Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest.
To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet would be much nicer.
If they implement the feature like that, which is implied in the article, this would be a big improvement to Twitter in my opinion.
One thing I've wanted to see tried with Twitter is the idea that you have your typical stream of tweets (vertical), but that any tweet can have depth (by swiping horizontally). Your "my thoughts" example would indicate "1/8" automatically, updating as it was created.
Means that someone can read as usual, or delve for the full series of tweets. They could provide an indication to the writer of what percentage of people read to which depth, for example.
It could work well for presenting news articles (sentence or paragraph at a time), photo galleries/essays, slidedecks, stories, advertising, etc. Using a news article as an example, some people will be interested in just the headline, others in the first three bits, a few in the full story to its end.
This is a really cool idea. It's a really simple solution to the same problem that would be really beautiful and easy to use on mobile especially. It doesn't quite reach the same depth, but I think it's a good way to start.
Always had it on my list to build a prototype of the concept and pitch it to media companies. Baffles me that they do so much work plugging Twitter handles for newsreaders, journalists, etc but then use a platform that hardly helps them.
- Cards seem quite similar to a carousel with maybe different movement options.
- Twitter character limit is already exceeded by people writing somewhere and posting the screenshotted image of the text, which is awful.
- 1/N.. N/N style can be expressed better by extended character limits, but that will decrease the number of tweets, which a public company may see as a deteriorating metric.
Unfortunately Twitter has more usability problems than char limit in the main timeline user interface.
- Viewing a conversation is pretty much confusing. You click on a tweet, it expands and it's not obvious how the conversation with a tree-branching structure proceeds
Ugh. Marc Andreesen is the worst with this. I had to stop following him. Twitter is the wrong platform if you want to smear 1500 characters worth of information across multiple tweets.
> Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of "read more" that you click to see the rest.
So Twitter wants to be RSS with better discovery. If there were discovery and UX for blogs like there is for podcasts (Pocketcasts, Overcast, etc.), then Twitter wouldn't even have a leg up on RSS at all.
I've often dreamed of a decentralized "Twitter" that allows you to subscribe to any Twitter, Facebook, or blogging feed and makes them all equal, first-class citizens (including the ability to reply/retweet/etc.)
Ask 99.9% of Sticher/Pocket Casts/Overcast/iTunes users what RSS is. They'll have no idea, and yet those apps rely on RSS to subscribe to podcasts.
The application can obfuscate the underlying technology. You don't need to know what RSS is to use it every day and love it, just as you don't need to know about DNS, TCP/IP, or most other internet technologies to enjoy the web.
Ok, that makes sense, although the content creators for iTunes, etc, still often have to find out what RSS is.
I'm still not sure what your point is - you said Twitter is trying to "be" RSS, but that's just the format, not the application. Twitter is not trying to aggregate content from elsewhere, either.
I don't get it. Twitter is a one to many broadcast channel. Its point is to be public. Privacy doesnt factor in. I think you could make a fake email, but twitter serves as a public channel so if you want privacy and twitter you are sort of asking for an sms message?
You give up privacy in many ways on Twitter, not just when you publish content.
Twitter can track you across third-party sites using its widgets, and it also knows your subscribing/reading behavior.
A decentralized system could be self-hosted and only pull in data through RSS, keeping you as anonymous as the IP address that you use. You'd only give up anonymity by replying to posts.
I've often dreamed of a decentralized "Twitter" that allows you to subscribe to any Twitter, Facebook, or blogging feed and makes them all equal, first-class citizens (including the ability to reply/retweet/etc.)
aka FriendFeed/Google Buzz. Neither of which were at all successful or exist anymore.
The problem is that there is no incentive to use them as platforms. People just output their other primary sources through them, and then engage on their primary platform.
That makes them horrible for users (who write comments and never hear back).
With this addition they will have officially become a user-focused Reddit. It's certainly not a bad thing but I doubt it's where the Twitter devs saw themselves heading. I'm sure people will continue to write 140 character messages but they'll probably become a minority over time. The bulk of tweets will just become title+link to external content or title+discussion starter.
> With this addition they will have officially become a user-focused Reddit.
I totally disagree. I still find it impossible to follow threads of conversation on Twitter. I'm a software developer and don't consider myself to be an idiot, either.
(Unrelated: I accidentally downvoted you when I was trying to copy-and-paste, and I'm terribly sorry!)
Agreed. Ive been frustrated looking at the tweet at the root of what I know is a long, branching conversation with many participants, unable to see the flow or follow it at all. Slashdot and Kuro5hin solved threaded/nested conversations over a decade ago. How does Twitter still suck at it?
I do think there is a tendency for social media sites to converge towards the same thing. As features are added, and limitations are removed, the lines between different types of sites begins to blur. Something that started as some simple niche site, starts allowing users to host content, create forums, have their own chat app, adds features from discussion sites, etc. Eventually we will end up with some kind of hyper-FaceTubeRedditumblrkype.
> One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet would be much nicer.
If people want to use twitter in that way than it's not the right place for them, there are already similar platform out there. Twitter's core and unique feature is micro blogging platform and i think it's never loose that unique feature.
> Twitter's core and unique feature is micro blogging platform
Trust me, from many, many discussions with people at Twitter, they absolutely do not see themselves as a micro-blogging platform, and do not enjoy the comparison.
If going beyond the 140 visible limit (or however many it ends up being) is highly discouraged (by the rest of the content being highly unlikely to be seen), I could see this working OK without lessening the magic of Twitter too much.
Also, this fixes an existing usability and accessibility nightmare of Twitter. People already post longer texts, just either split into multiple tweets (a horrible distraction if you don’t want to see it and incredibly hard to read if you do) or as screenshots (throwing accessibility completely out of the window – also not as nice an experience whenever reception is flaky).
I honestly see this more of a fix. All these horrible ways of using Twitter which are already commonplace will no longer be necessary. I don’t think it will fundamentally change how Twitter is used. People already use it in that way.
I don't think it will be a big improvement - I think it will become Medium Nano. Which is bad, because Medium and Wordpress (etc) already own that space, and a nano version adds nothing useful.
140c is great for one-liners and linkbait, which is - apparently - the main reason people read Twitter.
If it turns into a micro-blogging stream of extended self-expression, I think a lot of people won't have time for that.
One more click to get to content. Millenias worth of clickbait scrolling. Why not summarize Medium articles into 140 characters and slap on a multiplexed feed?
actually we get the implementation, but it is bad UX practise. it adds friction to the reading experience and will increase the quantity of tweets with truncated text within the first 140 chars. Twitter poorly handles this already with its URL preview cards. from a UX side, it's bad no matter how much spin Twitter will bring.
I was initially really against this, but parent comment brings a compelling argument: people are already using the service to say more than 140chars worth of stuff. The current methods to do it result in a far worse user experience than the tried and true "Read More" button would.
That said, I'm skeptical of it just in terms of product definition. Like Instagram adding portrait/landscape photos, more than 140 characters to a tweet does nothing but obscure what exactly the product is and how you're supposed to use it (even if people circumvent that anyhow).
I agree ethanbond with your 3rd para. It will muddle the product definition even further. It's rather telling to me that Twitter is willing to AB this without concern for its image or userbase - one that is mostly providing negative sentiment.
UX is something many businesses seem to really struggle with. If unnecessary friction is added, it really should cause stakeholders and designers to pause. The "read more" CTA will lead to more truncated tweets within the first 140 chars, something that is visually unappealing and breaks the reading experience by forcing a manual action. The workarounds you describe are not used by everyone and I'd wager that most users simply keep their posts within the 140 char limit rather than pict-tweet or storm a longer convo. Yes it forces brevity, but that is the Twitter identity which supports the product's skimmability usefulness. Give users a read more option, and many will post a few extra chars just because they don't have to put much thought into their wording now. Short term: usage goes up. Long term: quality decreases as Twitter becomes just another Facebook or Medium. It will be worse than Medium though because the audience Twitter is going after is more generic.
I've always argued that Twitter's userbase is more influential and valuable because of its forced brevity and fact that it was unique.
I already avoid truncated tweets and want to read long-form content elsewhere. So, I won't be using Twitter more. Maybe others will, but again, I'd wager that Twitter is simply sliding down a path that will be ultimately more harmful for its long term sustainability.
Personally, I love aspect ratios on Insta. It's a far better posting experience. As far as browsing, it's pretty much the same as before, I'd say. I haven't noticed anything, other than fewer awkwardly letterboxed images.
The way i know it from imgur comments it's not that bad. There the comments are not nessecarily sorted by time. What's the issue? It still discourages longer rants because every write up- and download cycle forces a short wait.
Agree with you. Twitter is way more easy to skim than FB or LinkedIn.
To be honest, I find the limit of 140 characters as its best feature because it is something that forces me to distill my thoughts in as less words as possible. A kind of exercise.
Based on tweets with the #Twitter10k hashtag, many users don't think it sounds like a good idea. Wall Street and the userbase seem to both agree for once.
To the people thinking 10,000 characters means suddenly everyone will write blog posts instead of tweets... Have you ever tried blogging? Writing blog posts is insanely hard and time consuming. You'd be an outlier if you could write one good blog post a day. It's not like every tweet is suddenly going to be an essay. More likely tweets will just be slightly longer (200 characters or something) and then there will be the occasional longer post. This is great because the hacks we were using beforehand (tweetstorms, replying to yourself, posting images of text) were all ridiculous for such a basic use case.
IIRC Twitter already enforces a max-height on tweets (ever since they allowed line breaks). People may indeed copy/paste but it won't add to the visual noise in timelines, and relatively few people will click through anyway.
Sadly it is pretty common that someone copy & paste some witty tweet and get attention. There's even a service to discover that. In Japanese it is called pakutsui (pakuri (= plagiarism) + tsui (= tweet)).
Honestly, as someone who doesn't like or use twitter very much, I find it really hard to follow a thread sometimes because of all the weird things people do to write more than the current limit
I disagree. But I guess we'll see. I think it will radically change the nature of Twitter. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I don't see anything wrong with tweet storms or text-in-images. And I think forcing people to be concise is terrific.
The key will be how much Twitter discourages going past 140 (or whatever the visible limit is).
So, I think you don't realize something very important about how people use twitter. Consider, what the typical number of blogs is that people around you might actually follow - (via RSS or some other means) in the sense that they're subscribed to it, new content appears from time to time, and when an entry appears they see it somewhere at the top of some feed? A feed they have to read through.
I would guess the very high end of what might be considered typical would be 50-70 or something. That is a lot of blogs.
Now let's compare with twitter.
Three years ago, the average twitter user followed 100 accounts.[1]
Here is an example of an article giving 55 "must-follow" twitter accounts [2] - a simple article, saying, hey, subscribe to these 55 sources. Can you imagine someone giving you a list of 55 blogs that you simply have to subscribe to, regardless of who you are or what your interests are - for everyone? That to be in touch with the world, you must follow at least these 55 blogs?
I can certainly imagine it for tech! But, for everyone?
The percentage of world leaders who use twitter is: 80%[3] - outside of the highly reduced format, do you think people care about politics that much? Obama has 68M followers. How many do you think would stick around after even a couple of extended posts? How interesting do you think every last politician is? Because that 68M compares to the total monthly reach of New York Times and all its web presence of on the order of 50 million people. Are people really that interested in not just one, but every last politician's every last statement, than in this highly distilled and reduced form?
Twitter works because of the character limit. That's what allows the average user to follow well over a hundred accounts.
I don't follow the hype and when I was an active user I would get frustrated with my tweet limiting to so few characters.
here is what I had to do:
1. write tweet, fuck, over limit
2. abbrev words, fuck still low on limit
3. remove spaces, fuck still low on limit
4. remove words and punctuations, thinking "fuck so this is what search engine feels like when one stems words", not my tweet is so not English
5. fuck still over limit or incomplete, tweet the first thought, comment on the new tweet with the rest of my story.
But why this model? FB has a limit few thousands char limits for status but in practice, only few lines will ever written on most FB statuses. People who manage to write a complete story on FB status have something meaningful to write about.
I guarantee you that your audience wasn't frustrated by the fact that you had to jump through those hoops. You think all those politicians and celebrities and thought leaders don't have trouble fitting things in 140 characters? I'm not being too verbose, but I've just written 292 here. :)
And yet Facebook has vastly better information density on their desktop and mobile sites than Twitter manages. (see my comment elsewhere on this comment thread)
Twitter's limit is too low, but it does have a certain appeal, and I'm following a lot of smart people that express a lot in 140 chars. Would be happy if this limit was raised to 250 chars.
But raising to 10,000 chars would probably kill Twitter for me.
Yeah they should separate out links (with a maximum number total links not characters per post) and hash tags (again with a maximum number of total hash tags not characters per post). Something like 5 links and 15 hash tags should be enough for even the most hardcore of Twitter users. Then up the post limit to 200 or 250 characters.
I have heard about Twitter looking into upping the limits for years now and I think they are over thinking the problem. Then again I have no idea if their backend is some how weirdly designed with the 140 character limit and changing that might require a lot of work. I wouldn't have thought so though. Well I should say I hope not, you never know what some devs do ;)
I think it will work if they make the long tweet into a native card, like a screenshot, instead of "read more." Having too many truncated tweets + "read more" would kill the experience. Twitter works because it's skimmable.
Removing the character limit is similar to the spam problem. It shifts the mental burden from the sender to the receiver. Instead of the sender being forced to compress, the receiver has to spend more time processing the text.
Yeah, my first thought was "The Death of Twitter has been announced". Although, I left Twitter for G+ quite a while ago precisely because of the character limit.
If G+ serves as a valid alternative to Twitter for your needs then you were using Twitter differently than most. Twitter's value is in its network, not the ability to share longform content, and G+ can't touch Twitter as a social network.
Yeah, it was super bittersweet and still is. My developer circle is mostly on Twitter, which I still interact with from time to time, to see what is going on in that circle.
I just hate trying to micromanage my words and grammar sooo much.
640 characters limit is perfect on Sublevel. The average number of characters per post on Sublevel is the same as Facebook. You can see more statistic on the about page.
I don't think the size of tweets will have much of an effect on load. I imagine the bulk of the cost is in processing a request, rather than the size of it.
Twitter could charge 1¢ for each character over 140. That will encourage people to (still) be concise, but also monetize people (or companies) that want to say more.
The best suggestion I've seen is 1¢ for the 141st character, 2¢ for the 142nd, 4¢ for the 143rd, etc. Going slightly over 140 costs a trivial amount, but it would be stupidly expensive to tweet anything really long.
Edit: mental math botched. I thought I remembered the powers of 2 better than I actually did. 160 characters would be about 10k, and 100k would buy you a whopping 163 characters.
Incorrect, there is actually some well-established mathematics dealing with divergent series as summing to finite values via analytic continuation. These results have to be treated with care, because they are inconsistent under certain algebraic manipulations, but the techniques are "real" enough that their results are used in particle physics.
"The sum of the series 1+2+3+4+5+6... = -1/12" is patently false, without a previous assertion that we have assumed the Cesàro sum of a series is equal to the series.
Even mathematicians working with Cesàro sums surround such statements with "this holds only if we interpret the infinite sum defining Z to be the Cesàro sum..." [0]
Precisely none of the times I've heard the "1+2+3+4...=-1/12" bullshit has the person stating it prefaced their statement with "this holds only if we interpret the infinite sum defining Z to be the Cesàro sum..."
If you say that "1+2+3+4...=-1/12" without stating your prior assumptions, you suddenly allow anyone to make any assumption whatsoever, no matter how obscure it is. In your imaginary world, someone could walk into a store and claim that "this 95 cent pack of gum is free" because they just made the unstated assumption that all non-integers do not exist, and seconds later they could return it for a full refund of $0.95 after making the unstated assumption that in fact the rational numbers do exist. Numbers, and in fact the entire system of mathematics fail to work at all once you allow arbitrary, unstated assumptions no matter their obscurity. And in fact, the assumption that non-integer numbers do not exist is made far, far more frequently than the assumption that the infinite sum defining the sequence is the Cesàro sum.
The only difference is that assuming the non-integer numbers do not exist is a defensible assumption in many, many scenarios... but Cesàro summations are only invoked about twelve times a year, in pure math or advanced physics papers.
[0] Madras, Neal. "A Note on Diffusion State Distance." arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.07315 (2015).
Yeah, I botched my mental math, but yours isn't quite right either, because the 141st character is 1 cent, which is 2^0. So the 20th power of two in this context is 2^19, and the sum of the powers of two up to the 19th is 2^20 - 1.
Damn. I had originally even typed it with 2^20-1 and $10k, but then second-guessed myself. (This process of me second guessing my math intuition and then making it worse is also why I didn't end up competing on the national level for my state in the high school math leagues ;P.)
I'd rather the reverse: people already post pictures-of-text, and because twitter like to scale to fit with no way of seeing 1:1 zoom other than the browser's "View Image" feature, it can often be unreadable. Maybe they could OCR the images.
I like Twitter because it forces people to be concise. There are already plenty of places on the web where people can post long thoughtful articles or op-ed pieces.
It forces people to not write a complex English sentence, is what it does. You literally can't express complex thought without multi-tweeting. Which is annoying.
There's concision, and then there's nuking the concept of the paragraph.
Yes, thank you for the char-counting. I'm aware that my comment was not the height of profundity, nor was it particularly long. However, I do occasionally post more interesting things, and some of them need to be longer, because they discuss a complex issue or cite many facts. My comment was not intended to, in itself, justify the need for a longer Tweet length.
This is a non argument. Dismissing an argument out of hand as invalid because you say so adds nothing to the discussion. Feel free to expand that to an actual argument
All I'm saying is that the tired "count the characters of the comment that says tweets are too short to contain a complex thought and point out that it fits within a tweet" method of argumentation doesn't prove anything except an ability to count.
Sorry to reply to my own post. It bothered me that I literally knew no good substitute in English for "literally". Did some research, and the best that I found is the phrase "without exaggeration", which actually seems usable to me and might be more likely to be understood than "literally" is today.
"I got literally hundreds of bug reports today" may not be appreciated correctly (a listener who doesn't know me might think that I got 12 and I'm just whining), but "Speaking without exaggeration, I got hundreds of bug reports today" seems airtight.
Or maybe it's time to import >>wörtlich<< into English.
Only if you'd assume the fallacy that an enunciation could ever be "literal" in its meaning. I'd argue this actually points at a structural undecidability which is essential to language.
From your link: "Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposite of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary."
You can express complex thought in short equations (and in fact it is often preferable), so why would it be the case that it couldn't be expressed in just 140 characters? It doesn't make sense.
Short equations don't express complex thoughts. They express the short result of complex proofs, which are themselves essentially definitions. Math is a process of describing reality using definitions built on definitions. The analogy to communicating social, political, or creative thoughts is ridiculous.
If you want to prove me wrong, show me a complex thought expressed in 140 characters. Again, I agree that complex thought can result in a very interesting tweet, but the tweet will not be able to convey all the thought behind it.
But it doesn’t lead to any meaningful discussions.
I’ve tried using twitter for some time now, and you end up sounding a lot more angry when you spend the 20 minutes trying to get your thoughts into 140 characters, and you’ll have to use a horrendous amount of abbreviations.
There’s no space left for polite "hey, sorry, I disagree with your thoughts on [long name of a project], I’d think you could do [feature] better if you’d look at adopting [technology]", there’s only "[project’s feature] is bad, would be better with [technology]".
Especially when you try to use German, you write half a sentence and the box is full.
Same with imgur comments, I frequently end up writing "1/12" as prefix to my comments – at that point it’s useless.
I'm going to go out on what might be something of a limb and suggest that perhaps Twitter is not the place for meaningful discussions, or even, discussion in general.
Obviously there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter, but I generally don't follow people who do more than post inane status updates like "i love tacos lol" or links to mildly interesting news articles. For me at least, that's all I want Twitter to be, and it does that admirably. If I want discourse theres room for that pretty much anywhere else on the Internet.
I suspect the majority of the problems people have with Twitter stem from expecting it to be something that it just fundamentally isn't and can't be. If you use Twitter with a desire for serious engagement with others you're almost always going to be disappointed. If you treat it as a place to put silly 140 character messages out into the world whenever you feel like it then it's much more fun. And weirdly, much more useful.
I totally agree with you. I actually think that's what Twitter was originally intended for. But I can't help but think about how a huge portion of Twitter has just devolved into a community of angry, underinformed, unqualified pseudo-activists releasing their rage into the abyss. It's amazing how a completely absurd and incorrect statement can be liked and retweeted thousands of times just because it makes for a good soundbyte. Anywhere else, that behavior would be shut down quick. But not on Twitter. It's almost as if the way the platform is designed encourages the behavior. There is no room for actual discussion, discourse, and statement validation. Just one absurd, oversimplified statement that's subsequently dismissed by an equally absurd and oversimplified reply from another user. Over and over again.
I don't think that Twitter was originally designed for real discussion and discourse, but it's become the Social Activist Platform™, and as such, discourse and discussion are almost necessities. In it's current state, however, it's 140 character format unfortunately aids and promotes ignorant and uninformed statements rooted in mob mentality, killing the possibility of any meaningful discussion or discourse, which could benefit many of the conversations that are occurring on the platform.
Twitter wasn't meant for discussion and discourse, but it's community seems to be demanding that it be exactly that.
I don't think it's become just the Social Activist Platform™. There are just alot of people who are very interested in politics that post on it. The same goes for gaming and music. Not so much books or tech.
The other thing it has going for it is it encourages immediacy, which makes it fun for sports fans and journalists love it for that as well. Which then leads to the modern "immediacy vs. accuracy" problem that broadcasting faces as well. The main reason politicians like it is because that's where the journalists are at.
I think you're putting too much on Twitter if you're trying to blame it for lowering the level of discourse, or for political mobbing of people online. So much of this is a broader symptom of the Internet being accessible to so many people who are enthused but not very informed. And it happens across platforms. Facebook is worse IMO as it really leads to the lowest common denominator of political nonsense being shared out.
TL;DR: Twitter is good if you want to find people who have common interests. Or want to find out more from celebs and/or creatives. Or just from more normal people who have a cool job. It's bad if you want to talk politics, but so is 90% of the Internet.
> I'm going to go out on what might be something of a limb and suggest that perhaps Twitter is not the place for meaningful discussions, or even, discussion in general.
I tend to agree with you, but then again I've never understood the appeal of Twitter. Do people get enough entertainment out of the "i love tacos lol" tweets to continue using it day after day? You could link to mildly interesting articles, but you can hardly say anything about it in 140 characters, so why use that medium to post/reply to articles?
I really enjoy twitter for searching hashtags of current events. If there is some sort of live situation happening I always search twitter first for people near area etc. I almost always find news details on twitter faster than anywhere else. Example would be someone heard the police mention name on scanner and tweeted it long before news broke of persons name. After twitter I find every news source slow.
How many others do you imagine would pay twitter by the character rather than use mediums not so constrained and how much.
The most expensive medium per character is text messaging
https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing and each carrier effectively holds a monopoly on reaching that customer via that means especially since plenty of phones still can't receive any other form of electronic message.
Twitter has more than ample competition this kind of blackmail would destroy twitter.
People would switch to a free social network, guaranteed. Twitter already has a huge problem maintaining loyalty, and creating a class system -- where people who can/will pay actually get more of the stage -- would piss a lot of people off.
It forces people to
- Write simple sentence bereft of complexity and nuance.
- Split the same thought over multiple tweets hurting continuity
- Use url shorteners making it harder to discern the source before you click
- Write their long post on their blog and tweet the link to it.
This post describing the limitations and disadvantages of the twitter character limit couldn't have been tweeted!
I must be the only one who thinks this is a good idea (not the 10,000-char limit in specific, but something much higher than 140-char).
Some of the most interesting ideas I've seen on Twitter were in tweetstorms, which is a pretty nasty and ugly hack itself. Proponents of the 140-char limit usually cite some notion of terseness and thought-density, but I see more half-formed ideas and deliberate grammar/spelling mangling to make things fit. That's not terseness, that's gray-matter-powered lossy compression.
But I'm also one of those crazy people who uses Facebook like others use Twitter - I don't write whole essays but 140 chars is like thinking through a straw.
(Side note: I also have a pet theory that Twitter's problems with epic shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or less)
>I also have a pet theory that Twitter's problems with epic shitstorms/political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people arguing politics/economics/important things with each other in 140 chars or less
I'm pretty sure those arguments and "shit-storms" are occurring everywhere there is written text on the internet, regardless of character limitations.
Sure, though I feel like it's worse on Twitter than in most places for a few reasons: it's really easy to retweet and disseminate someone's post, and the public nature of accounts/tweets makes it very easy to dogpile.
On Facebook you might get some flak from your uncle, on a forum you might get into a tussle with another poster, but there are natural limits to the severity and the scale. On Twitter many of these limits are stripped away - it's very easy, and very common, to retweet someone "look at this fucking idiot" and invite your circles to pile on, many of whom will have never heard of the offender before.
This is also how harassment and abuse on Twitter is worse than other platforms - on Facebook you might get into a flamewar with your uncle and face awkward family dinners for a while, but on Twitter a dogpile is millions of users large, and you're statistically guaranteed to get a few people with legitimate screws loose in that bunch who might actually SWAT you or stalk you or otherwise take things way, way too far.
Add this to the fact that Twitter's length limits discourage nuance and encourage soundbites and you get IMO the worst intersection of soundbite culture, outrage culture, and massive built-in virality.
I keep joking to people that I want to start rotatedfloralheartbullet.com (.com), a social network where you're only allowed one character, but you have the whole unicode space to choose from.
Evan Williams founded Blogger (no character limit) and then Twitter (140-character limit). After rotatedfloralheartbullet.com's one-character limit, the logical conclusion is Bitter with one-bit posts. :)
From experience: don't underestimate network effects. "Twitter but like it used to be" still starts with nobody you're following on Twitter on it, and Twitter's TOC prevents you from importing them.
I can't believe that there are so many backers of the old limit! Don't you guys hate that you have to always compromise on punctuation, select shorter (but less precise) synonyms, and other just to fit into the story that Twitter was trying to push all this time, but which wasn't the reality (of people using Twitter via SMS)? Okay, now, Twitter goes to another extreme - from too short, to too long. I'm fine with shorter message, but 140 is way too short. Modern phones combine SMSs into a bigger blob. Use that and just make a limit of 5 SMSs or something along these lines.
I actually really enjoy the process of having to re-write my thoughts to have them fit. Reminds me what is crucial and what is superfluous. (139 chars)
u r so rite! 140 char limit limits my thoughts 2 that which is critical. without it id waste tons of space expressing my brilliant thoughts (140chars)
(speaking of crap formatting, I still can't get used to HN comment formatting.. apparently no way to make a line feed or a list, at least, none that's documented)
But seriously, it's ironic that Twitter limits tweets to 140char but the site and mobile app are some of the worst wastes of screen real estate I've ever seen. I keep trying to find it of some value but I just can't do it. Either nothing shows up in my feed, or I follow "must follow" people and get to hear them go on about random crap I don't care about. My real actual Twitter mobile app feed currently looks like this:
* retweet
* promoted tweet
* while you were away (1)
* while you were away (2)
* while you were away (3)
* while you were away (4)
* while you were away (5)
* actual tweet in proper chronological order (1)
* actual tweet in proper chronological order (2)
* people you may want to follow (1)
* people you may want to follow (2)
* people you may want to follow (3)
I had to scroll down 4 entire (iPhone 6) screenfuls of tweets before I got to the chronologic list of recent tweets I actually want to see, and even then, saw only 2 of them before the next chunk of junk! The light grey bar on a light grey background is poor delineation between sections, as well. It blows my mind that a mostly-text medium with such a strict character limit manages to have vastly worse information density than Facebook.
I use them differently, too, of course. Facebook feels more personal; I'm friends with real-life friends, and am a member of some groups for fun. Most of the updates feel personal to me.
Twitter I use to follow "important figures" and some friends.. but no friends tweet, and the important figures never say anything interesting.. or at least, if they do, I can't get to it, because the UI is such garbage.
it's what gave Twitter it's identity and allowed me to discover valuable information quickly. sticking a read more button to expand a tweet is just lazy and bad UX but worse, alters the fundamental usefulness of Twitter for me. it basically breaks the reading experience while introducing a host of issues and unnecessary friction. I'll surely alter my usage as well. I post way less now because of all of this AB testing and lack of product leadership.
True, but often people need to post multiple tweets, and somebody manages to reply in-between and then tracking the conversation becomes harder on the reader.
I feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the spirit of Twitter's original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but there's a "see more" button/icon/etc. that expands the tweet to longer form.
That would seem to solve both issues -- short-and-sweet for those that want it, and longer as necessary.
(Note this idea has been baked for approximately 15 seconds, so I'm sure I'm missing quite a bit.)
> I feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the spirit of Twitter's original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but there's a "see more" button/icon/etc. that expands the tweet to longer form.
That would also provide a better first-party equivalent to services like TwitLonger, as well as the common practice of posting a snippet and a longer text-as-image.
I'd like it if they added text attachments, like you can currently attach images or videos. This way the core tweet itself is still 140 characters. It'd be a nicer version of images full of text.
Microsoft Word used to have a summarization engine. You could specify a maximum length, and it would remove sentences, in a surprisingly intelligent way, to get to that length. Twitter readers now need such a feature. Just because someone sends huge tweets doesn't mean they have to be displayed.
I think it's very risky to do something like that with someone else's words without consulting them.
Imagine a satirical tweet with exactly the wrong "unnecessary" sentence removed. Suddenly your life is ruined because you said something that makes people angry.
My only concern is that we'd get into a frustrating game of clickbait, since the summary wouldn't necessarily have to reflect the content.
An example is the "Facebook is dead" link on HN recently. The article was about someone quitting Facebook, rather than an argument that Facebook is losing trendiness.
Now imagine a Twitter where every single tweet is similarly bait-y.
You see this now, whole paragraphs of a noteworthy book punctuating a timeline, people taking screenshots of text, or otherwise cluttering up my Twitter with textual soundbites in the guise of a JPEG
a.) These are not very accessible
b.) I am too lazy to transcribe / OCR these
c.) It defeats the purpose of Twitter
d.) It would be far more handy to have big text blobs like this in a Tweet's JSON schema Something like
{ textBlob: '...book quotes galore...'}
b.) Images as text are a huge waste of resources. A lot of bandwidth could be saved by persuading tweeps to use a text-blob instead of an image (Free bandwidth people, that's what we all want is it not?!)
Not if there are tools that abstract away all the difficulty. Type 10K chars into a box; hit post; magically the first 140 show up as a text and the rest as an image.
The Twitter engineering team is probably hating this decision. I bet a lot of their infrastructure is built around the assumption that tweet.txt is short :) This has huge implication on the data schema, caching, search, etc.
If that's the case, that's their own fault. Seriously.
As an engineer, you can hardcode your assumptions or make them parametric. I get that 140 chars has been a core part of the Twitter identity, and maybe there are some infrastructural aspects that have to be hardcoded to optimize for that. But if they've got `140`s sprinkled all over their code base because that was the assumption of the day, god help them.
Well... some back-of-the-envelope math. Assuming average characters-per-word of 4.5[1] and also add 1 for space/punctuation for a word unit of 5.5:
10000/5.5 = 1818 words.
1800 words @ 250 wpm average reading speed is ~7 minutes.
A 10,000 char (7 minute article) expansion looks to me like a "micro-blogging" platform rather than "tweeting". I'm guessing it all goes back to Twitter trying many things to become bigger than traditional Twitter. Hence the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513237
(It goes without saying that not every "mega" tweet will use all 10,000 chars.)
Wouldn't average characters per sentence be a slightly better measure? In German and other Germanic languages it's common with compounded words, thus word XY seem long but would in English just be written as X Y.
Presumably, post-140 Twitter will be pretty much the same as classical 140 twitter, but instead of 3/4 of all twerps ending with links to properties outside of Twitter, a huge chunk of those will link to more content inside of Twitter.
The only major change in post-140 Twitter would be the death of the Andreessen-style twerpstorm.
> The only major change in post-140 Twitter would be the death of the Andreessen-style twerpstorm
You'd think that's the case but I'm not so sure about that.
The hidden secret of secret of Tweetstorms is that they take up the space of multiple tweets, which means that people can retweet more times (people do retweet entire Tweetstorms!) and occupy the entire space on their followers' timelines.
Although, if you Tweetstorm when a 10k character limit exist, the shenanigans would be obvious. Anyone who pulled this would instantly get an unfollow from me, of course.
Also, I feel like "Tweetstorm" are also closer to the raw metal of how people actually think out loud (or at least anecdotally how I tend to think out loud), building from the last thought a small fragment at a time. To some extent that's what I appreciate about Twitter is sometimes capturing the raw point-to-point (scattered) thought process over blogs where one has a tendency to expand, revisit, and rewrite, obscuring the thought process but building a better narrative in the result.
I like the idea of going back, "merging tweets" into a collection, and then writing a narrative on top of it, connecting dots and building revisions that complete it as a "post". I guess kind of like Storify.
I originally agreed with you, but after thinking about it I think the devil is in the details of how this is released. That is, Twitter's uniqueness is that it is geared towards short, real-time "bursts of consciousness", but people with lots of followers still occasionally put out long "blogs in tweet form" with multiple tweets.
If Twitter keeps the focus on the short bursts, but still has a separate way to do "Twitter blogs" or whatever, I think it could work. If Twitter just unconditionally changes all Tweets to 10k it seems like it would kill what makes Twitter unique in the first place.
Completely non-sequitur fact, but maybe fun from a "hacker" perspective:
Most parakeet cages I've seen in bird stores have a bell-in-a-ball type toy. Try picking it up and ringing it sometime. For some reason, all the parakeets will stop chattering as long as the bell is ringing.
My biggest issue with Twitter's 140 character limit is it removes all opportunity for nuance. Within 140 characters you can just barely voice and opinion or thought in the most basic terms. Yes you can split your thoughts into multiple tweets but people will typically only focus on the first tweet that really expresses the basis of an idea and that's what will get shared the most. Allowing more wordy and nuanced tweets probably won't solve the social media over reactions that seem to flare up, but maybe it'll help if people aren't forced to awkwardly clarify their positions with a bunch of tweets that have to be read from the bottom up.
I think they should have a weekly character limit and let users use those characters as they want. That way you get a limit to prevent just reams and reams of characters in tweets, but allow flexibility with how you tweet.
I like this idea, or let users filter by what they want to see. 200 character, 500 character, 5000 character.
It still seems like twitter is trying to find their niche. The 140 character limit is long past its purpose, but it's also kind of a defining characteristic of twitter. It forces brief comments and an easy-skim timeline, at the expense of real conversation or information exchange.
TWITTER
Twitter Basics: Why 140-Characters, And How to Write More
We’re all used to the 140-character limit by now, but do you know how it started? Here’s a little history lesson for anyone wondering why they’ve got to condense their thoughts into 140-characters or less – and how to get around the limit without turning off your followers.
The origins of the 140-character limit
Once upon a time, long long ago… a group of young programmers whipped up a program that could send SMS to and from a small group of recipients.
This blossomed into Twitter, a web- and mobile- based messaging system that lets users send short messages – known as tweets – to one another.
So why the 140-character limit?
Twitter was (and still is) a service that relied heavily on mobile-messaging. Sure, you can send and receive tweets on your computer, but a huge draw of Twitter in the early days was its ability to be accessed from mobile phones.
And since the worldwide standard length of SMS (or text messages on phones) is 160-characters, the founders of Twitter thought it wise to stay within that bounds so as not to inundate people’s phones with 3 or 4 staggered, delayed, or even partially missing 4-part messages.
140-characters was chosen as a good length, leaving 20 characters for the username of the sender. This way, anyone receiving a tweet via SMS would get the whole tweet in a single text message, with nothing spilling over into a second or third message that pops up minutes later.
> What was its purpose and why is it long past it?
To allow people to use Twitter over SMS. SMS are 160 characters, so a 140 character tweet leaves room for a 20 character header to allow for metadata and actions.
You can still use Twitter this way, which is why (as of relatively recently) you couldn't post a tweet that began with the word "Get", even from the web interface.
SMS has a 160 character limit, and Twitter was originally supposed to be SMS driven. I personally don't know anyone who has ever Tweeted via SMS though, or whether that is still even possible.
I used it on an old Moto Razr for a while back in college when that was my daily driver. Address is still in my phone copied from SIM to SIM to Cloud (shortcode 40404).
On an old iPhone with just basic speech to text abilities I would sometimes use Bluetooth to "text twitter ..." and that worked. (Nowadays we got our Siris and Cortanas and direct app integration, but that "text twitter" is still sometimes a more reliable voice trigger than "tweet".)
I still often turn on SMS notifications for accounts I want to specifically hear from or events I'm attending.
Makes a lot more sense to just "fix" what they've already got -- stop counting @ mentions, hashtags, and URLs as characters. If URLs didn't count, that'd mean the death of URL shorteners, which would mean no more link rot.
I think they should increase their character limit linearly with time. Kinda like Gmail storage back in the day. Twitter wouldn't be twitter without short messages. Or maybe allow users to skip the limit once a day.
1. 140 char tweets aren't indexed very well by search engines. Writing blog posts or 400+ char tweets? Way better. More indexable content. More user growth. Wall street is satisfied for a few months.
2. The notion of expressing yourself (or whatever you want to call blogging) is easy to explain (WordPress, Tumblr, Medium). I'd argue that it's much easier to explain blogging than Twitter. By introducing something less ambiguous it should help user growth.
As much as I would hate 10k char tweets, I can see why they are doing this.
Minor changes to the current product won't drive the growth they and Wall Street are looking for.
Restricting users to 140 characters wasn't just a good idea because of SMS character limits, it also forced users to create content that had a far greater chance of being shareable.
The traditional blogging platforms that came before Twitter generally failed as broad-base social media platforms because of the walls of text people would write. If you're an average person, nobody wants to read your wall of text about some childhood experience, but people might be interested in your one-liners about news, celebrities, friends, etc.
I think the changes that are causing them to consider a 10,000-character limit are:
1. A larger percentage of Twitter traffic is celebrities/marketers, and people trying to connect with celebrities/marketers (not friends connecting with friends). Character limits don't matter for this traffic because quality/virality is either guaranteed (celebrities/marketers) or irrelevant (consumers trying to connect to celebrities/marketers).
2. It's difficult to sell text as short-form shareable content now that everyone's sharing images, gifs, and really short videos. If the text isn't going to be shareable, they might as well lift the character limit and expand its utility as a general feature.
Personally I like the idea. The way I use Twitter is to see what public figures and organizations are saying publicly, so a higher character limit is 100% upside for me.
This is going to kill Twitter for me. A few more characters is likely a good move. 256 seems nice.
But, I don't use Twitter for long form content. I do use Twitter as a way for people to get me interested in long form, or to raise awareness of something.
If my feed gets clogged with long form, I'm moving on. Too much info, wrong use case.
Seems to me Twitter could gather a lot more value out reconsideration of how hostile they have been to the ecosystem that grew up around Twitter.
- Tweets are not titles. Soon they 'll have "Click here to read my thoughts on X" / "Click here to read my response to Y" situation. That's not twitter, it's RSS.
- Content creators/websites that use twitter to funnel users to their websites will not use this feature.
- Tweetstorms can be solved much more elegantly (e.g. click to expand "continuation tweets")
- A tweet is a single sentence. Human brains have limits.
From what i understand they wont remove 140 tweets but will introduce their own variation of "posts".
Every media distribution site atm seems to try to also own the content.
Twitter's value isnt that you have to write short messages but that others can scan dozens of ideas/tweets of multiple people in a very short time. They wont take that away. Most likely you will even have to attach a 1400 tweet to the post.
Woah, woah, woah! 10,000? If anything tweets are too long! They should reduce the size if anything. 16 characters and a selfie should suffice for all inter human communication.
If we increase the character limit how does it foster innovation in the realm of human to human interaction? I mean, they might as well be old school print media at this point, slightly democratized to allow celebridiots to poorly market themselves and occasionally post something offensive which will create media outrage.
How will news anchors have segments where they "read people's tweets"? We don't have a segment called "Anderson Cooper reads the New York Times." They're direct competitors!
It's crazy! It makes no sense, Twitter has gone too far this time! People will just keep typing their stupid thoughts to fill the tweet up to the stupid limit because they have to be entertaining in long format. I don't have time for that shit!
How deep is the 140-character limit hard-coded or assumed throughout Twitter's codebase and beyond? How much would break if the Twitter front-end simply stopped limiting submissions to 140 characters? There is Twitter's web front-end, the server backend, Twitter's native apps, third-party clients, feed reading scripts, …
Twitter is considering to allow message longest that 140, but I don't think that the problem is the character limit for the kind of interaction of twitter users. There are other problems not so big but that make the user experience not fluent for a simple app like Twitter.
Writing posts with more that 140 can potentially get many FB users, nevertheless TW should take care of the its current users. I notice many incoherences of the web app, for instance the top menu, on left where pop/up and navigation are mixed.
Second, the mobile app is very wired I receive notifications about message or followers that appears on my notification tabs randomly.
In conclusion, I love TW and I'm not a FB user, but I'm honest my twitter timeline is a bunch of Ads and I follow Twitter just because I love the concept of it.
Facebook is a walled-garden, Twitter is not. The humans in the middle of these two giants, are all confused.
Meanwhile, Twitter needs to figure out how they are preventing spammers and spam-bots from infiltrating the environment where humans supposed to tread...only if, they wish humans to use their service.
This sounds like Weibo, a very popular service in China. There is some history of such a thing being very succcessful.
However, I've never used Weibo. Can any describe the differences between Weibo and longer-form Twitter, and talk about Weibo's strengths and weaknesses?
The problem is missing interesting Tweets. My timeline is flooded with new tweets. Better flagging to read later, algorithms that say you might find this most interesting, filtering would be welcome and are needed.
I still don't really understand Twitter. I have an account and have followed ~50 people and organizations I find interesting, and all I see is floods of re-tweets of people I have no interest in.
Filtering options would be nice but the lack of algorithms deciding what to show me is exactly why I use twitter over facebook and I already hate their occasional recommended tweets.
It would be nice if we could somehow follow based on more specific filters ... like combination of user and topic.
Recently I wanted to follow a well known Java Evangelist, but their Java tweets were mixed with lots of politics tweets. Even though I agreed with the politics, I only wanted to read the Java related stuff - but it was like drinking from a firehose so I gave up.
And also being able to disable retweets for Lists would be nice too.
The character limit is a massive problem though. Tweetstorms, replying to yourself, and posting images of text are all ridiculous hacks for a basic use case.
Can you expand on that? Do the tweets contain links, or do they just pack enough meaning into 140 characters that you'd like to think about it for some time before replying?
Personally, I think that anything that needs to be bookmarked later like that belongs in an RSS feed.
Links, videos, and potentially interesting discussions that may result.
The last point also touches on an issue I have with the Twitter Android client: there's no way to refresh a tweet to see new replies. Even if I go back to my timeline and tap on the tweet again, it'll just show whatever it has in the local cache. Normally that's good behavior, but a pull-to-refresh (an action patented by Twitter, no less) would be absolutely ideal.
It sounds more like you'll be able to attach a long-form text document to a tweet just like you can attach a photo. The tweet itself, as presented in the normal view, is still constrained in length.
Yeah, this isn't even that new -- currently people get the same effect by posting images of text. Allowing them to attach text is a logical improvement.
I find it fascinating that almost every single significant product change Twitter has made has effectively been a result of end-users or third party developers attempting to fix the core product experience.
- @mentions
- Retweets
- Mobile clients
- periscope
- Image effects
Now long-form tweets trying to fix the redicilous problems of having to screenshot text to fit your message in, agonizing over short URLs or character by character shortcuts just to get a tweet out.
Any significant innovations or leaps forward from Twitter that we're not what people have been trying to do?
Meh, I doubt it would bring me back. 90% of my friends are on FB and the lack of a limit (or one I've ever hit) is quite nice. I'm able to write out full sentences with much less ambiguity or "text-speak" and while FB isn't my favourite company ever I'm going to go where my friends are at the end of the day. I don't write pages and pages or even multiple paragraphs most of the time but 1-2 sentences is normally not enough to express a full thought and because of that Twitter just doesn't work for me.
They might extend the message limit to 10K characters, but they won't be able to stretch their users' attention span which is probably is bound by 2 or 3 sentences anyway.
Finally! I have been wanting them to remove that for a long time now.
Twitters biggest problem is that they are a protocol router more than a destination. And so while people use it to find content they consume this content somewhere else out of reach for twitters add engine.
Now that people will start writing on twitter this will mean a lot more time is spent on twitter consuming content on twitter and reading ads on twitter.
With this they get to keep the protocol part while keeping users longer on their platform to consume content.
I am talking about Twitters biggest problems from the point of whether it will survive you talk about it from the point of whether it's a better product experience.
it's a short-term fix. also, the details will likely introduce UX issues when so many others could have been addressed. this, along with a non-reverse chronological timeline is a product pivot with lots of risk. maybe it'll work out, but I'll use it less. I'd rather invest in time elsewhere based on where Twitter is headed.
the 160 character limit on twitter helped me learn to speak more concisely.
I've had an account since 2009, but didn't start using it until 2014. It was work at first - I didn't "get" it - but i stuck with it, and gradually i enjoyed it more. All my tweets went through to faceebok, where they recieved more positive feedback than my typical facebook posts.
People can read 160 characters of text quickly, and enjoy it. Long paragraphs, not so much.
If Twitter is finally willing to increase the limit, maybe they should consider options to monetize it. Like my suggestion from years ago that they should sell a $1 per month subscription for users wanting to double their limit: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=65
TweetDeck (before it was sabotaged by Twitter) used to have a cool feature like this where if you "tweet longer" you get a link attached to your tweet.
Twitter killed this years ago when it acquired TweetDeck.
This is funny because everything Twitter has been doing lately has been mostly done (and stripped down ever-since) in TweetDeck years ago!
Unless they're going to create some sort of limit on how much Twitter mobs can dogpile people, doxx them, and call their employers to get them fired, no thanks. You'd have to be crazy to post on Twitter and take those risks, no matter how anodyne you think you're being in your tweets.
There's quite a few ideas that were created because of the limit. For example Micro SF (https://twitter.com/microsff). Constraints can fuel creativity, it would be sad to see this go.
Reminds me of a company that was doing innovation in radio and figured out a way to beam still images with the radio waves. Only problem is they were on their way to re-inventing TV if they did a little more innovation..
All that's needed now is markdown or html support...
A good solution would be having a 10000 character limit, but formatting under-140 tweets differently so they stand out more. This would encourage people to keep things short, while giving them a way to publish longer posts if they really want to.
sorry ;) I guess I came across as trollish, but I really loved Twitter and it's difficult to see it on its current path. There were so many historical and important industry news items I learned first on Twitter. Twitter owns the in-the-moment. However, I'm passionate about UX and see something really cool being built at Ello. I've dealt with all the platforms and Ello to me is very unique. Deep down, I want Twitter to still succeed, but I see too many bad product decisions coming from a company that lacks clarity and UX passion.
Increasing the limit beyond the current arbitrary 140 character limit is good, but 10000 characters is a bit much. I'd rather see a small increase (maybe 160, 200?) and removing links and @'s from the count.
Okay what's differentiating Twitter from fucking Facebook now?
Only the facts that there's (currently) no policy against pseudonyms, bots and multiple accounts and that there's no useless crap games like Farmville.
I think that the crucial difference between twitter and facebook is not the length of the posts, but the fact that twitter is broadcast, or "publish-subscribe", while facebook is semi-private through reciprocal permission (by default).
And the publish/subscribe model being a possibly superior alternative to a two-way opt-in friendship model, is probably the reason for twitter's success not the 140 characters. So by keeping the subscription model but allowing for longer content, I think it's a win-win.
I've never used twitter and don't understand the appeal at all. How can anything worthwhile be said in 150 characters? Even this comment comes in at 171 characters, jesus.
I can only see this being beneficial to the platform and/or ecosystem if they restrict the default displayed size of tweets, requiring users to click-through to read more.
Twitter should add the option to put the long-form articles behind a paywall, pay the author and withhold a fee. Solves their monetization problem in one go.
Seriously: Jack Dorsey is definitely worth his 100 millions if he can come up with innovations like this; raising the number of character? Holy shmoly, what a genius! A veritable dare devil!
I feel bad for Twitter because they have a popular product that's hard to monetize. That being said, I wonder if any of the Twitter execs who think of this stuff actually use Twitter.
I don't feel sorry for them. Twitter is a great idea and valuable platform. It would be better implemented in a decentralized way - perhaps with it's own protocol.
By running it as a business and they're trying to force a square peg into a round hole and slowly undermining its value.
We already have that - it is called tumblr. Also the social media outragists will have slightly harder time pulling things out of context - think about all the other media which income comes from producing outrage over tweets ...
I have a semi-serious business idea for Twitter. They should charge verified/celebrity users a huge amount to be able to fill in whatever number they want in the followers box. If you're advertising on twitter, you will know the actual number so you're not paying extra. It\ would reduce or eliminate the services that "help" with inflating your follower count, and vain people who care about this stuff get to see a large number next to their name.
Right now, twitter can claim that the number labeled "followers" is the number of followers. If they adopt your scheme, they can't. They'd basically be lying.
To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that's nice about Twitter is that it's fairly skimmable. All of those "1/ Some thought", "2/ some thought continued" threads damage that. Combining them into a "My thoughts on... read more" tweet would be much nicer.
If they implement the feature like that, which is implied in the article, this would be a big improvement to Twitter in my opinion.