Oh, yeah?
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Twitter to Increase Tweet Character Limit to 4,000, Elon Musk Says
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So there!
i was told twitter was going to shut down last month
No…no one’s going to pay for Twitter essays. And Elon’s a buffoon. He’s a classic grifter at this point looking for adoration no matter how low he has to go.
This is great! All the FBI has to do is filter for tweets longer than 1000 characters, and they can easily identify the lunatic "manifestos". I feel safer already!
I'm using twitter as a fast news service for specific topics and with quick reply from users to add information and context. I myself never post there. In specific topics (certain sports, science related topics) this works more or less well. The main problems with twitter for my purposes can IMHO not be solved by changing or adding features. And it also doesn't matter who owns twitter or who gets banned. The problem IMHO are the users. Outside of very focussed groups Twitter is a nasty place. People tweet so much inane or useless stuff that it is hard to find relevant news. If there is an interesting tweet then immediately everything around it gets flooded with useless posts so you never find the informative tweets anymore. Because of this I found twitter less and less useful and I use it much less.
I haven't used in a few years, but the limit forced focus via brevity--essentially a first draft edit for normal people that improved the overall content quality.
You see, Elon would magically force every person on Twitter to have to post a 4,000 character tweet! Then force everyone to read the 4,000 character tweets! I mean, any person could ignore the longer tweets or self limit themselves to 140 or 280 or 420 characters but how dare an option to use more characters exist!
If you desire brevity it sounds like you could ignore the 2,000 or 4,000 character tweets. It doesn’t seem that anyone will be following you around forcing you to pay attention to them.
This guy has a Midas touch for ruining stuff. He is like that dic* on the orange lamborghini in the Silicon Valley show.
Let me get this straight: you *want* governments and corporations to more tightly control the flow of information? Because someone said something problematic?
All over the world, people are making the same mistake.
- Edward Snowden
All over the world, people are making the same mistake.
- Edward Snowden
It's astonishing isn't it, I don't get all this crap on Twitter, nor Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Mastodon, or Telegram, Medium, Reddit, etc.
One strike and people I know or follow or copy me in are out. Same on other platforms, friends sharing my contact details with stupid free games, nope no, thank you.
Yet so many complain and don't get it's a mirror of what they've created…
Mine is full of crypto, infosec, cars and F1. I take full responsibility for that.
Pieces of it have been failing. On the user side search doesnt fully work for comprehensive results anymore, trending topics arent accurate, 2FA has never been fully fixed, etc. On the advertising side it’s even worse, tools that are designed to help advertisers plan campaigns are broken left and right and support is non-existent since the ad depts got gutted.
So it *is* shutting down as services that need maintenance, bug fixes, tweaks, etc start to break. It’s death by a thousand papercuts. A modern SaaS product isnt like a single LAMP box that will just break and be done, it’s a large and distributed system of systems. Those systems are breaking. Eventually enough cross dependencies will break and enough tech debt to keep them working will accumulate that larger and larger problems will crop up. And it *is* already happening.
The fact that things havent failed more catastrophically yet is a testament to the engineers that built it, but that wont last forever.
EDIT: Also Musk better be praying something like the recent log4j vuln affecting something twitter heavily uses doesn't pop up right now - there’s no way he has the staff to handle that level of patching, testing, and releases if something like that came up. Especially if it’s a CVE on something that, say, affects build systems too (like log4j’s did with Jenkins for ex)
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It's all about how long you can keep eyes on the service these days, the more words you allow the more eyes are on Twitter I suppose...tho kinda goes against the whole brevity thing. Medium charges based on how long users read articles on their site, I wonder if Twitter is trying to go for something similar?
sorry
I love the new twitters!
Elon is doing a job others in charge should follow!
he did not have to rebuy the messy platformed website.
I get less or no ads, and my 8 other followers seem happy to
they just do not realize what a gem we have online.
now I can type in perfect English with editing and the users know I edit for space.
yikes
too much pressure!
I love the new twitters!
Elon is doing a job others in charge should follow!
he did not have to rebuy the messy platformed website.
I get less or no ads, and my 8 other followers seem happy to
they just do not realize what a gem we have online.
now I can type in perfect English with editing and the users know I edit for space.
yikes
too much pressure!
I think the OP’s point was more that the entire pitch for twitter was the brevity.
And look, for longer blogging the whole interface doesnt really work. The UI/UX, the platform in general (including trending and search algorithms, backend optimizations, etc), is geared around short form rapid fire content - kinda like the midground between long form and a chat room (I hate the term “microblogging” but, well, if the shoe fits I guess). That rapid fire exchange in turn was geared to allow for quick topic changes that could gauge people’s interests better in real time and then target ads - and that’s twitter’s pitch to their actual customers: advertisers.
It’s not just the OP’s preference that’s important here, it’s that the whole platform, both user FE and the advertising platform that twitter actually *is*, was built with brevity in mind.
I did a quick search and found that the ideal blog post length is 1,700-2,400 words — I don’t know what this translates into characters, but 4,000 characters was probably chosen in relation to the data I’m seeing. If you have a blog, or want to dip your toes into blogging to promote your brand, Twitter seems like an inexpensive platform to do so when you compare it to the others out there. I don’t currently have a blog, but would consider Twitter if I did — or at least to supplement my blog.
Dont worry, Tumblr will probably try to be relevant again by attempting to turn into Twitter
(but they’ll fail because Tumblr hasn't had any idea what to do with their platform for a long time)
