me, if not a bit delayed.

~~~
onion2k
Making people stop and think, and sometimes abandon what they were going to
say, is a _really_ good aspect of Twitter.

~~~
rconti
Doesn't seem to be working, does it? I'm a fairly verbose person and nothing I
ever want to say fits in 140 characters. And the stuff I see on twitter that
DOES fit into 140, well, I'm typically better off not reading it. (222
characters)

~~~
rollinDyno
Doesn't seem to be working. I'm fairly verbose, nothing I ever want to say
fits in 140 characters. I'm better off not reading what DOES fit. (140)

~~~
SquareWheel
This version reads to me as almost irritated, as if you're ranting about
something.

This might be a situation I'd abandon the post completely because there's no
way to communicate my post in the proper tone and context.

~~~
rconti
To be fair, I WAS ranting :)

------
pg_bot
I'm convinced there is no one at twitter that understands why they succeeded
as a company. Their management team continually makes decisions that are
reminiscent of shuffling around deck chairs on the titanic. I get the feeling
that they only exist due to inertia which is a death sentence for most tech
companies.

~~~
tootie
No one in silicon valley will say the reason, but it's blindingly obvious. It
was dumb luck. Luck plays a part in every success and failure and Twitter was
about 98% luck. There was and is no vision or strategy that explains this. No
lessons to learn. Pure zeitgeist that is bound to crumble sometime after Trump
leaves office.

~~~
glenstein
I think it was a convergence of luck, the solving of a specific problem that
was relevant at the time (sms messages), well timed celebrity adoption (Shaq
was an early twitter user) and the idiosyncratic constraint of 140 characters
which distinguished the platform from alternatives and contributed to a unique
feel.

It's large part luck, but the particular features play a role, too.

------
WillPostForFood
Early evidence that it is a mistake:

 _OH HOLY SHIT. I figured out what we should do with the new 140 characters.

´•._.•´¯`•._.•´Forum Signatures Are Back Baby`•._.•´¯`•.¸¸.•´_

[https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/912793201592999936](https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/912793201592999936)

~~~
a_t48
Oh nononononono.

------
agumonkey
Reading the 280 test page feels odd. It kills the instantaneous feel of
140chars. The 280 ones feel like engaging a different part of your brain.

I think they should try to allow easier creation and reading of "thread" (when
one user starts a long stream, while keeping the 140 char base.

~~~
notatoad
apparently they're working on a built-in threading tool:
[https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-
button/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-button/)

------
slg
It is clear that people want to use Twitter to say things longer than 140
characters as the rise in popularity of long threaded Tweets would attest. It
is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their iconic
140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform.

~~~
hk__2
> It is just strange that Twitter would seemingly prefer to abandon their
> iconic 140 limit over making threading a native function of their platform.

They don’t: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-
button/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/tweetstorm-button/)

~~~
slg
One of those options was announced publicly with an official blog post and one
of them was slipped into an app unannounced likely as part of a/b testing.
Maybe they eventually implement both, but at this moment their preference
between the two is clear.

~~~
hk__2
> One of those options was announced publicly with an official blog post and
> one of them was slipped into an app unannounced likely as part of a/b
> testing.

Both of them are currently being tested on a limited group of users; but
that’s true only one got a blog post.

------
kibwen
In the very early days of Gmail (2005-ish) they had a constantly-increasing
ticker on the front page showing you how many bytes of storage your account
had access to. In my head I'm imagining such a ticker on Twitter's home page
as well, but ticking up to show you how many characters your tweets can be.
Given their current rate, the ticker would be incrementing at 0.00000037
characters per second. This way we'd have access to 281 characters by next
month!

------
madeofpalk
Twitter seems to have the worst luck/timing when it comes to 'new features'.
Last time it was

    
    
        Users: Please help get rid of these nazis
        Twitter: ROUND PROFILE PICS!
    

this time its

    
    
        Users: Please help prevent nuclear war
        Twitter: HOW ABOUT LONGER TWEETS!

~~~
coldtea
Because otherwise the role of Twitter is thwarting nazis and preventing
nuclear war?

~~~
freedomben
Sadly, these days it seems that the tech companies have become the content
police :sigh:

The only thing worse is that there are people crying out for it.

~~~
madeofpalk
They're not tech companies though any more. They're content companies.

------
auvi
Peter Theil once said "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters".
Looks like that 140 characters limit have now doubled.

~~~
tzakrajs
Peter Theil says lots of things.

~~~
notfromhere
many of them very dumb

~~~
marricks
I'd describe them more a insidiously evil.

~~~
cisanti
?

------
nafey
That's a bold move by Twitter. I can't help but feel it is out of desperation

~~~
sgk284
Ex-twitter eng here. Twitter has been debating this change internally for at
least 5 years now. They were afraid to pull the trigger because no one inside
knows why they've had the success that they've had and they're afraid to
change too much (lest they pull a Digg).

This move isn't made out of desperation, but it's probably being done right
now because they've nothing to lose by randomly trying things.

~~~
jochung
Isn't it obvious? Twitter is a dopamine pump combined with a misunderstanding
machine that has gamified the cult of personality.

Familiar readers feel a reward for their constant interpretive skimming of
aborted thoughts, outsiders project the worst kind of interpretation to feel
superior, as it automatically turns everything you post into a shareable post
card with your face on it.

~~~
slouch
Twitter lover, here. My feed contains hardly anyone I've met IRL and is mostly
a cable TV replacement and RSS reader supplement.

------
aarestad
All of Twitter has immediately gone for the "I would rather have no Nazis"
joke.

~~~
covercash
Is it a joke?

~~~
aarestad
In the "ha ha only serious" vein, I suppose.

------
pornel
This doesn't solve the main pain points with length (megathreads and
screenshots for quotes), but harms brevity that made Twitter varied and quick
to read.

People post huge "threads", which are a UI mess, and are much much longer than
280 chars. So now instead of "[1/15] Thread…" we'll have "[1/7] Thread…"
rants. And people post screenshots of articles which again are longer than 280
chars.

Twitter used to float idea of 10K limit:
[https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/140-to-10k/](https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/140-to-10k/)
A 10K char "attachment" to a tweet would have allowed people to stuff their
megathreads and articles there.

------
trjordan
Good.

Twitter needs to keep moving forward. There have been several features that
feel like the core of their platform, but based on their revenue growth, they
may be holding them back. Personally, eh, 280-length tweets feel weird and
long and I don't see the need, but I'll probably get over it. If they can
change how Twitter is used open up new audiences and conversations, this is
good.

They are trying something big, and that is Good.

~~~
yssrn
The character limit is a core aspect of what makes consuming content on
Twitter so engaging vs. other platforms.

Will this change improve engagement number or ad revenue? I sincerely doubt
it.

An actual useful change would be versioning functionality so that users can
edit tweets to correct typos or factual errors while not erasing the record.

~~~
riffic
Twitter will not implement the ability to edit tweets. tweet text being
immutable is one of their data model core tenets:

[https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-
of-...](https://www.quora.com/When-will-Twitter-offer-the-option-of-editing-a-
tweet-after-being-posted-to-the-timeline/answer/Raffi-Krikorian?srid=uMEx)

------
saghm
Have they gone into any detail about how exactly they're going to enforce
different limits for different languages? If it's by the localization of your
browser/app, what's stopping someone from changing their language to English
and then typing 280 Japanese characters? If it's by doing some sort of
language recognition on the tweet, how will it deal with mixed content?

~~~
dannyw
They could do something like this:

280 character limit.

1 Japanese character counts as 2 characters.

If you have the Japanese locale, the limit is still visually displayed at 140,
and your displayed count is halved (and rounded down).

~~~
saghm
Is punctuation or whitespace commonly used in Japanese tweets? If so, that
seems like it would make the limit somewhat variable

------
Illniyar
Sometimes, things that look obvious and simple require a lot of work and
research to build so that it will fit the product and won't damage the
community and momentum.

This isn't one of those times. Seriously, what in the world took so long.

~~~
partiallypro
I wish it would take longer, because frankly it's a dumb idea. It defeats the
purpose of Twitter.

~~~
subroutine
It’s also dumb when I have to read 3 tweets in a sequence by the same person
trying to get a single point across, each one with a different set of
comments, likes, and retweets.

Im not sure this will fix it though, maybe it will help. I feel like the same
could be accomplished with an expando at whatever limit they set. That way
when I browse twitter the tweet boxes are still the same size as originally,
and if i want to read more I can tap the expand box button.

~~~
partiallypro
They could fix this by fixing how they thread tweets. Currently they thread
tweets, but it's grouped in a weird way and sometimes someone that isn't the
person that threaded them is in the middle of the thread. Also, instead of
making people manually put (1/x) they could just create a counter and put them
in sequential order treating any time the author only replies to themselves
(which is how you thread) as the thread, but any reply to someone not
themselves as outside of the thread. I'm sure that's complex, but I believe it
could be done with some logic.

------
ak39
Can someone explain this:

"But in English, a much higher percentage of Tweets have 140 characters (9%).
Most Japanese Tweets are 15 characters while most English Tweets are 34"

Why is 34 characters considered most tweets when the chart shows 140
characters higher than "34"? As labeled, the hump is lower than spike at 140
characters.

What am I missing?

Edit: Is the author saying the mode is 34?

~~~
rovek
This confused me as well. The chart leaves much to be desired if the quote is
accurate.

------
Zarel
Everyone is criticizing this decision, but I think it's useful to point out
that I've heard a lot of users say that Japanese Twitter has significantly
fewer misunderstandings and toxicity and is a generally friendlier place than
English Twitter.

This might be a lot of the reason Twitter is trying this out.

~~~
Geee
I bet it's just Japanese culture itself, not Japanese Twitter.

------
coloneltcb
worth noting that the 160 char limit on SMS was a product of thoughtful
design, and user-centric deliberation, not arbitrary:
[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-
text-messaging.html)

I wish Twitter had the same commitment. Or at least hired product people who
used the service.

~~~
eridius
The 160 character limit was a balance between "limit should be as low as
possible for bandwidth reasons" and "users must be able to express simple
messages". The former isn't an issue anymore, so there's not longer any
obvious reason why 160 should be the limit.

------
joelrunyon
We don't need 140 characters. They could solve this a dozen other ways
including:

* Not counting links as characters.

* Not including images as characters.

* Improving tweet-storm capabilities.

* Improve threading + response mechanisms.

This is the easiest + worst improvement they could do. I hope it's not
permanent.

~~~
ebola1717
* Links are 20 characters, flat (could be less, but users would spam 100+ links).

* Images aren't counted (unless they come from links).

* @handles were moved out of the text for replies.

* Threads have improved a lot over the past year.

* Thread composer is apparently on it's way.

~~~
joelrunyon
Just don't follow spam accounts? Not that hard...

------
orf
[https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=tweet_length&type...](https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=tweet_length&type=Code)

~~~
legostormtroopr
I wanna make a PR bot that just changes every instance 140 to 280 for every
repo that has the word Tweet on Github.

------
JamesBaxter
Presumably there are going to be a lot of broken 3rd party plugins on people’s
sites(design wise at a minimum). Should there have been more of a warning
period?

~~~
gruez
>Presumably there are going to be a lot of broken 3rd party plugins on
people’s sites

even worse, buffer overflows

------
anonfunction
> We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on
> Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer
> limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all
> except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).

If the only justification they had was that three languages can convey more
information than the rest why not reduce the characters for the three
"cramming" languages?

~~~
kumarvvr
Well, their idea is to increase the amount of communication _per tweet_.

------
mrb
A few years ago I suggested Twitter should roll out an optional $1-per-month
plan to let users tweet 280 characters.¹ If 10% of their MAU sign up, this
would up their revenue by 17% (extra $400M yearly.)

¹ [http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-
month...](http://blog.zorinaq.com/revenue-idea-for-twitter-1-per-month-to-
raise-the-limit-to-280-c/)

~~~
brianwawok
You do realize the credit card processing fee on a $1 purchase is ~$0.40?

~~~
mrb
Batch the monthly payments into one $12 yearly payment.

------
iagooar
I like it. Will reduce the amount of 1 out of X tweets from the same person.
It will allow tweets to become quite a bit more expressive, without becoming
Facebook-like novels. And hey, when Twitter doesn't try new stuff, people
complain. When Twitter does, they complain as well.

PS: This post would perfectly fit in a next-gen tweet ;)

~~~
ramshorns
Your PS is a statement whose existence makes itself false. Kind of like "This
page intentionally left blank."

------
xenadu02
Japanese/Chinese only “fit” in 140 because of the way they count “characters”.

280 for alphabetic languages seems roughly equivalent.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
A Chinese character is much more dense than two roman letters. When I was
texting in china during the SMS phase, I got around 16 or maybe 20 characters
before it was broken into extra messages.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
…huh? It should be able to fit 70 characters (70 UCS-2 characters is 140
bytes, which is the SMS message limit).

~~~
seanmcdirmid
No way. Maybe someone Chinese knows the limit better, but I definitely
couldn't send a 70 character message without it having been broken up into 3
or 4 texts.

------
scotchio
My only concern is I really appreciate zero fluff when browsing whatever.

I imagine this will be abused a little bit. Not a big deal since there's
images, gifs, video, and polls to grab your eye. Just slightly annoying.

For example:

```

BREAKING

BREAKING

BREAKING

BREAKING

BREAKING

BREAKING

Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet Consectetur Adipisicing Elit Sed Do Eiusmod Temp -
[http://example.com](http://example.com)

```

------
DonHopkins
This is as earth shattering as when Macromedia Director went from 24 layers to
48 layers!!!

Yet Director still didn't have enough layers to make an animated map of all 50
United States of America (or a car insurance turkey with 50 clickable tail
feathers). So we got Flash!

------
nradov
And in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so
on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images containing
large blocks of text which is worse for everyone than just removing length
limits.

~~~
hk__2
> And in a few more years they'll increase the limit to 560 characters, and so
> on. Users will just continue to bypass any limit by tweeting images
> containing large blocks of text

The blog post explains how that’s not true with their Japanese example:

> Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of
> frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting
> in Japanese.

If Japanese people feel they have enough space to write their thoughts, why
wouldn’t the English ones with a bit more space?

~~~
nradov
The point is that their analysis is garbage. They looked at the length of
tweets, and what percentage of tweets hit the 140 character limit. But the
reality is that users impacted by the limit either send multiple tweets (1/n,
2/n, ... n/n) or attach an image containing a block of text. How do you
measure that?

~~~
betterunix2
Multiple tweets or attaching an image of a block of text are both annoying for
users. If in one language users are more likely to be annoyed than in another,
why not fix the problem?

------
andr
The irony is that both Biz's [1] and Jack's [2] tweets announcing the change
could convey the same message with a third of the characters. In fact, they'd
be better written. The need to carefully think, rethink, edit, and reedit your
tweets so they fit in the limit lead to much higher quality.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/biz/status/912783936123691009](https://twitter.com/biz/status/912783936123691009)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824](https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824)

~~~
notatoad
example of how it could be better written in 140:
[https://twitter.com/brianrbarone/status/912788388150960130](https://twitter.com/brianrbarone/status/912788388150960130)

~~~
tim--
[https://twitter.com/DocPop/status/912799932829929472](https://twitter.com/DocPop/status/912799932829929472)

------
aleksanb
Luckily the demoscene graphics showcase platform
[https://www.dwitter.net](https://www.dwitter.net) still enforces the 140
character limit! Keepon making those webgl canvas graphics!

~~~
seanmcdirmid
And let's not forget [http://tinytocs.org](http://tinytocs.org), a CS journal
whose article bodies must fit into 140 characters.

------
mwcmitchell
this basically reads as:

"We didn't grow at all last quarter, but things here at Twitter are A-OKAY
(please belive us)! We can still grow, all we need to do is destroy/modify the
one thing that made us unique and successful!"

~~~
hk__2
If the only thing that makes you unique and successful is a technical
limitation that dates back to text messages, it’s probably time to move on.

------
isarat
I remember reading the story of an ex-twitter employee who was not very happy
about innovating with "140 characters". People learned the art of crafting
content with 140 character. Many of the reply-to-self and 1/2 tweets are going
to be history. So does people write on the notes, screenshot and share. I
believe it's more about building a better graph with more content intake, than
giving voice to express. Twitter is always a tool polished by its users and
several inventions made due to constraints. Let's see how people are going to
take the 2x tweets.

------
jpatokal
Factoid of the day: the 140-char limit originates from the SS7 MAP signalling
protocol used for SMS, which allows a message payload of precisely 140 bytes.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS)

You can actually cram up to 160 characters into an SMS if you use a 7-bit
character set, but Twitter apparently wanted to support European languages and
went with the 8-bit version. However, allowing 140 double-byte chars (Chinese
etc) blows through the actual limit of 80, requiring concatenated SMS to send.

~~~
nicky0
I thought the extra 20 was for the originator's username.

------
arielm
I’m glad Twitter is changing things up. Technically this means doubling
everything (database, cache, etc) which I imagine was an undertaking.

But...

Is this really what’s preventing Twitter from growing? I don’t think so.

I use twitter for both personal and company reasons and I can see how it’d
help the latter. I don’t see how it helps the former. To me, the whole purpose
of the feed is to get the “gist”. 280 characters is wayyy more than that.

I wish they spent their efforts on improving/building useful things (including
better targeting for ads) or bring back the tweet counts.

So congrats, but to me it’s a sign things aren’t chirping anymore.

------
SkyMarshal
I've often wondered what effect, if any, the higher information density of
Chinese/Japanese/Korean has on peoples' minds and the way people think. Anyone
ever heard of any studies on this?

------
peterarmstrong
This type of announcement needs to come from the CEO, not a product manager.

~~~
robinhood
Product managers execute the vision of the CEO and the company in general. Why
do you think they don't deserve to announce something major?

~~~
peterarmstrong
Because this is more important than something you delegate. It's the biggest
change to the company since the company was created. It's not like Twitter
does 10 products, and it's like "bring Phil up to talk about this one". This
_is_ Twitter. If it was discussing random licensing deals with the NFL, fine,
you can, and probably should, delegate that in order to signal its relative
importance. But for this to be treated like something of that magnitude is
wrong.

------
nothis
Any reason not to simplify that measure and make it 280 chars for all? They
might not use it in Japan but what's the point of limiting them if they
apparently don't use the space anyway?

~~~
bradjohnson
Forcing brevity is the whole point of twitter. They've found that they are
limiting the English twitter with 140 characters, but 140 characters seems to
be working well for Japanese.

------
orblivion
They should make Chinese, Japanese and Korean tweets shorter instead.

------
roryisok
Another cool feature could be not enabling people to start nuclear war on the
service.

This might get down voted as trolling, but the real trolling is going on
between Donald Trump and North Korea. The fact that twitter continues to allow
the racism, bigotry, sexism, antisemitism, climate change denial and
warmongering of the most high profile account they have to go unchecked is
ridiculously unethical. Instead of taking a stand against the erosion of
Western ethical standards they're profiting from it

~~~
edanm
Are you kidding? You really think that Twitter should be censoring _the
president of the United States_?

That is beyond ridiculous. His tweets are instantly newsworthy - would you
object to CNN writing about them?

And if you've gotten to the point where your political philosophy is to censor
the democratically elected leader of the US, you've basically removed all
possibility of ever understanding about half the people in the country.

~~~
roryisok
Surely there's a distinction to be made between a government censoring its
citizens free-speech, and a private service allowing _The_ most powerful man
in the world to use its platform to excuse white-supremacists and increase
tension between hostile nuclear powers?

Surely?

This is not censorship we're talking about, and it's not free-speech. It's
about having a set of rules on your social network and enforcing those rules.
Unfortunately, twitter seems to have none.

~~~
edanm
There is a difference, which is why I didn't talk about the 1st amendment or
government protected free speech, so you seem to not be replying to my actual
comment.

All I'm saying is, if your rules imply that you need to censor the
democratically elected leader of the US, then there's _something wrong with
your rules_. Also, let's be clear on this - even if Twitter for some insane
reason decided to censor President Trump, it's not like he has a lack of
microphones around. As much as we techies love Twitter and other companies,
there really _are_ other solutions around, and I think POTUS specifically
would be able to get his message out even without Twitter.

~~~
roryisok
> you seem to not be replying to my actual comment.

Sorry, I was sort of replying to both yours and the comment below it. neither
of them mentioned free speech but it was sure to come up.

> if your rules imply that you need to censor the democratically elected
> leader of the US, then there's something wrong with your rules

So if I run a micro-blogging service and I make a rule which says "hey,
nobody's allowed to be racist on here, ok?" and then Donald Trump signs up and
says something racist, my rules are wrong because he's the president? Where's
the logic in that? If the president breaks the law, is there something wrong
with that law too?

So we're clear here, twitter does _not_ have any such rule. I'm suggesting it
should.

------
CM30
Honestly, I don't see why they shouldn't change to 280 characters. I mean,
Mastodon instances allow 500 by default, Gab.ai allows 300 by default...

And neither find it takes away from the microblogging aspect one bit. Pretty
sure a lot of other Twitter alternatives allow for messages of around those
sizes too.

Yes, it means doing away with a bit of tradition. But generally, my experience
there is that the tiny amount of characters has hurt more than its helped. So
easy to lose necessary context in that space.

------
dreamfactored
So they are making the roads wider, which will only increase pollution.
Twitter's one saving grace was it at least enforced some concision to the
tides of ill-informed opinion.

------
secfirstmd
I'll be impressed with Twitter when they actually show they care about the
security and safety of their users by implemented end to end encryption for
their DMs...

------
misterbowfinger
The analysis was really interesting. I wonder if there's cultural bias as well
- i.e. English speakers tend to be more verbose because we have a need to
speak more

~~~
netsharc
Hah, in Japanese and Chinese a lot of words are single characters. To use your
post as an example, "analysis", "really", and "interesting" will probably be
one character each, they're several UTF-8 bytes, but Twitter counts those
still as single characters...

~~~
looki
In Japanese those three words could be translated as 分析、本当に、面白い respectively,
8 characters in total - i.e. the same length as just "analysis" in English.

------
notadoc
Does anyone else get the impression that Twitter has no idea what to do with
their service, let alone how most people use it?

Adding verbosity is the last thing the service needs.

------
tempestn
In my opinion, the best balance would be to keep the focus on short, succinct,
140 character tweets, but to also give the option to add a "read more" section
to any given tweet.

So you could eliminate tweet storms and give people a convenient outlet for
longer-form thoughts, without just bloating everything. I expect 240
characters will largely result in people just using more words to say the same
thing.

------
nikolay
They shot themselves in the foot by putting this ridiculous limit! Make it
500, or, better yet, limit the number of words, which makes more sense, but I
don't use Twitter much if at all, because I hate broken English, missing
punctuation, and having to restructure your thought to fit into the SMS limit
of the '90s!

------
kelvin0
Well glad to see Twitter is finally tackling humanity's woes. I'm sorry for
the vitriol, but what kind of value is this adding to anyone's life? It seems
to me like another way of having the hunched-over-zombies-with-lit-faces spend
even more time 'connecting' with other humans.

------
OscarCunningham
Great, now I have to recount to see if my joke about Game of Thrones breaking
the Twitter rule still works.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
I hope this isn't _actually_ language-based, else it'll be awkward for tweets
that mix languages, or multilingual users who have their UI in one language
and tweet in another.

It would make more sense to simply count CJK characters twice, like the
“double-width character” days of old.

------
odbol_
It's weird that their justification is that other languages can fit more
_words_ in than you can in English. But then they increase the _character_
count.

Wouldn't it make more sense to switch to a _word_ limit, instead of a
_character_ limit?

~~~
DanBC
> Wouldn't it make more sense to switch to a word limit, instead of a
> character limit?

CanYouImagineTheCamelCaseNightmareThatWouldCause?

------
cherrytree
I guess they didn't consider _halving_ the limit for the other languages
instead?

~~~
richdougherty
Exactly. The short length of tweets creates joy and makes Twitter unique.

People who speak other languages are cheated out of that joy. The best
solution is to shorten tweets in those languages!

------
iXce
> Most Japanese Tweets are 15 characters while most English Tweets are 34

Doesn't the graph shows that most English tweets are 140 characters instead?
The first peak on the English curve is indeed on 34 characters, but it's lower
than the 140 peak.

~~~
projektfu
You're right about the mode, but the quote is also correct in the sense of the
area under the curve. Most English tweets are 34+/-n characters, where n gives
you more than 50% under the curve. It rapidly falls off from 9% on the 140
character side.

------
robtaylor
@Jack said "Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real
problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our
brevity, speed, and essence!"

[https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824](https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824)

How many people did it take to come up with double a char limit, and how is
that 'thoughtful' or 'solving' anything? Total guff.

The start of the end of twitter hashtag hottake.

~~~
aaron-lebo
Hey man, Jack's been putting in 23 hour days for the last seven years to make
this happen. Not cool to mock his effort.

But seriously that Tweet shows the usefulness. For them not to have tried it
until now shows how scared they are to make any real changes. 1) Guess 2) this
3) doesn't 4) fix 5) this 6) nonsense? Those comments are absolute youtube
quality cancer though. Goddamn tragedy that this is the pinnacle of human
discourse right now.

These are the first five replies to that tweet:

 _Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 1h1 hour ago Replying to @jack

I will reserve my full response until I get 280 characters but this is a slap
in the face to everyone harmed by your lax governance 1 reply 15 retweets 109
likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 57m57 minutes ago

Your platform has been co-opted and manipulated, turned into a megaphone for
hate and propaganda. 3 replies 20 retweets 154 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏
@DrNeilTyson 56m56 minutes ago

Your response? Remove the last filter forcing careful selection of words. This
makes Twitter boring without making room for real thought. 4 replies 14
retweets 107 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 55m55 minutes ago

And yet again, another surface-level tweak that fails to deal with the rot
inside this community. 1 reply 10 retweets 82 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏
@DrNeilTyson 54m54 minutes ago

You have failed signally in your responsibilities to your users, investors,
and frankly to all of humanity. Thanks, Jack._

What a weird platform.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
Worst thing Twitter ever did was teach you what people you once respected are
_really_ like.

Can't believe I ever looked up to him.

~~~
schoen
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that is a parody account, not actually
Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

------
__s
Going to prove [https://recordsetter.com/world-record/twitter-
hashtag/785](https://recordsetter.com/world-record/twitter-hashtag/785) wrong

------
Yizahi
Oh, great, it only took them how many years to acknowledge the stupidity of
char limit? Now they only need to throw their UI out of the window and make a
proper intuitive tree style interface and they are golden.

------
lloda
A solution would be to give you a fixed space, then make the font smaller or
narrower as you write more. It's a softer limit and it accommodates CJK
because usually those characters are bigger.

------
quickthrower2
Easier solution would be to limit Japanese etc to 70 characters.

I think the 140 is a good limit which forces you to write the "headline" of
what you want to say and assimilate a feed reasonably quickly.

------
Pxtl
Latin-derived languages are getting longer, but Asian ones aren't? It sounds
like they're switching to utf-8.

I know that's not really what's happening, but that's what it sounds like.

------
fiatpandas
I’m curious how much has to change code wise to get this to work. Or is there
simply a single global variable that controls max tweet size (ignoring the
fact that this is language specific).

------
theincredulousk
Called it

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759157)

Should have charged people for it though. They need the money.

------
Havoc
Ah good, maybe Trump will make more fleshed out policy decisions now.

------
m3kw9
Having known many Japanese, I feel they like to be concise and simple in their
expression, they do like infer a lot and not be direct, hence no need to spell
everything out all the time

------
swamp40
I've always thought they should charge 10 cents per extra character over 140.

Trying to eliminate 1 or 2 letters is exhausting - I would often pay 10 or 20
cents just for the convenience.

------
zxia31
As a Chinese, I was never bothered by the 140 chars limit because symbols in
Chinese can convey much more information than the same length of English
characters.

------
bitdiddle
It's all down hill from here. Pretty soon there will be a 2K word minimum and
we'll all be making up stuff, like those fifth grade book reports.

------
thebiglebrewski
Lmao. This isn't what's going to save Twitter.

------
unpythonic
Since brevity is the soul of wit / And tediousness the limbs and outward
flourishes, I will be brief... Wit should fit on a Hollerith card.

------
DonHopkins
It's a trick to get Trump to double the rate at which he incriminates himself!

I hope he doesn't start twice as many wars.

If he takes to it, then Twitter could gradually raise the limit bit by bit,
like you train a cat to shit in the toilet by slowly moving its litter box
[1], and eventually he'll be tweeting in full paragraphs of complete (if not
coherent) sentences.

[1] [http://www.wikihow.com/Toilet-Train-Your-
Cat](http://www.wikihow.com/Toilet-Train-Your-Cat)

------
look_lookatme
Twitter has had a net negative effect on discourse, media and, by extension,
on society. More characters won't help.

------
feborges
I suggest the characters limit to grow/shrink dynamically based on the
percentage of tweets that reach the limit.

------
Decabytes
Why raise the character limit? If you are going to do that then what purpose
does the limit serve anymore?

------
jacquesm
#define MAX_TWEET_LENGTH 280

Bfd. If this is enough to make headlines all over the world you can bet they
will do it again.

------
politician
Do you think this change will result in a positive improvement to the content
of the tweets from POTUS?

~~~
politician
@dang What's a good way to run a poll without abusing karma. Throwaways?

------
zeep
Aren't many Japanese characters also words? which would explain why they use
less characters...

------
billmalarky
Seems like one possible solution is to increase the character limit, but also
increase the "pain" a user has to go through to use the additional characters
(my ghetto solution would be to use a captcha to unlock the higher char
limit).

That way people would only use the additional chars if they really needed
them, reducing noise from otherwise unnecessarily long tweets.

~~~
cwkoss
"Watch this 30-second ad to expand your character limit by 30 characters for
this tweet!"

~~~
billmalarky
Anything to disincentivize casual use of the huge limit.

------
komali2
Wait, so how does it work? What if half my message is in Chinese, and the
other English?

------
shmerl
Don't use Twitter? Diaspora has a much larger limit, and you can use hashtags.

------
hardwaresofton
tldr; Twitter is changing the limit 140 -> 280 characters

I wish that emphasis (bolding? anything really) on what actually changed, I
read through a lot of reasoning that I didn't really care to read/find
compelling.

------
logicallee
> For example, when I (author's name) Tweet in English, I quickly run into the
> 140 character limit and have to edit my Tweet down so it fits.

... sparing all your readers that reading time. The whole post doesn't mention
reading time _once_. Doesn't that matter too?

------
beager
Hasn't Twitter given us enough characters already?!

------
davesque
How about actually enforcing your terms of service?

------
jijji
alter table messages modify message_body bigtext; -- thanks for the feature
enhancement twitter! it only took eleven years!

------
ElijahLynn
Love it! Tired of micromanaging characters.

------
neximo64
Twitter has no vision under Jack Dorsey.

------
sharkjacobs
who was possibly asking for this?

I can see far more need for "read more" expandable tweets to replace
tweetstorms

------
homero
When? Mine's not working

------
rsrsrs86
You need entropy not length!

------
mbillie1
Good, I hope this spells the death of this horrifying product.

------
dboreham
Innovation!

------
fairpx
> Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a
> pain.

When I read this, I thought I was on somebody's blog who wanted to give her
idea on why they didn't like Twitter. Then I realised this was... Twitter's
blog.

The constraint of 140 characters is what made Twitter, IMHO, interesting. Sure
it required you to do a bit of puzzling, but that's exactly what made each
tweet read worthy.

Then came the bots and the spammers and the place got ruined. Twitter has a
bunch of problems, but the 140 characters isn't one of them.

~~~
1ris
I agree that 140 characters is what makes twitter twitter.

But then again I can't understand what 140 characters are usefull for. I have
a twitter account since 2007 (or 2008, not sure). I didn't get it back then. I
came back more than once, as it got constantly more popular. I never got it.
The quality of content tends to be, for my opinion, very poor. It's mostly
people misrepesenting and insulting other. 1) Twitter is aswell a tool to
share simplistic ideas with people that already agree with you.

If the content is better, it's pictures of text and 12 tweets in a row. Right
now it seems you have to fight the platform if you want to post something
good. Not sure if 280 solves it, but it might become more useful, as it still
restricts verboseness.

And the aim of twitter should be to be usefull, rather than twitter. As being
twitter does not earn them any money.

/edit: 1) I feel german "grime twitter", a buch a trolls being extremists of
all flavors insulting people with way too much ego is the best part. It's like
4chan, with less racism and slightly more grown up. And it is, as you can
image, toxic garbage. And that's the best part in my view.

~~~
ianamartin
Agree 100%. I've tried to really get into it many times. Maybe once a year or
so, I'll tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to really 'get' twitter this time."

The people I follow are some genuinely interesting people. And god writers. I
subscribe to their blogs' RSS feeds. But engaging in that conversation with
them is almost impossible if you don't already know them in person.

I'm not terrible at saying things either. I think I have total fewer than 50
tweets and around 300 followers. 6 new followers per tweet seems like a pretty
good rate of gaining attention. But I don't know anything about these people
or how to engage with them. So I don't.

Frankly, I do assign part of the blame for the rise of the internet outrage
machine to twitter conditioning people's behavior, no matter how
unintentional.

The formulae is simple: find something you think is distasteful. Tweet about
how it's evil or racist or sexist or communist or whatever bad thing you want
to make sure people don't think you are. Sit back and watch all of the other
people who don't want people to think they are that thing pick up their
pitchforks and go to town against your target in the manner of something I can
only describe as as mindless as a holy war. Now sit back, relax, and feel
good: mission accomplished.

The same things happen on Facebook and Reddit. But it's more obviously absurd
on twitter. Social issues are too complex to be dealt with effectively in 140
or even 280 letters. The best you can do is point a finger at someone or some
thing and throw a label at it.

It really is garbage that's lowered the standards of discourse.

Again, I don't think tha was ever twitter's intent. But that's the effect it's
had.

I understand the argument that various platforms we use are simply a
reflection of society as it really exists and has always existed. And I
disagree with it.

Every social interaction has a reward potential. Obtaining those rewards is
what generally drives behavior. The modes of interaction that we have in
person generally reward positive social interactions.

Both my parents are conservative, religious people working in a university
environment. As I was growing up, they would have liberal and non-religious
colleagues over for dinner because that was how university professors hung out
after work 30 years ago.

Disagreements were polite, thoughtful, and lengthy. This was a positive
interaction for both sides of the debate. You get to sit down with someone who
strongly disagrees with your foundational principles, eat dinner, and walk
away respecting the other people even though you disagree.

I'm not pining for the good old days or saying that technology is bad because
human interaction promotes social behavior.

But the behavioral reward is there: don't act like a dick, and you're
colleagues will respect you.

With twitter, on the other hand, the only behavioral reward available is
attention--measured by likes and followers. And the easiest way to get that
attention high is not through genuine, respectful, human interaction. The
fastest way to being a twitter super star is anti social behavior: acting like
a dick.

Humans will always take the path of least resistance to the greatest reward.
Whether that's using sloppy logic and false equivocations to label some thing
you don't like as evil or if it's embracing the evil label, magnifying it, and
claiming it as a right, either way, it represents the lowest form of
discourse. And twitter is the emperor of low discourse. Facebook and Reddit
are just wannabes.

That's a lot of criticism for one of the world's largest communication
platforms. You might ask if I have a solution to any of that.

I don't. I'm not sure it needs a solution. Maybe twitter should just embrace
what it is and accept that.

Shit. I think that was more than 280 characters. Oh well. No one on twitter
would read it anyway.

~~~
wpietri
There's nothing wrong with mainly being a reader on Twitter. That's a valid
and common way to use it.

------
bitmapbrother
Twitter should have subscription plans that correlate to the number of
characters you can use.

280 = free tier

1000 = $0.99 per month

2500 = $1.99 per month

5000 = $2.99 per month

------
mozumder
External links shouldn't also take any characters in Twitter. It should be a
separate data field, like images are right now.

Also, I'm not sure why there isn't a separate expanded post field as well. Use
the twitter feed for your headlines to a post.

------
jlebrech
finally you can argue with every facetious person on twitter that'll need
extra detail or will take everything out of context, or that need a citation
for something that should be common knowledge.

------
matunixe
We don't care, we have Mastodon and our limit is 500.

------
georgestephanis
Here comes the shark jump!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4ZGKI8vpcg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4ZGKI8vpcg)

------
megapatch
It would have been cool if they instead had reduced the number och characters!

------
nickthemagicman
The new character count feels like they arbitrarily just doubled it.

Like Gob Bluth made this decision to be a better CEO than Michael.

"Oh yeah Michael I'm taking your 140 characters and DOUBLING IT!"

------
gallerdude
This seems rash. I feel like you should have to select something in order to
have a 280 character tweet. I think the reason Twitter has worked is because
of the constraints and the creativity working around said constraints. By
opting everyone in immediately, I feel there may be some culture shock.

~~~
buttscicles
Which is why they aren't doing that...

"Although we feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change
will have, we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a
decision to launch to everyone"

I feel like this could be a good change, looking forward to seeing how it goes
either way.

