
Twitter stops counting replies towards its 140 characters on web and mobile - bpierre
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/30/twitter-stops-counting-replies-towards-its-140-characters/
======
bluetidepro
> While Twitter is making these changes as a means of trying to simplify its
> service for users, it’s really just swapping out one set of rules for
> another. And that can be super confusing [link a].

This is spot on and buried further down the article. To me, the UX of this
change just makes Twitter even more complicated now. Their UI/UX is getting so
bogged down with rules that it's incredibly hard to explain Twitter to a new
user. It's even confusing for a current active Twitter user to keep track of
what's what.

I recently helped a friend get setup to use Twitter and until I had to explain
it out loud for the first time to someone who didn't already use the service,
I never realized how confusing all the rules are. They are not black and white
like they used to be, and it's not easy to follow.

[link a] [https://medium.com/@sarahperez/twitter-so-easy-its-
hard-e9ff...](https://medium.com/@sarahperez/twitter-so-easy-its-
hard-e9ffc03e8bbb)

~~~
smacktoward
The worst part is that they make big splashy announcements about these
changes, but then _don 't actually roll the changes out_ until much later. Not
counting @-replies was announced nearly a year ago (see
[https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/twitter-moves-away-
from-14...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/24/twitter-moves-away-
from-140-characters-ditches-confusing-and-restrictive-rules/)), for instance,
but it's only taking effect now. The long delay is guaranteed to confuse
people, lots of whom will have (understandably) assumed that Twitter stopped
counting @-replies when they saw a headline in the news reading "BREAKING:
Twitter stops counting @-replies."

~~~
Mithaldu
If i remember correctly they ACTUALLY enacted that a long while ago. Just ...
you could only access it via the mobile twitter clients. What changed today is
that they updated the website itself to act like that.

------
bengotow
There's a lot of hate circulating around my Twitter feed this morning because
of this, but I think it makes perfect sense. New users signing up for Twitter
have to get longer usernames - everything else is taken. Then, when they try
to reply to a couple of their friends, they only have like 50 characters to
type a message. It's a non-starter. 140 characters enforces concise thoughts
but somewhere around 90 characters you basically can't express yourself
anymore.

This change evens the playing field for new users, allowing them to use the
platform the same way og users like @alex and @ow do (having meaningful
threads with 3+ people.)

~~~
psyc
The hate is not about the char count. It's about:

1\. They failed to provide a way to remove @s from thread replies. Edit:
Whoops, there is a UI for this. Which jarringly takes you to a different
dialog and back! So my new complaint is that they made it harder and weird. I
stand by my opinion that they screwed this up.

2\. They failed to provide a way to change the visibility, aka 'dot replies'

They fixed one thing, and broke two. Par for the course for Twitter UI
designers. It has always baffled me how consistently bad every part of the
Twitter UI is. Just try using lists sometime.

~~~
shadowfacts
You can remove people from replies. Click on the usernames in the 'Replying to
@personA and @personB' and it'll open a list of people you're replying to,
each with a checkbox that can be used to remove them.

Dot replies haven't been necessary since Twitter added the ability to retweet
yourself. You respond to someone as usual and then retweet it, so all of your
follower's will see it, even if they aren't following the person you responded
to.

It can definitely be a bit confusing for old users (and the UX for the first
one isn't the greatest), but nothing's been removed, it's just been changed.

~~~
panic
Whether or not you think they're still necessary, dot replies are a different
thing than retweets. The ability to reply while at the same time making that
reply visible to your followers has been removed.

~~~
shadowfacts
Retweeting your reply achieves the same thing in the end. You've replied to
the tweet and made your reply visible to your followers.

With regards to UX, it's debatably more or less confusing, but the
functionality is still there.

------
jackschultz
Funny, I literally just noticed this 3 minutes ago. Was replying to a tweet
with two people on the reply but couldn't figure out how to get what I was
trying to say under the limit so I clicked out of reply. Then I decided to try
again and was confused at why the auto reply names that are usually there were
gone.

Huge fan of this, being able to express more of what you want to respond about
is great.

------
swalsh
I wonder if as they started to make this change they started finding numerous
areas of the code where devs went "eh, it'll never be more than 140 chars...
that's our thing".

~~~
matt4077
This reminded me of the surprisingly interesting chapter on character counting
in their docs: [https://dev.twitter.com/basics/counting-
characters](https://dev.twitter.com/basics/counting-characters)

Summary: the probably did find problems like that, but long before this change
when they encountered different languages and character sets.

I'm sure running into the int32 limit for object ids was more of a hassle.

~~~
danso
Speaking of interesting writeups, their writeup on Snowflake, the system they
use to generate unique 64-bit integers for tweets is itself a great read:
[https://blog.twitter.com/2010/announcing-
snowflake](https://blog.twitter.com/2010/announcing-snowflake)

------
thewhitetulip
The problem of Twitter is that many people (including me) have tried to use
the platform n number of times, but either it is too cryptic or too useless
for us in day to day life. I don't use Facebook much, I do use HN/Reddit/Quora
and sometimes stackoverflow. I use the platforms which teach me something,
reddit taught me a lot of things across all domains, HN teaches me new things
everyday (it is also my news source), Quora and Stackoverflow are also nice,
they give me _some_ advantage.

but I can't say the same with Twitter, if you see my twitter page, I use it
only to tweet to nasty companies who keep pestering me with SPAM text messages
despite my DO NOT DISTURB feature!

For me, twitter has relegated it's position to become the tech support medium,
I really do not understand why they do not make this a feature. A friend had
got a counterfeit phone from an Indian ecommerce site, he found out after a
month, after calling the site, they said "sorry, 7 day return policy", I put
that on twitter, one month later, he got his money back.

~~~
jjaredsimpson
I found twitter incredibly useless and had many fits and starts. Now I'm at
the point where I use the mobile app everyday multiple times per day.

I gave up tweeting entirely. I have 6 followers and only 3 of them are people
I know in real life, however none of them tweet. So twitter isn't a text
messaging replacement for me.

I just accepted that Facebook is a much better place for me to put a thought
and get feedback from people I know.

I follow ~150 people. The main blobs are pros in a video game I play
seriously, and politics professionals, and science/tech professionals, and
media outlets.

I don't follow any celebrities or people who I think are just brand pushers.

Now every time I go to twitter I know that I will have a new set of
interesting content to pursue. New conversations about strategies or video
archives from the game universe. Breaking news with commentary by politics
minds I care about (no hacks or rank partisans). Interesting science and tech
links from other like minded people who are keeping up.

The real problem with twitter is that it is completely nonobvious how I
eventually came to like it. I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a
set of follows which will engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.

~~~
Mithaldu
> I couldn't ever tell someone else how to curate a set of follows which will
> engage them. Seems like twitter can't either.

The problem is that many people think of twitter as a tool to talk to someone.
In reality it is a tool to subscribe to people. Micro-blogging is a stupid
word, but it is true. You get use out of twitter by treating it like an RSS
client:

Find feeds with content that interests you (personal things of friends,
musicians, artists, game devs, people talking about political issues that
interest you, activist groups, etc.) and subscribe to them.

That covers the use case of the average person. If you feel ambitious you can
also become a _content producer_ , but that is of course a real investment.

------
matt4077
I've actually grown a bit fond of twitter over the last months. For some
communities, it's very much the place where the news happens, and you can
watch it unfold life.

That being said, I wish they'd do more with the potential they have. For
example, I have tried at various times to find out what's happening when I
heard the distant noises of a large demonstration (I'm in Berlin, Germany and
it's a weekly occurrence, at least in the summer). Not once did I succeed with
twitter's search, not even in cases where I later found out that there were
many tweets about the event.

------
csswizardry
This literally just turned on for me seconds ago. I noticed it because nearly
all of my Notifications timeline now lacks clear context.

------
cableshaft
I can't believe how long it took for them to actually implement this. This was
a braindead obvious change to make ever since it was clear no one cared about
sending tweets by SMS anymore.

Now they need to do the same with hashtags. Fitting what I want to say and
including more than 1 hashtag (usually I just want 2, sometimes 3) is really
difficult for me.

~~~
DanBC
#that's #going #to #make #some #longer #messages #really #fucking #annoying
#to #read #because #people #are #arseholes #and #this #is #why #we #can't
#have #nice #things.

~~~
theseatoms
Then count all hashtags but the first.

~~~
rhizome
Well, but GP wanted like 3.

------
infogulch
Does this mean you can now reply to an unbounded number of people? i.e. one
enormous reply chain where new people hit reply on the latest reply to add
their own handle to the list. Possible?

------
anigbrowl
I'd be thrilled about this if they hadn't locked me out of my account and
ignored my support requests :-/

------
27182818284
I'm bummed out this was a focus as the user-feedback thread had a lot of other
more useful features that I feel were mentioned more
[https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480](https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480)

~~~
r3bl
Ironically, for the first time in 5-7 years of me using Twitter, the replies
didn't load until I refreshed the page.

------
minimaxir
How do you .@ reply with the new UI? (i.e so that the reply appears as a
normal tweet to all your followers)

Not seeing it on iOS.

~~~
shadowfacts
You reply as normal and then retweet your own reply. All of your follower's
will be able to see the tweet regardless of if they're following whoever you
responded to.

~~~
minimaxir
This is apparently the official solution.

Yikes.

------
swang
i just tried this out on the web. if you reply to a tweet, and that tweet
mentions someone else's name, your tweet will have both their names included
just like before (except their names are now in a link above the textbox).
however if you want to remove their names, you have to click on the link,
click on their checkbox to deselect them.

so it's harder to remove people from a reply, and harder for others to remove
you from threads you don't want to be a part of.

------
nemof
i'm still super pissed at the changes they made to search in tweetdeck
recently. ( see announcement here
[https://twitter.com/TweetDeck/status/842044139587928064](https://twitter.com/TweetDeck/status/842044139587928064)
).

now each time you click the search icon on the left hand side, when you do a
search in the pop up box, rather than inline the results in the pop-up search
window (all still on the left hand side), it now automatically generates a new
column. for each search. that appears to the right of the last column in
tweetdeck.

as a ux decision this is awful. searches in tweetdeck were ephemeral. you
search, 99% of the time you close your search once satisfied with the results,
and that was it. the number of times you actually want to convert a search
into a permanent column is very small.

as it is with the changes to search every single time you search now you
instantly generate a new column. if you dont delete each search the columns
just keep on building up and up. this is an awful and unrequested change to
tweetdeck search, and there seems to be zero public facing community managers
for tweetdeck who this can be raised with.

------
awalton
I am actually a fan of this change, simply because the enclaves on Twitter
have expanded pretty significantly, and communicating with the whole group is
pretty hard in a single conversation tree...

I think it's a bit awkward in the UX, but at least now you haven't wasted 110
characters on people's variably-lengthed names...

------
hellofunk
Twitter is gradually moving to final policies that will actually get me
tweeting regularly. When I'm able to publish my memoir -- which incidentally,
is coming along very nicely -- as a single tweet, I will know that I, and
Twitter, have finally arrived. God speed the memoir tweets!

------
feborges
It is worth mentioning the huge spam potential that ~unlimited~ @mentions can
have:
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8Nvg4EUwAE3Kzx.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C8Nvg4EUwAE3Kzx.jpg)
(screenshot)

------
laacz
The problem is unwanted notifications of conversations (easy way to target you
with spam, for example) you don't want to participate in. And there is no easy
way to opt out.

------
meehow
That's real innovation and deserves an article. Oh, wait...

------
eugenekolo2
World breaking news.

------
treve
This happened weeks ago for me. Late news?

~~~
throwanem
A/B testing.

------
skdotdan
Every single feature Twitter introduces actually make it worse.

------
najati83
I'm not the kind of person who hates changes, but everything that Twitter does
certainly irritates me. I liked the service ten years ago when it was IRC-
like. This is just one step towards their target of making it annoyingly
complicated for power users. I've had this for weeks on Android (A/B testing?)
and I was kind of hoping they'd drop it... nope.

