[glenstein]

I agree with you that the 140 is iconic and it's probably not a good idea to abandon it. What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.

That way you don't lose the iconic 140 characters thing, and you don't have any problem to solve by making weird compromises where the user names or media URLs don't count toward the 140, blurring the lines of what 140 means and losing the "creativity loves constraints" factor.

[macspoofing]

> What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.

How is that elegant?

[was_boring]

People often using the word "elegant" when they actually mean "my preferred."

It helps give credence to the solution.

[xori]

It's hell'a more elegant than https://twithelper.com/long-text-to-image-converter

[glenstein]

That's true as a general observation, but in this case I meant elegant in the usual sense.

[joelanman]

That's an elegant explanation

[endless1234]

>What's more, I feel like there was a very simple, elegant solution to this all along. It was to allow long-form text as a type of embedded media, treating it the same as video and pictures.

Indeed, especially as people have been already doing this by sharing longer posts as pictures of text

[tajen]

And reversely, it's incredibly creative for Trump to attempt to fit the entire USA diplomacy in 140 characters.

[794CD01]

That's just a side effect of him trying to fit the entire USA diplomacy into his head, which has approximately the same capacity.

[tajen]

That or trying to fit the entire USA diplomacy in a mail server under her desk... and getting it hacked.

[rayalez]

Articles with good titles/descriptions/images are already beautifully embedded as cards.

So having a medium(or any other) blog that automatically posts links to twitter is the perfect solution to this, I think.

[glenstein]

I was even thinking things like links to Twitlonger and Pastebin could be used for embedded text, the same way twitter knows how to handle imgur & youtube links and embed their content with tweets.

[amelius]

Better solution is to let users solve a complicated CAPTCHA when they want to tweet longer messages. That way, there is no social pressure to make long tweets (no reasonable person can pressure you to solve boring CAPTCHAs), while it's still there if you need it.

Or, phrased differently, they should make it harder to tweet longer messages.

[jfktrey]

Micropayments! /s

[alex7o]

That is exactly my thought. Actually it was microtransactions.