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by austenallred 3265 days ago
I like how Benedict Evans describes the 140 char limit: lossy compression.

It's hilarious to me that a rule enforced by external technical reasons (length of SMS) has become so important to the product that it's non negotiable.

Why can't I even, for example, add a text "attachment" the same way I attach photo, video, links, etc.? There's something hilarious about the CEO of Twitter screenshotting the "notes" app on his iPhone in order to send a message.

3 comments

I like the idea of a text "attachment" but I could also see it being used negatively.

e.g. I tweet something positive in the 140 characters, and in the attachment I have something offensive. It's similar to the editing tweet problem.

There was some press about expanding the limit https://www.recode.net/2016/1/5/11588480/twitter-considering...

We could encourage Twitter clients or browser extensions to OCR the attached images and automatically convert them to text. Indeed - the same addons could encode text all using a standard font to make it easier.
Using twitter for 6 months trained me to screenshot text instead of pasting it. Ugh. What a shitty product.