Comment by Grue3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Grue3 | Hacker News Reader

1. Remove post length limit. 2. Limit the number of tweets per day instead. 3. You can pay to remove the above limit.

This solves the problem of timeline being unreadable once you subscribe to enough people. Ain't nobody got time to read all that crap. Once everyone is rate-limited, everyone can easily digest their timeline. Without length limit, tweets become more thoughtful.

4. Fix the UI. Make it easy to view replies. Make it easy to view embedded images. Make it lean and fast. That would give Twitter advantage over similarly bloated services.

5. Anti-trolling measures. This one is really obvious! There should be no indication that you're blocked by another person, they just don't see you anymore. If the blocked person doesn't know they're blocked, they don't get the satisfaction of being blocked, and they don't know when they need to create another account to annoy you. This should be the basic rule when you implement a blocking feature.

6. Open up API. This one is obvious.

> Ain't nobody got time to read all that crap.

+10 to this. The signal to noise on Twitter is terrible.

Pretty sure I'm using it "wrong", but my likelihood of following someone on Twitter is generally inversely proportional to their number of tweets per day.

In the set of people I follow, the popularity of Twitter accounts is directly proportional to the total number of tweets they have, which is a sample of almost 400 people. I did an analysis a while back.

Of course, there are always counter examples, famous people that don't tweet at all, or people posting dumb shit and not getting followers. That tweet to follower ratio has some variation. Quality matters too and it helps if people have a following outside of Twitter.

But still, I'd say that your likelihood of following someone is not representative of other Twitter users.

Uh...so stop following "crap" accounts?

> 1. Remove post length limit

That post length limit is what made Twitter interesting for me. This is being identified as a problem, however there's always Facebook and Google+ that don't have a limit. Twitter will not succeed by copying competitors.

> 2. Limit the number of tweets per day instead. 3. You can pay to remove the above limit.

People will never pay for removing such limits. They'll simply switch service once it gets annoying enough. This is the flaw in the logic of people that are anti ads as a business model. Basically people will not pay up unless there's scarcity and artificial scarcity doesn't really work.

Such a strategy would also be really unwise, because from my own observations, a majority of Twitter users are fairly silent, being content consumers rather than producers. So alienating those users that produce content for you is not the best strategy.

Agreed that the post length limit shouldn't be removed. However, I am fine with a limited number of tweets instead. Perhaps not by day, since some days there are so many newsworthy events that there might be a lot of possible quality tweets. Maybe a weekly limit? Just something to discourage someone from spamming.

Regarding #1, #2, and #3.

So what happens if instead of having 1,000 x 140 char tweets cluttering your timeline, you instead wind up with 100 x 1400 char tweets? Do you have time to read all that?

You can see if something is worth reading within the first 100 characters. Twitter character limit doesn't work because people are posting images of text, or do "tweetstorms". If the limit made sense, the users wouldn't be doing this.

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