[Indyan]

If you need a thousand words to say something, put it on Medium or Tumblr or any of the hundreds of other blogging and social media platforms. I dont mind a minor tweak of the char. limit, but the rumored 1000 word limit is way too much.

The beauty of Twitter is its brevity. It forces people to cut out the flab and be concise. This in turn makes the entire steam easily glanceable. Huge walls of text will take away much of what makes Twitter special.

[a_shane]

I'm 100% with you. Honestly, my "prefect Twitter" would be to keep the 140char limit, but to exclude @ mentions, photos, and links from the limit.

That way users can be a bit more expressive without the word-barf walls of text which make Facebook, Tumblr, and other social platforms a nightmare to read through.

[kndyry]

Playing devil's advocate, my first response would be to register accounts for, say, the 2,500 most common English words and then compose some rather nice essays.

@Yes, @something @like @that @might @prove @quite @funny.

[devindotcom]

Perhaps make it only the 1000 most common words and rename Twitter "Thing Sayer"?

[cyrus_]

Length of mentions could be capped at 140 to prevent this hack.

[chimeracoder]

> I'm 100% with you. Honestly, my "prefect Twitter" would be to keep the 140char limit, but to exclude @ mentions, photos, and links from the limit.

Right now, there's a real benefit to having short Twitter handles, because they count less against the limit (longer ones really add up in Twitter conversations that involve multiple people).

I understand why usernames count towards the limit, but I wish they didn't.

[Pharaoh2]

You know what a good solution to that? Constant cost for @mentions. Each one costs you two characters.

While you are at it, urls cost you 5. Images cost you 10.

Removes the benefit of shorter twitter handles, longer twitter handles doesn't fuck up what you are trying to say and, you can talk to multiple people in the same tweet.

[a_shane]

Ooh, I like this!

However, I feel like it would be weird for people to adopt, and probably put people off of Twitter, since paying attention to a 1-1 limit is annoying enough.

[mikeg8]

I don't think it would require any conscious effort on the end user, the remaining char counter would handle all of this for them so adoption is painless

[HorizonXP]

I really like this idea.

[blankenship]

That makes sense to you (a web user who wants to use multiple platforms, and likely already does) but not to Twitter (a business whose financial interests are best realized the longer you stay within the walled garden of their product.) Twitter doesn’t want you to leave their ecosystem, so they’re considering changing the boundaries of the ecosystem.

[a_shane]

Which is all well and good, but when you take away too many of the features which make that ecosystem unique, there's less incentive to use it over anything else.

[wnevets]

perhaps but if that ecosystem is just like everyone else's, what's the point of staying?

[tw04]

They should just acquire twitlonger and be done with it.

[shas3]

Isn't this identical to saying, "If you need to post a pic, do it on Instagram?"

The essence of Twitter, Instagram, etc. is the social network. The format of the content is fungible.

Further, short tweets can coexist with text-walls just as pics and videos coexist with 140 character tweets.

[lux]

Another option would be to turn lengthier posts into cards. Uses existing Twitter concepts, doesn't change anything for existing users, lets people express more complex ideas. Seems like an easy change and a big win for everyone.

[a_shane]

I assume that this is what's going to happen. While I'm a bit nervous about this whole "10,000 char" thing, it would totally destroy their current user experience and make Twitter unreadable if they actually implemented it in your feed.

Still, I don't quite know if I like that idea. I guess we'll see.

[lux]

Totally. There's no way they'll dump 10,000 character posts into your feed without providing a summary and read more link. That would destroy the experience on any social network, which is why Facebook already summarizes lengthy posts automatically. A tweet-sized summary would make everyone's complaints about this a total non-issue.

For reference, here's what 10,000 characters looks like:

http://pastebin.com/vNQ0CSMu

In figuring itself out now, Twitter's real problem that its existing users haven't had to experience any real degree of change for a long time. Facebook was kind of smart to "move fast and break things" and ignore the complaints from people who don't want to have to learn new ways of doing things :P

[JustSomeNobody]

Doesn't have to be huge walls of text. Technology can help with that easy enough.