Jack Dorsey addresses Twitter's character limit | Hacker News Reader

Jack Dorsey addresses Twitter's character limit

twitter.com

85 pointsTheBiv69 comments

If you need a thousand words to say something, put it on Medium or Tumblr or any of the hundreds of other blogging and social media platforms. I dont mind a minor tweak of the char. limit, but the rumored 1000 word limit is way too much.

The beauty of Twitter is its brevity. It forces people to cut out the flab and be concise. This in turn makes the entire steam easily glanceable. Huge walls of text will take away much of what makes Twitter special.

I'm 100% with you. Honestly, my "prefect Twitter" would be to keep the 140char limit, but to exclude @ mentions, photos, and links from the limit.

That way users can be a bit more expressive without the word-barf walls of text which make Facebook, Tumblr, and other social platforms a nightmare to read through.

> I'm 100% with you. Honestly, my "prefect Twitter" would be to keep the 140char limit, but to exclude @ mentions, photos, and links from the limit.

Right now, there's a real benefit to having short Twitter handles, because they count less against the limit (longer ones really add up in Twitter conversations that involve multiple people).

I understand why usernames count towards the limit, but I wish they didn't.

You know what a good solution to that? Constant cost for @mentions. Each one costs you two characters.

While you are at it, urls cost you 5. Images cost you 10.

Removes the benefit of shorter twitter handles, longer twitter handles doesn't fuck up what you are trying to say and, you can talk to multiple people in the same tweet.

I really like this idea.

Ooh, I like this!

However, I feel like it would be weird for people to adopt, and probably put people off of Twitter, since paying attention to a 1-1 limit is annoying enough.

I don't think it would require any conscious effort on the end user, the remaining char counter would handle all of this for them so adoption is painless

Playing devil's advocate, my first response would be to register accounts for, say, the 2,500 most common English words and then compose some rather nice essays.

@Yes, @something @like @that @might @prove @quite @funny.

Perhaps make it only the 1000 most common words and rename Twitter "Thing Sayer"?

Length of mentions could be capped at 140 to prevent this hack.

That makes sense to you (a web user who wants to use multiple platforms, and likely already does) but not to Twitter (a business whose financial interests are best realized the longer you stay within the walled garden of their product.) Twitter doesn’t want you to leave their ecosystem, so they’re considering changing the boundaries of the ecosystem.

perhaps but if that ecosystem is just like everyone else's, what's the point of staying?

Which is all well and good, but when you take away too many of the features which make that ecosystem unique, there's less incentive to use it over anything else.

They should just acquire twitlonger and be done with it.

Doesn't have to be huge walls of text. Technology can help with that easy enough.

Another option would be to turn lengthier posts into cards. Uses existing Twitter concepts, doesn't change anything for existing users, lets people express more complex ideas. Seems like an easy change and a big win for everyone.

I assume that this is what's going to happen. While I'm a bit nervous about this whole "10,000 char" thing, it would totally destroy their current user experience and make Twitter unreadable if they actually implemented it in your feed.

Still, I don't quite know if I like that idea. I guess we'll see.

Totally. There's no way they'll dump 10,000 character posts into your feed without providing a summary and read more link. That would destroy the experience on any social network, which is why Facebook already summarizes lengthy posts automatically. A tweet-sized summary would make everyone's complaints about this a total non-issue.

For reference, here's what 10,000 characters looks like:

http://pastebin.com/vNQ0CSMu

In figuring itself out now, Twitter's real problem that its existing users haven't had to experience any real degree of change for a long time. Facebook was kind of smart to "move fast and break things" and ignore the complaints from people who don't want to have to learn new ways of doing things :P

Isn't this identical to saying, "If you need to post a pic, do it on Instagram?"

The essence of Twitter, Instagram, etc. is the social network. The format of the content is fungible.

Further, short tweets can coexist with text-walls just as pics and videos coexist with 140 character tweets.

Twitter is chasing growth. They are not adding this feature because the current user base demands it, they're adding it because they think they can use it to bring more people in.

Though it should keep the current user base happy.

exactly :/ and its the kind of move you dont come back onto, argue upon for the next 5 to 10 years which either result in:

- twitter becomes another FB/tumblr/medium/whatever. shareholders happy, money flows better, old twitter users gone.

- twitter slowly dies while arguing it was a good choice and writing 10k letters of excuses

Neither result interests me.

"- twitter becomes another FB/tumblr/medium/whatever."

It's it that already? How is it different/special? Seriously most of my friends on twitter just reblog the same exact stuff they post on instagram and facebook. They all seem analogous to me at this point.

Twitter seems angrier and more prone to witchhunts than the others. Gamergate/Justine Sacco/whatever seem like they're more likely to happen when the boundary between chatting with friends and public statements is blurry.

I feel like Twitter is not going to make it because it feels very hostile to _any_ beliefs. I'd bet that it will be seen as leading to Instagram/Medium/Weibo/whatever, much the same way that the BBSs led us to HN.

Agree- it seems very reactionary and defensive. Our attention is getting VERY fragmented. Personally, I feel way too spread out over too many social media venues and I don't know where to focus. I have a twitter but it's only to park my name there and in case professional people google me. I don't use it. I'm not sure what to use these days, to be honest.

"What if text was actually text?"

Imagine if you traveled back in time to the 90s and showed this to someone and said this was coming from the CEO of two multi-billion dollar 21st century companies.

I'm actually in the process of updating my quote template for my content marketing services at the moment, and looking over it again it's basically a bunch of gibberish and nonsense that wouldn't have made sense when I was growing up. Weird.

Twitter wants to be Tumblr; They want to be an amalgamation of people's content, including photos, surveys, tweets, posts, and anything else people can come up with.

I would definitely use the service more if longer text posts were allowed, but make sure you set them up as separate "entry" types. Tweets should be in large font, while text should be smaller, and maybe a different background color (and possibly filterable).

Its interesting to see both responses to his tweet and the responses here. Pretty much everyone seems dead set against the idea. Personally i'm cautious about the implementation but im not against the idea. I post on FB far more than any other platform. It's not because I have more friends there. In fact I have more followers on twitter. Its simply because FB doesnt limit what I want to say. I completely get that brevity is a huge advantage. Honestly I do, but no matter how lean one is with one's words, there's only so much one can cram in. It's the only reason I dont post more to twitter. Heck i broadcast more out on Telegram than I do on twitter and i dont even have a large broadcast list. Yes, these problems can be solved with a blog but that introduces a new problem of distribution. Its far easier to get a large number of people to read your text on twitter than it is on a blog, even when you have a slick platform such as Medium. There's just too much thinking involved in something like that. A blog isn't something you write while you're jumping on the bus, but an extended tweet is something you might. I know for a fact I'd tweet more even if i had just a couple hundred more characters to play with. It doesnt need to be a huge change. As i said. It all comes down to how they choose to execute. This could potentially make or break twitter.

Edit: sp/grammar

Photographs of text are not searchable. Twitter needs your tweets in text so that they can target ads at you and make money. If you want twitter to succeed as a business, you'll support the increase in text length.

They should auto-create a blog for you, when you create a long message (twitter.com/user/blog/), and only include the link to the blogpost in your twitter stream.

Dear Twitter,

People hate change. They really do. So if you're going to make a change, do it swiftly. Just yank that bandaid off. They'll get over it when the stinging stops.

Yours,

Everyone not whining about this.

What are the business advantages? It has to make business sense, right?

Bigger ads? Trap people more in the ecosystem, less outbound links, maybe?

They don't have traction amongst normal humans.

Just what the world needs: more traps.

All of the above, plus attracting new users.

Comparatively, Twitter doesn't have the same user base as Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp, and I think that extending the character limit is a way of making Twitter more accessible for first-time users.

It's also designed to bring more brands to Twitter. Right now it's extremely difficult to promote your brand/business, include a photo, @ mention someone, and include a hashtag. An extended character limit solves all of these problems, making it a more attractive platform for advertising than ever before.

Having more text means more text to mine which would be something of a paid service. I can imagine a couple of ways, but imagine a real time feed of all long text "posts" which mention your brand, product, company.

Seems like a pretty strong suggestion that they will be increasing the character limit (if only through a "show more" button).

Very telling that he used "if we decide to ship what we explore, WE'RE [emphasis added] telling developers well in advance" instead of "we would tell developers"

This should have been a blog post.

I think it's more of a tongue-in-cheek self reference. "We've spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it." The spellcheck underline at the end was probably not just carelessness, though I don't follow the whims of tech royalty very carefully.

The fact that I had to tab back and forth to type up the quote drives his point home for me.

Most photos of text on Twitter are not original content. They're either a photo with no textual content (e.g., selfie), a photo of a twitter conversation (used as a form of archiving in case of deletion), or a photo of a physical text (used to quote a non-digital medium).

If tweet-storms are aesthetically compatible with Jack Dorsey's denim collection, and a character limit isn't meant to replace them, then I don't see how the expanded character limit is addressing an existing problem for users. It's certainly not gonna replace textual photos.

What definition of "original content" do selfies fail to meet?

Uh, what? Why would you address this almost a decade after launching? Why would you call out people who post images to get around the limitation? Seems like grasping for straws to me...

The reason to mention image posting is specifically to say that they want the UX to be like a text attachment rather than just a wall of text on someone's feed. Which is a much smaller disruption to existing experience.

On that note, the fact that images are being used to show text content on Twitter right now is laughingly unfair to folks who use a screen reader, given how much we value HTML for its presentation flexibility.

Re: screen readers, this obsession with image and video on the web is infuriating. All I want to do is consume text, especially for news. Why is this so much to ask for?

> Why would you address this almost a decade after launching

Twitter has changed CEOs four times since it was founded. It's never been a company with any kind of long-term vision or strategy.

Which is hilariously fitting.

They should tier it. 140 characters for a free account. 280 characters for a cheap but paid ($) account. 1000 chars for a premium ($$$) account.

Basically he is saying "we allowed pictures, but now people are taking pictures of long texts, therefore we should lift the limit." The photos were a mistake in the first place! The path for Twitter is now to become a Facebook clone, without much differentiation (and with a smaller user base).

This is almost definitely not going to actually allow tweets to be any longer.

My bet is that it manifests as some kind of text attachment. Just as you're currently able to attach images, video, and all sorts of random junk via 'cards', you'll now be able to attach a text post.

Most of the time when I see a tweet, it's when somebody takes a screenshot and posts it in a news article. It's been years since I've logged into twitter.com to sift through garbage looking for anything useful.

truth is, except for this single tweet, i just skip images-as-text. they're the minority. with the new twitter, making this a real thing, i suspect the amount of large messages will be enough that...i will skip twitter?

I don't undestand since you can insert pictures people use them to post long posts so what's the point of having limited number of characters? EDIT: or you can post a link to somewhere

ever searched an image for something?

exactly, so you want to use text instead of images to write longer, that's my point, why limit text

Did you even cared to visit the story link?

yes, saying pretty much the same I'm saying

It's kind of ironic Jack Dorsey used an image of text (containing several paragraphs) to explain why the 140 character limit is a "good" thing for Twitter.

Seems like he was trying to convey a message -- being a bit meta about the problem with the character limitation perhaps?

It's not ironic, it's his point. The same people complaining about having more characters have been using images of text to get around the 140 character limit. Their complaining doesn't make sense.

>The same people complaining about having more characters have been using images of text to get around the 140 character limit.

Are they? This claim seems highly unlikely. Do you know of any specific critics of this new policy who have posted such images?

and reading his message was annoying because too long. it could have fitted in 3 short sentences (of, granted, potentially up to 250 chars)

or they just post multiple tweets all in a row if they run out of space in the 140 characters.

Like you, I read Dorsey's post unable to tell whether he was for increasing the limit (and using the image to prove his point) or against increasing the limit (and oblivious to the contradiction). Thus illustrating another big limitation of Twitter: the difficulty of understanding the context of a single tweet.

It's just as ironic that his post to answer whether Twitter would support a 140+ character count neither said they would or wouldn't be changing the limit by using a screenshot of text more than 140 characters.

I believe this post to be a huge joke. All meta, no value. He's totally messing with us. Funny.

I don't think that's what he was explaining. To me, this reads as Jack saying essentially, "I like the 140-character limit, but sometimes you just need more text, and the current solution of having to tweet images like this is stupid, so we're looking into how to do it better without compromising the common case. I don't know exactly what we'll do yet, but we know there's value in short text and there's also value to long text."

I guess Dorsey will finally get his revenge on Evan Williams.

I'm out of the loop, can you fill me in? Did they have a falling out?

Is there room for a constrained text-only Twitter clone?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com