Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

Other commenters seem to be missing a critical point here: tweets continue to have a 140 character display with some sort of &quot;read more&quot; that you click to see the rest.<p>To me, that actually sounds pretty great. One thing that&#x27;s nice about Twitter is that it&#x27;s fairly skimmable. All of those &quot;1&#x2F; Some thought&quot;, &quot;2&#x2F; some thought continued&quot; threads damage that. Combining them into a &quot;My thoughts on... read more&quot; tweet would be much nicer.<p>If they implement the feature like that, which is implied in the article, this would be a big improvement to Twitter in my opinion.

To the people thinking 10,000 characters means suddenly everyone will write blog posts instead of tweets... Have you ever tried blogging? Writing blog posts is insanely hard and time consuming. You&#x27;d be an outlier if you could write one good blog post a day. It&#x27;s not like every tweet is suddenly going to be an essay. More likely tweets will just be slightly longer (200 characters or something) and then there will be the occasional longer post. This is great because the hacks we were using beforehand (tweetstorms, replying to yourself, posting images of text) were all ridiculous for such a basic use case.

Twitter&#x27;s limit is too low, but it does have a certain appeal, and I&#x27;m following a lot of smart people that express a lot in 140 chars. Would be happy if this limit was raised to 250 chars.<p>But raising to 10,000 chars would probably kill Twitter for me.

Twitter could charge 1¢ for each character over 140. That will encourage people to (still) be concise, but also monetize people (or companies) that want to say more.

I like Twitter because it forces people to be concise. There are already plenty of places on the web where people can post long thoughtful articles or op-ed pieces.

I must be the only one who thinks this is a good idea (not the 10,000-char limit in specific, but something much higher than 140-char).<p>Some of the most interesting ideas I&#x27;ve seen on Twitter were in tweetstorms, which is a pretty nasty and ugly hack itself. Proponents of the 140-char limit usually cite some notion of terseness and thought-density, but I see more half-formed ideas and deliberate grammar&#x2F;spelling mangling to make things fit. That&#x27;s not terseness, that&#x27;s gray-matter-powered lossy compression.<p>But I&#x27;m also one of those crazy people who uses Facebook like others use Twitter - I don&#x27;t write whole essays but 140 chars is like thinking through a straw.<p>(Side note: I also have a pet theory that Twitter&#x27;s problems with epic shitstorms&#x2F;political flamewars stems from the fact that you have people arguing politics&#x2F;economics&#x2F;important things with each other in 140 chars or less)

I&#x27;ve begun wondering if there&#x27;s a market for recreating original technologies that have evolved beyond their original intent.<p>For example, a new site that allowed you to broadcast up to 140 character messages.

I can&#x27;t believe that there are so many backers of the old limit! Don&#x27;t you guys hate that you have to always compromise on punctuation, select shorter (but less precise) synonyms, and other just to fit into the story that Twitter was trying to push all this time, but which wasn&#x27;t the reality (of people using Twitter via SMS)? Okay, now, Twitter goes to another extreme - from too short, to too long. I&#x27;m fine with shorter message, but 140 is way too short. Modern phones combine SMSs into a bigger blob. Use that and just make a limit of 5 SMSs or something along these lines.

I feel like this could work out quite well, so long as they preserve the spirit of Twitter&#x27;s original 140 char limit. That could be handled as simply as: The first 140 characters are shown (just like they are today), but there&#x27;s a &quot;see more&quot; button&#x2F;icon&#x2F;etc. that expands the tweet to longer form.<p>That would seem to solve both issues -- short-and-sweet for those that want it, and longer as necessary.<p>(Note this idea has been baked for approximately 15 seconds, so I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m missing quite a bit.)

Microsoft Word used to have a summarization engine. You could specify a maximum length, and it would remove sentences, in a surprisingly intelligent way, to get to that length. Twitter readers now need such a feature. Just because someone sends huge tweets doesn&#x27;t mean they have to be displayed.

You see this now, whole paragraphs of a noteworthy book punctuating a timeline, people taking screenshots of text, or otherwise cluttering up my Twitter with textual soundbites in the guise of a JPEG<p>a.) These are not very accessible<p>b.) I am too lazy to transcribe &#x2F; OCR these<p>c.) It defeats the purpose of Twitter<p>d.) It would be far more handy to have big text blobs like this in a Tweet&#x27;s JSON schema Something like<p><pre><code> { textBlob: &#x27;...book quotes galore...&#x27;} </code></pre> b.) Images as text are a huge waste of resources. A lot of bandwidth could be saved by persuading tweeps to use a text-blob instead of an image (Free bandwidth people, that&#x27;s what we all want is it not?!)

The Twitter engineering team is probably hating this decision. I bet a lot of their infrastructure is built around the assumption that tweet.txt is short :) This has huge implication on the data schema, caching, search, etc.

Well... some back-of-the-envelope math. Assuming average characters-per-word of 4.5[1] and also add 1 for space&#x2F;punctuation for a word unit of 5.5:<p><pre><code> 10000&#x2F;5.5 = 1818 words. 1800 words @ 250 wpm average reading speed is ~7 minutes. </code></pre> A 10,000 char (7 minute article) expansion looks to me like a &quot;micro-blogging&quot; platform rather than &quot;tweeting&quot;. I&#x27;m guessing it all goes back to Twitter trying many things to become bigger than traditional Twitter. Hence the previous discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10513237" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10513237</a><p>(It goes without saying that not every &quot;mega&quot; tweet will use all 10,000 chars.)<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=average+characters+per+word" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=average+characters+per+word</a>

Presumably, post-140 Twitter will be pretty much the same as classical 140 twitter, but instead of 3&#x2F;4 of all twerps ending with links to properties outside of Twitter, a huge chunk of those will link to more content inside of Twitter.<p>The only major change in post-140 Twitter would be the death of the Andreessen-style twerpstorm.

If this happens, Twitter will cease to be Twitter.<p>In keeping with the bird analogy, messages will be that annoying parakeet in the pet store rather than spring time finches.

Good.<p>My biggest issue with Twitter&#x27;s 140 character limit is it removes all opportunity for nuance. Within 140 characters you can just barely voice and opinion or thought in the most basic terms. Yes you can split your thoughts into multiple tweets but people will typically only focus on the first tweet that really expresses the basis of an idea and that&#x27;s what will get shared the most. Allowing more wordy and nuanced tweets probably won&#x27;t solve the social media over reactions that seem to flare up, but maybe it&#x27;ll help if people aren&#x27;t forced to awkwardly clarify their positions with a bunch of tweets that have to be read from the bottom up.

Jack Dorsey just posted a longtweet-as-image which implies that the story is true: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;684496529621557248" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jack&#x2F;status&#x2F;684496529621557248</a><p>His comments about searching&#x2F;highlighting imply that this feature might be like Medium.

I think they should have a weekly character limit and let users use those characters as they want. That way you get a limit to prevent just reams and reams of characters in tweets, but allow flexibility with how you tweet.

Makes a lot more sense to just &quot;fix&quot; what they&#x27;ve already got -- stop counting @ mentions, hashtags, and URLs as characters. If URLs didn&#x27;t count, that&#x27;d mean the death of URL shorteners, which would mean no more link rot.

I think they should increase their character limit linearly with time. Kinda like Gmail storage back in the day. Twitter wouldn&#x27;t be twitter without short messages. Or maybe allow users to skip the limit once a day.

Might be interesting if they &#x27;gamified&#x27; this character limit.<p>Your limit increases the more engagement you have.<p>Or maybe everyone starts off with 10k but the limit decreases based on engagement. Might be a way to reward people who create interesting content.<p>Although I&#x27;m sure someone at fiverr would be offering a service to counteract that idea via bots seconds afterwards.

140 seems pretty short, but 10000 seems very excessive. Why not something closer to the hundreds. 500 maybe?

Seems like the major benefits are:<p>1. 140 char tweets aren&#x27;t indexed very well by search engines. Writing blog posts or 400+ char tweets? Way better. More indexable content. More user growth. Wall street is satisfied for a few months.<p>2. The notion of expressing yourself (or whatever you want to call blogging) is easy to explain (WordPress, Tumblr, Medium). I&#x27;d argue that it&#x27;s much easier to explain blogging than Twitter. By introducing something less ambiguous it should help user growth.<p>As much as I would hate 10k char tweets, I can see why they are doing this.<p>Minor changes to the current product won&#x27;t drive the growth they and Wall Street are looking for.

We built <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;writerack.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;writerack.com</a> to help take care of this problem.<p>It is puzzling why Twitter refuses to encourage 3rd party applications to do peripheral things while they still get the data.<p>That way, they focus on the core experience for most of their users.<p>10 000 and it becomes a poor attempt at medium. 140 characters allows text to be like images where you can skim.<p>Occasionally, you see tweetstorms and decide if you want to &quot;view more&quot;<p>Anyway, it&#x27;s their turf.<p>Do check out <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;writerack.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;writerack.com</a> and have fun with it until it is no longer useful :)

Restricting users to 140 characters wasn&#x27;t just a good idea because of SMS character limits, it also forced users to create content that had a far greater chance of being shareable.<p>The traditional blogging platforms that came before Twitter generally failed as broad-base social media platforms because of the walls of text people would write. If you&#x27;re an average person, nobody wants to read your wall of text about some childhood experience, but people might be interested in your one-liners about news, celebrities, friends, etc.<p>I think the changes that are causing them to consider a 10,000-character limit are:<p>1. A larger percentage of Twitter traffic is celebrities&#x2F;marketers, and people trying to connect with celebrities&#x2F;marketers (not friends connecting with friends). Character limits don&#x27;t matter for this traffic because quality&#x2F;virality is either guaranteed (celebrities&#x2F;marketers) or irrelevant (consumers trying to connect to celebrities&#x2F;marketers).<p>2. It&#x27;s difficult to sell text as short-form shareable content now that everyone&#x27;s sharing images, gifs, and really short videos. If the text isn&#x27;t going to be shareable, they might as well lift the character limit and expand its utility as a general feature.<p>Personally I like the idea. The way I use Twitter is to see what public figures and organizations are saying publicly, so a higher character limit is 100% upside for me.

This is going to kill Twitter for me. A few more characters is likely a good move. 256 seems nice.<p>But, I don&#x27;t use Twitter for long form content. I do use Twitter as a way for people to get me interested in long form, or to raise awareness of something.<p>If my feed gets clogged with long form, I&#x27;m moving on. Too much info, wrong use case.<p>Seems to me Twitter could gather a lot more value out reconsideration of how hostile they have been to the ecosystem that grew up around Twitter.

- Tweets are not titles. Soon they &#x27;ll have &quot;Click here to read my thoughts on X&quot; &#x2F; &quot;Click here to read my response to Y&quot; situation. That&#x27;s not twitter, it&#x27;s RSS.<p>- Content creators&#x2F;websites that use twitter to funnel users to their websites will not use this feature.<p>- Tweetstorms can be solved much more elegantly (e.g. click to expand &quot;continuation tweets&quot;)<p>- A tweet is a single sentence. Human brains have limits.

From what i understand they wont remove 140 tweets but will introduce their own variation of &quot;posts&quot;.<p>Every media distribution site atm seems to try to also own the content.<p>Twitter&#x27;s value isnt that you have to write short messages but that others can scan dozens of ideas&#x2F;tweets of multiple people in a very short time. They wont take that away. Most likely you will even have to attach a 1400 tweet to the post.

Woah, woah, woah! 10,000? If anything tweets are too long! They should reduce the size if anything. 16 characters and a selfie should suffice for all inter human communication.<p>If we increase the character limit how does it foster innovation in the realm of human to human interaction? I mean, they might as well be old school print media at this point, slightly democratized to allow celebridiots to poorly market themselves and occasionally post something offensive which will create media outrage.<p>How will news anchors have segments where they &quot;read people&#x27;s tweets&quot;? We don&#x27;t have a segment called &quot;Anderson Cooper reads the New York Times.&quot; They&#x27;re direct competitors!<p>It&#x27;s crazy! It makes no sense, Twitter has gone too far this time! People will just keep typing their stupid thoughts to fill the tweet up to the stupid limit because they have to be entertaining in long format. I don&#x27;t have time for that shit!

How deep is the 140-character limit hard-coded or assumed throughout Twitter&#x27;s codebase and beyond? How much would break if the Twitter front-end simply stopped limiting submissions to 140 characters? There is Twitter&#x27;s web front-end, the server backend, Twitter&#x27;s native apps, third-party clients, feed reading scripts, …

Twitter is considering to allow message longest that 140, but I don&#x27;t think that the problem is the character limit for the kind of interaction of twitter users. There are other problems not so big but that make the user experience not fluent for a simple app like Twitter.<p>Writing posts with more that 140 can potentially get many FB users, nevertheless TW should take care of the its current users. I notice many incoherences of the web app, for instance the top menu, on left where pop&#x2F;up and navigation are mixed.<p>Second, the mobile app is very wired I receive notifications about message or followers that appears on my notification tabs randomly.<p>In conclusion, I love TW and I&#x27;m not a FB user, but I&#x27;m honest my twitter timeline is a bunch of Ads and I follow Twitter just because I love the concept of it.

Facebook is a walled-garden, Twitter is not. The humans in the middle of these two giants, are all confused.<p>Meanwhile, Twitter needs to figure out how they are preventing spammers and spam-bots from infiltrating the environment where humans supposed to tread...only if, they wish humans to use their service.

This sounds like Weibo, a very popular service in China. There is some history of such a thing being very succcessful.<p>However, I&#x27;ve never used Weibo. Can any describe the differences between Weibo and longer-form Twitter, and talk about Weibo&#x27;s strengths and weaknesses?

This entire article is ~954 characters, less than 1&#x2F;10th of the proposed 10,000 maximum.

The problem isn&#x27;t character limit.<p>The problem is missing interesting Tweets. My timeline is flooded with new tweets. Better flagging to read later, algorithms that say you might find this most interesting, filtering would be welcome and are needed.

It sounds more like you&#x27;ll be able to attach a long-form text document to a tweet just like you can attach a photo. The tweet itself, as presented in the normal view, is still constrained in length.

I find it fascinating that almost every single significant product change Twitter has made has effectively been a result of end-users or third party developers attempting to fix the core product experience. - @mentions - Retweets - Mobile clients - periscope - Image effects<p>Now long-form tweets trying to fix the redicilous problems of having to screenshot text to fit your message in, agonizing over short URLs or character by character shortcuts just to get a tweet out.<p>Any significant innovations or leaps forward from Twitter that we&#x27;re not what people have been trying to do?

Meh, I doubt it would bring me back. 90% of my friends are on FB and the lack of a limit (or one I&#x27;ve ever hit) is quite nice. I&#x27;m able to write out full sentences with much less ambiguity or &quot;text-speak&quot; and while FB isn&#x27;t my favourite company ever I&#x27;m going to go where my friends are at the end of the day. I don&#x27;t write pages and pages or even multiple paragraphs most of the time but 1-2 sentences is normally not enough to express a full thought and because of that Twitter just doesn&#x27;t work for me.

They might extend the message limit to 10K characters, but they won&#x27;t be able to stretch their users&#x27; attention span which is probably is bound by 2 or 3 sentences anyway.

Finally! I have been wanting them to remove that for a long time now.<p>Twitters biggest problem is that they are a protocol router more than a destination. And so while people use it to find content they consume this content somewhere else out of reach for twitters add engine.<p>Now that people will start writing on twitter this will mean a lot more time is spent on twitter consuming content on twitter and reading ads on twitter.<p>With this they get to keep the protocol part while keeping users longer on their platform to consume content.

the 160 character limit on twitter helped me learn to speak more concisely.<p>I&#x27;ve had an account since 2009, but didn&#x27;t start using it until 2014. It was work at first - I didn&#x27;t &quot;get&quot; it - but i stuck with it, and gradually i enjoyed it more. All my tweets went through to faceebok, where they recieved more positive feedback than my typical facebook posts.<p>People can read 160 characters of text quickly, and enjoy it. Long paragraphs, not so much.

If Twitter is finally willing to increase the limit, maybe they should consider options to monetize it. Like my suggestion from years ago that they should sell a $1 per month subscription for users wanting to double their limit: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.zorinaq.com&#x2F;?e=65" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.zorinaq.com&#x2F;?e=65</a>

TweetDeck (before it was sabotaged by Twitter) used to have a cool feature like this where if you &quot;tweet longer&quot; you get a link attached to your tweet.<p>Twitter killed this years ago when it acquired TweetDeck.<p>This is funny because everything Twitter has been doing lately has been mostly done (and stripped down ever-since) in TweetDeck years ago!

Unless they&#x27;re going to create some sort of limit on how much Twitter mobs can dogpile people, doxx them, and call their employers to get them fired, no thanks. You&#x27;d have to be crazy to post on Twitter and take those risks, no matter how anodyne you think you&#x27;re being in your tweets.

There&#x27;s quite a few ideas that were created because of the limit. For example Micro SF (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;microsff" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;microsff</a>). Constraints can fuel creativity, it would be sad to see this go.

Reminds me of a company that was doing innovation in radio and figured out a way to beam still images with the radio waves. Only problem is they were on their way to re-inventing TV if they did a little more innovation..<p>All that&#x27;s needed now is markdown or html support...

A good solution would be having a 10000 character limit, but formatting under-140 tweets differently so they stand out more. This would encourage people to keep things short, while giving them a way to publish longer posts if they really want to.

Ah... we built <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twlng.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twlng.com</a> as a way to work around the Twitter limit.<p>Without the ability to format the longer text, &#x27;Tweets&#x27; will just end up being unreadable.

2016 is the year Twitter jumped the shark. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ello.co&#x2F;teanee&#x2F;post&#x2F;0M0OKQLGuxdtXpjHKXAq1w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ello.co&#x2F;teanee&#x2F;post&#x2F;0M0OKQLGuxdtXpjHKXAq1w</a>

Increasing the limit beyond the current arbitrary 140 character limit is good, but 10000 characters is a bit much. I&#x27;d rather see a small increase (maybe 160, 200?) and removing links and @&#x27;s from the count.

I think they should allow each account to be increased to 280 for $280&#x2F;year.

Okay what&#x27;s differentiating Twitter from fucking Facebook now?<p>Only the facts that there&#x27;s (currently) no policy against pseudonyms, bots and multiple accounts and that there&#x27;s no useless crap games like Farmville.

I&#x27;ve never used twitter and don&#x27;t understand the appeal at all. How can anything worthwhile be said in 150 characters? Even this comment comes in at 171 characters, jesus.

I can only see this being beneficial to the platform and&#x2F;or ecosystem if they restrict the default displayed size of tweets, requiring users to click-through to read more.

Twitter should add the option to put the long-form articles behind a paywall, pay the author and withhold a fee. Solves their monetization problem in one go.

If they do this, I might start to see some value in twitter. The 140-character limit has a strong anti-intellectual effect on the discourse there.

They were at 23.15 On Dec 31st<p>Opened at 22.64 on Jan 4th, going as low as 22.19<p>Opened at 22.79 on the 5th and closed 21.90<p>I think this rumour was irrelevant to the price change

How about not setting limit to any length, but using a text summary generator to reduce the tl;dr version to 140 characters?

It would be an interesting experiment to watch. It can take Twitter much ahead or it will break Twitter completely.

oh yes, the spam it allow will be beautiful.<p>twitter spam has been of limited value due to the constraints.<p>would be more useful to move links, @mentions, etc. out of the character limit.<p>but hey, if they do it, it opens the opportunity for another unicorn that will be the snapchat of twitter.

The first thing I thought of while reading the title was: is it April 1 already?

If 140 characters was brilliant, than 10K characters is unbelievably brilliant.

#unexpected #amazing #surprise #dorseydoesit #humanitysaved<p>Seriously: Jack Dorsey is definitely worth his 100 millions if he can come up with innovations like this; raising the number of character? Holy shmoly, what a genius! A veritable dare devil!

The 140 limit is the reason I like twitter. It forces conciseness and some kind of quality.<p>10k blog posts with 140 charsbof content to decipher.... No thanks. Showing the first 140 only with a &quot;read more&quot; button does not fix that.<p>Rip twitter

I&#x27;d really like to be able to edit Tweets.

So the microblogging phenomenon is over?

I wonder how much theyll charge with their gnip rip-off company for us to query these long tweets.

this will be the real beginning of the end for twitter. stupid

i think this is the death of link shortners

So what&#x27;s the difference between twitter and tumblr then?

this is awful, and its really funny to me that all the people complaining about the 140 character limit are doing so via long unfocused babbling rants

I support this.

I feel bad for Twitter because they have a popular product that&#x27;s hard to monetize. That being said, I wonder if any of the Twitter execs who think of this stuff actually use Twitter.

We already have that - it is called tumblr. Also the social media outragists will have slightly harder time pulling things out of context - think about all the other media which income comes from producing outrage over tweets ...

I have a semi-serious business idea for Twitter. They should charge verified&#x2F;celebrity users a huge amount to be able to fill in whatever number they want in the followers box. If you&#x27;re advertising on twitter, you will know the actual number so you&#x27;re not paying extra. It\ would reduce or eliminate the services that &quot;help&quot; with inflating your follower count, and vain people who care about this stuff get to see a large number next to their name.