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Comment by AlwaysBCoding | Hacker News Reader

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.

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You don't necessarily have to write them yourself. You can just copy and paste from different sources multiple times a day.

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.

Wait, are you telling me I can copy paste content on the Internet and get credit for it?

I believe this is called "Programming" in certain enterprise circles.

I think the term of art in this case is "retweet".

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)).

You don't necessarily have to write them yourself. You can just copy and paste from different sources multiple times a day.

(Sorry. I'll take your downboats and be on my way. I could not resist.)

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).

People won't write long blog posts. Instead they will get drunk and write long LiveJournal posts.

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.

It's that simple.

[1] this figure was really hard to find, don't know why. http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-statistics-by-the-numbers-1531...

[2] http://greatist.com/happiness/must-follow-twitter-accounts

[3] http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/march-2013-by-the-num...

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. :)

Agreed. And editing is the hardest (but most important) part of writing.

Hence the old gag:

Sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have much time.

Blaise Pascal, in 1657: "I have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter."

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

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)

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