Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules

Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules(techcrunch.com)

22 points by hackergirl88 10 years ago | 27 comments

detaro 10 years ago |

official announcement: https://blog.twitter.com/express-even-more-in-140-characters (running discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11761583)

donretag 10 years ago |

"After all, Twitter is a great big, public conversational platform — the fact that you could follow chats between other users you cared about was part of its draw."

Insane. For me it is the complete opposite. Having to read a personal conversation between two people is perhaps the primary reason I do not use Twitter. Far too much noise. And they should count hashtags as double (the other main reason why I cannot stand Twitter).

giarc 10 years ago | |

If you think twitter is bad for hashtags, I recommend staying away from Instagram.

donretag 10 years ago | | |

Do not use Instagram either, but for other reasons. :)

I tried using Instagram. Downloaded the app and created an account. It promptly emailed everyone in my address book notifying them that I created an account. Deleted the app and my account. Never again.

t0mbstone 10 years ago |

I almost completely ditched Twitter because I got sick of attempting to condense my thoughts into blurbs a toddler with ADD could understand.

On twitter, I have thousands of followers and I'm lucky to get even one reply or mention.

On Facebook, however, I have about 300 friends, and I can post an actual paragraph along with a photo or a video. I often get 30 likes and 20 comments on the posts.

Facebook does a much better job of facilitating real conversations, and yet it still allows people to post 140 character blurbs (if they want to).

I get it though. Twitter is what it is, and there are tons of people who love it. I'm not one of those people.

fayimora 10 years ago |

The way I understand it, the 140 character limit still holds. They just stopped counting things like mentions and URLs.

robmcm 10 years ago | |

But if they didn't use a misleading title you wouldn't have clicked the link...

fayimora 10 years ago | | |

haha I thought about that too. Clever but slightly misleading. Surely they could have come up with something true and equally attractive but then again it's the battle of "who gets the story out first"

Touche 10 years ago | | |

Is it misleading to call a spade a spade? There's a character limit, they're just going to arbitrarily decide what is and isn't a character based on engagement feedback they get from advertisers.

teaneedz 10 years ago |

Removing the ".@" syntax is a mistake. I don't always want to broadcast replies. I still don't understand why URLs are still included within the 140 char limit either. Can someone explain that better than the article?

ecesena 10 years ago | |

Urls where fixed to 22, then 23, lately 24 chars. It's the length of the actual shortened url.

I've been working with people helping social media for a bit, and one common issue in preparing a list of tweets to schedule is making sure the length is ok. So you end up with silly xls files where you have a url column, a text column, etc. and weird formulas to compute the size.

I think Twitter just wants to simplify the life. You can send 140 chars of text/comment. Mentions, urls, images, etc. are not counted because normal people aren't counting like that.

apetresc 10 years ago | | |

He was asking why URLs ARE still being counted as part of the length – Twitter seems to have excluded everything except for those. Your reply demonstrates how arbitrary that distinction is :)

alexizamerican 10 years ago | |

From the blog, replies aren't broadcasted. Only new tweets that use "@" are broadcasted.

lutz 10 years ago | |

What they mean is that .@ isn't getting removed -- by default your replies won't be broadcast to everyone (same rules apply as always) -- but since you no longer see the leading @mentions, you physically cannot do .@ on the tweet. The right way to do it going forward will be a retweet on your own tweet.

tptacek 10 years ago |

I don't know if this was the original Techcrunch title, but it is extraordinarily misleading. The proper title is the current article title:

Twitter moves away from 140 characters, ditches confusing and restrictive rules

dang 10 years ago | |

Thanks, we restored the original title.

Submitters: please do not rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please especially don't rewrite them to make them more misleading and linkbait. (Submitted title was "Twitter ditches 140 character limit".)

Tomte 10 years ago | | |

Apropos character limits: maybe you could stop counting (2001) etc. towards the 80 character limit in submissions?

Because a few times I have left out the year since I couldn't find a good shorter title, and then you added the year afterwards. I would have done that myself. :-)

acaloiar 10 years ago |

I get why this is news to many people, but when you get down to it, a company removed its own arbitrary limitation. It's really difficult to give a shit about such things.

EDIT: I'm aware of the original reasoning for the limitation, so perhaps "arbitrary" is not the best adjective.

AlphaNico 10 years ago |

Interesting move toward the end of the 140 character limit. Let's see how it goes but I'm pretty sure people will still complain about the limitation, until they really ditch it...

mettamage 10 years ago |

Silly question perhaps (I'm a Twitterer): but can't you now do hacky things like @insert_complete_message_you_want_to_tell?

sumitgt 10 years ago | |

Maybe not that since that would not be registered username.

http://but.you.might.be.able.to.do.something.like.this

pilif 10 years ago | | |

no, because URLs are still counted (probably because of this workaround).

fayimora 10 years ago |

Wow I have been using Twitter since 08/09 and I never knew about the ".@" reply.

jug 10 years ago | |

There was nothing special to them though. Convention was just ".@user" but you could also have used "Hello @user!" The point was to force Twitter from treating it as a recipient-only message.

rochak 10 years ago |

About damn time!

id122015 10 years ago |

are bots going to be confused because there is no limit now ? or are they going to step up to the next level and write essays ?