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Comment by richdougherty | Hacker News Reader

I personally like the way Twitter encourages brevity. I think the constraint of 140 characters leads to more thoughtful, creative expression. So it's really an aesthetic thing for me.

But I don't have an argument with people who want more. Having more characters will making tweeting easier and more practical.

It's really a decision for Twitter to make - do they prioritise aesthetics or utility?

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Yeah, I'm a big fan of the brevity. For me who I follow is about breadth, and the longer people's tweets are, the fewer I can follow. I also think a lot of the >140 tweets I see could easily be written in 140 if the writer worked a little harder. As this edit of Jack's first 280-character tweet conveys well: https://twitter.com/caitlin__kelly/status/912795950476857344...

It's a love/hate thing. I see your edit and it looks like arbitrary whittling down of the original which was already fine, if not superior.

I see you're not much of a Twitter user, so I can see how you might not be sensitive to the difference. But for me, the 140 character limit has been a great source of writing discipline, getting me to squeeze a point to its essence. If the 280-character version is only arguably better than the 140-character one, then it's circa half as efficient, both in terms of character count and the reader's time. Jack's post was sloppy writing.

And that's really my beef with this change. Twitter is seeking something easy to measure -- engagement of marginal writers -- but willing to sacrifice things that are harder to measure, like reader burden and tweet quality.

Worse, this still won't solve the "need to post more text" problem; you can find a zillion historical examples of people needing more than 280 characters. Thus the unique institution of a tweetstorm, where people had to distill their thinking into a linked set of short, punchy sentences. Thus the less appealing practice of posting an image of text. Thus people being inspired to write longer posts elsewhere and then respond with a well-phrased tweet and a link. I think Twitter would have been far better served to offer text attachments equivalent to image attachments, basically adding a real blogging feature to their existing microblogging platform.

Any constraint has the power to encourage more thoughtful, creative expression. Even the most draconian censorship regime sometimes results in beautiful works designed to work around it. But 140 is just an arbitrary number picked for technical reasons a long time ago. There's no reason to think that 140 hits the right balance between brevity and expressiveness. We've simply adapted to this arbitrary limit, in a sort of Stockholm syndrome.

Had they picked 100 characters when they first started, and then decided to increase that to 140, we'd be having this exact same conversation.

Maybe there's a sweet spot for the length of a tweet in any given language that we could find out by map-reducing some big data. But it's unlikely to coincide with the arbitrary limit imposed by SMS, so I'm happy to see Twitter experimenting with a different limit and carefully monitoring how it affects usage patterns.

> Having more characters will making tweeting easier

That's exactly what I don't want. When I tweet, I have to take a minute to try to make my idea more concise. I make multiple passes over it and end trimming a lot of the unnecessary words.

In short, the author has to spend a bit more time, but saves a lot of time for every single person who has to read the tweet.

Whenever i had to make my idea "more concise" it was because i was explaining something complicated and had to sacrifice nuance. Often this led to people failing to understand the point, resulting in unnecessary back and forth where i then supply the nuance after the fact. More recently it led to simply giving up and not even trying in the first place.

> I think the constraint of 140 characters leads to more thoughtful, creative expression.

Leads 2 cryptic and weird abbrev.

I never see this type of abbreviation on my timeline.

Out of 69043 tweets I have in my current timeline archive, 160 (0.23%) of them contained ' u '; of which only 30 (0.04%) were from people I follow, the other 130 (0.19%) were retweets.

140 is more than just aesthetics. The enforced brevity is what makes so many people regular readers of a tweeter that would not be regular readers of a blogger or of a serial essayist. If Trump pushed out five ten minute reads per day, only people paid to condense them into shorter forms would read them (journalists and analysts). And that's supposedly the most important person in the world, the impact of a switch to longer forms would be even bigger for other Twitter celebrities. The brevity vs. depth tradeoff is also a tradeoff between reach and depth.

On a certain level of abstraction, Twitter's achievement is an implicit contract between writer and reader that promises a certain standardized answer to the brevity vs depth question that greatly helps brevity to fulfill its potential of generating reach. Tweaking that contract, even by a mere 140 characters is huge (Twitter, of all entities, should know how important 140 characters can be).

> I think the constraint of 140 characters leads to more thoughtful, creative expression

In english, esp. with the emoji's and shortenings line "4 u" == "for you". Other languages rarely have this kind of option unfortunately.

> I think the constraint of 140 characters leads to more thoughtful, creative expression

No, it leads to long tweet storms.

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