> To me the magic of Twitter resides in the ability to connect with people with whom I have a professional relationship or interest, but not necessarily a personal one.
You can do that with Fb pages, Medium, blogs, etc, etc.
> The 140 character limit is an archaic relic that I believe is harmful to Twitter.
You are wrong. Twitter was barely used with SMS.
The limit (now) is a product choice, not a technological one.
> As always, you are (were) using Twitter wrong. I follow authors, artists and journalists.
Well yeah, but those authors, artists and journalists can only use Twitter to share links and images (and announcements) since no meaningful content can fit into 230 chars. The worst is when people split a single paragraph text into 5+ tweets, that just brain damage inducing UX....
IMHO removing the limit would've been the only good thing Musk did if it was available to everyone.
No, it was designed to replace SMS. Hence the character limit.
And blogger is easy enough to use. Heck, my computer illiterate grandma was using it before she passed.
The problem is that blogging takes time and effort, and the vast majority of people have no interest in it. The only thing they want to do is share their fleeting thoughts and/or tidbits they have found elsewhere. Which they can do easily on their smartphones. Blogging though, not so much.
>Your response? Remove the last filter forcing careful selection of words. This makes Twitter boring without making room for real thought.
Ehhh, one of the reasons Twitter is useless for actual conversation is that you can't express a thought. You only have just enough room to say something that you can't flesh out such that you can enrage other people. Twitter is built on anger and misunderstanding, interpreting 140 chars least charitably as possible.
Then someone tries to organize their thoughts into a tweet storm, but there's no real way to respond to it without more small bite-sized misunderstood/misunderstanding comments.
Increasing the limit is a good thing in this regard.
That the 140 char limit forced people to "choose the best words" is laughable.
> on a social network where people share 280 character messages is fucking bizarre.
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Perhaps a less dismissive characterization of Twitter would help make it less bizarre?
It's a platform used by many leading public figures, including US presidents, to share information and the 280 character limit is a format that often leads to less filtered communication than you'd get in other mediums.
> I don't want longer tweets. That's what URL's are for.
This right here.
Medium, PostHaven, Wordpress, blog services, etc. All of those products exist for an extended thought. I always believed that where Twitter excels is in micro-sharing/blogging.
I am not willing to read, let alone comment on a 500+ word Facebook status post. But I'm certainly willing to enjoy/participate in a discourse over a 160 character thought.
If I am in the 500+ word reading mood, I goto Medium or PostHaven or the equivalent blog-platform. Where there's a forum, there's an audience. And Twitter's quick digestible tweets cultivates an insane amount of diverse discourse.
Sure, there's harassment. Sure there's spam. But there's a lot of gems on Twitter.
> The essence of Twitter is precisely that the tweets are short, bite-sized thoughts
Yea hard disagree there. I spend more time and get more value and depth from reading Twitter threads than random tweets. Twitter threads however are an abomination UI-wise and annoying to write. Longer tweets make more sense.
In any case if you prefer shorter content that's fine, but there's nothing to be gained by restricting content type. Give people freedom and let the users decide what they find worthwhile.
It's funny to me that everytime I'd mention increasing the tweet length all the replies I'd get would be people telling me I'm wrong and that Twitter should keep the same smaller character limit. It's like vocal people on the internet fear change.
> massive mistake
Whether it's a mistake comes down to how much revenue Twitter makes in blue checkmark fees vs. how much revenue they lost from advertisers bailing. I'd need to see some hard numbers on that before being able to call it a mistake.
From a user perspective however I don't care at all. If anything making that more egalitarian instead of some mythical status symbol makes more sense.
For the record I say all of this as someone who hasn't purchased a blue checkmark.
> "You don't have to like that he said but he puts it in context and within the realm of Twitter - a 140 limited space of communication."
This is part of why I dislike Twitter - the 140-char restriction supposedly makes you to the point and concise, but in reality it just encourages snark and imprecision.
It's a world of sound bites, and "Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse" sounds wittier and has more jazz than "I really dislike this open source project and here's why."
That said, if a platform disallows you from being clear and fair to fellow people, don't use it. Ultimately the responsibility to be good to one another is your own to enforce, not Twitter's.
> "Can we not be critical on the internet any more?"
Honestly? No. The internet is full of flippant, callous, outright dismissals. It's reached epidemic scale - and it extends far beyond our little corner of tech. Everyone wants to have their little sound bite hating on something, and it's juvenile.
Given the current state of things, IMO criticism demands a higher standard than ever before. It's not that we can't be critical, it's that we can't be critical without qualifying and substantiating said criticism - there's just too much "hurr this sucks" floating around.
This may necessitate using communications platforms that permit more than 140 chars at a time ;)
I use Twitter and I think it needs to end - at least in its current form. It has a very low signal-to-noise ratio and doesn't offer the users adequate control over what they see. As an example, you may not want to see (re)tweets on Baseball from the prominent Web Dev space folk you follow, or the off-topic comments by trolls in replies.
> Twitter is just a social network, it can be used for good or for bad, based on who one follows.
...and the people that interact with them. There need to be more receiver-side controls. Blocking tweets by words is a first step, they should have opt-in filter by subject and raise the bar on replies that ride the coat-tails of authors authority.
> This is precisely why it's important that Twitter calls out when things are stated as fact without evidence.
Twitter is a platform for stating things as fact without evidence. 120 (or whatever it is now) character limit is not suitable for having cogent conversations.
> Preemptive reply: no, nobody reads Twitter over SMS anymore.
I do, yet I still think this should be experimented with. If an account I follow tends to post longer messages, I can deal with seeing only the first line of them.
> Absolutely none of those sites or services has been worse off thanks to the higher character limit, nor has it hurt the microblogging feel in general.
> So why are people so stressed out over Twitter having a higher amount now?
The answer to your question is that they disagree with your preceding statement.
> "If Twitter cared about avoiding arguments, there are so many things they could do: remove the outdated character limit, let us edit tweets, create progressive circles of privacy, don’t let retweets out of our networks, slow the whole thing down, and encourage smaller communities."
If they try to do this, they may as well tell their users to move to Facebook and close shop.
Twitter is what it is precisely because of, not in spite of, these "limitations". Like most new media it's defined in terms of constraints it has. Without them, Twitter will be no different than everything else.
> Fully disagree. Would the author also have made the claim back in 2006 when Twitter was founded, that the future of the internet are short texts with a 140 character limit?
...he posted in 172 characters.
In 2006 predicting that the future of the internet wasn’t going to be in longform text would’ve been pretty bold and pretty prescient.
Look at what’s happened to longer text content since then. The concept of “long reads” is all but dead now. Been replaced by short snarky comments, tweet threads, videos, and social feeds.
> and wants to see Twitter add value to society in some way.
Define "add value", because otherwise I'm laughing hard at this notion.
If you define it purely as "produce a product that people enjoy using or find useful", then sure, it adds value.
But at a higher level, asking if it's a net positive on society as a whole, and I'd say Twitter will never succeed at that. Social media has caused a breakdown in political discourse where people no longer seek to understand, but instead seek to "win", and Twitter's short message limit completely eliminated any possibility of actual conversations in favor of 140-character[0] zingers that are nothing more than ridiculous straw men. Nuance is a thing of the past.
[0] I know it's 280 now, but for the longest time it was 140, and I'm not sure the difference really matters. It's still incredibly limiting.
> I agree that Twitter is a poor medium for writing. But Twitter gives you an audience (and retweets).
Does it though? I have a blog and occasionally tweet. My blog gets about 30 hits on an average day, mainly through search engines.
If I tweet, I get maybe 20 impressions. And those impressions are all that I get, nobody goes back and reads 6 month old tweets and there is no way to search for them.
You can do that with Fb pages, Medium, blogs, etc, etc.
> The 140 character limit is an archaic relic that I believe is harmful to Twitter.
You are wrong. Twitter was barely used with SMS.
The limit (now) is a product choice, not a technological one.
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