The fact that it took this long for them to make such an obvious change speaks to how afraid they are (were?) to challenge core assumptions about the product.
Imo, it shows that, like many of us, they don't really understand why Twitter became so popular. That being the case, they don't know what they can and cannot safely change.
To me, Twitter works because many people prefer to read 100 headlines and know a little about everything, than reading just a big essay. Have a variety of views, rather than just one.
It is better for the reader, not so for the writer. Because of that, I do not understand why they focus so much on getting more writers (login) than readers (views).
I think looking at it this way is a bit naive. While I agree that "attachments" shouldn't take up tweet text, the 140 character limit is a core component of the service. Call it a micro blog or a mass SMS, Twitter is 140 characters.
That said, I think most comments are missing the point - having attachments not take up characters really won't make the service any more useful to the mainstream... That's the real problem in my opinion.
I don't know, if you post a link as well as an image you're losing 24 characters from a 140 character limit. You lose just less than 20% of the characters available. I think a 20% increase is fairly substantial.
Especially considering most changes are pandering to brands, and this is a use case that we use a lot. (Whether Twitter is a useful channel aside...) extra space for copy will always go down well with the people paying the bills.
The more you think about Twitter the more you understand it, including why it works, and at Twitter, lots of people are thinking about Twitter, so they probably know that SMSes worked like conversation, where the tech forced you to be polite, i.e. not ramble on about something without letting the other party say anything, they should just listen. SMS conversations flows like a oilite chat about the weather. Quick, brief and with nice pauses in between. Maybe that's not what they were after but isn't that what Twitter achieved?
My experience is a lot like that. However one of the core issues Twitter has had in the recent past is that many users were not experiencing polite conversation on twitter. They were experiencing harassment instead.
It's hard to blame them for that, though. They made a blog with a 140-character limit and it became one of the most valuable companies in the world. Who knows what it will become if they fiddle with anything?
It wasn't really a blog though, right? Maybe it began as "a real-time blog aggregator, where blogs only have titles". I believe nowadays it's the network effect that keeps them, not the technology itself.
Still I think the 140 character limit was in part due to their continued success; I know when I look at a tweet, I'm not going to get a 1000-word dissertatino on a subject - I will get bite-size pieces of info (for the most part, except for the multi-part diatribes or conversations, which I generally ignore).
Link anxiety is a real thing - I'm less likely to click if it's going to absorb my attention for 5m+.
Fair point though, it's confusing. Can't you edit your post and remove the correction now that it's irrelevant? And then we can delete this entire unnecessary subthread :)
Whilst Twitter has someone tweet the occasional gem, it's genuinely few and far between. I honestly feel that the format was great when it was only really programmers who used it (and even then I'm not so sure...) but limiting people to 140 characters, even discounting images and links, means most people can't convey views on most complex issues.
I have an unpopular view, but I'm firmly of the belief that all Twitter did was amplify the voice of celebrities - most of whom have not much to really say, made it easier for abusive speech to be targeted towards individuals and amplified moral outrage. Facebook has as well, but nowhere near as badly as Twitter.
Edit: like I say, it's an unpopular view! If only someone would tell me why my view is wrong or unreasonable. In 140 characters...
Edit 2: It's suddenly occurred to me that if someone was able to give a highly convincing argument in favour of Twitter's ability to convey all complex arguments and views and did so with a lengthy response, but there was no way of distilling the message to 140 characters... would that invalidate it?
Definitely twitter is entirely about who you follow. I tried it out early on, saw no value, and ignored it for a year or two, until a friend convinced me it has some value, and there are two uses I find.
I follow several programmers (some internet famous, some merely who I've found from using a project they worked on or someone else's retweet), and through that, find it interesting to get a glimpse at what other people are doing or finding challenging, or see when there's buzz around some new technology in my space.
The other thing I find it useful for is local updates in my (relatively small) city. Traffic updates, road closures, police activity, events, etc. The local public works and city hall accounts are surprisingly active and often useful. I also follow a handful of restaurants nearby the office: they often tweet lunch specials.
I follow exactly zero mainstream celebrities, never look at 'Moments', 'trending', etc -- I find those things full of crap I simply don't care about at all.
That has been my observation as well. It's quite useful as an segregator for local information. Probably because of the character limitation. I think there's a psychological positive to it as in "well I only have to type about 140 characters" (said the event organizer, police pr person, town hall person etc.)
The change will be nice because it'll hopefully be easy to parse the metadata for attachments (images, url) and it should be more elegant to handle them in general than regexping them out.
What's the best strategy for avoiding harassment? I have a Twitter account, but very, very rarely use it. It's my biggest concern really.
Knowing strategies to avoid just nasty people is the main issue I have with it. Like, if you go into Twitter and see that you have a whole bunch of Gamer Gayers targeting you (just an example, I can't see how I would be a target!) then I'd imagine having no Twitter would be preferable to actually having a Twitter account!
You don't have to actually post anything. I use Twitter to consume information, not to blast it. Sometimes I'll retweet a project or maybe post an interesting bit of code, but that's unlikely to attract any negative attention. Avoid posting or retweeting contentious information, you'll be fine.
I'd imagine having no Twitter would be preferable to actually having a Twitter account!
To some people it's so valuable to use as a means of participating in their community of choice that they're willing to keep using it despite severe harrasment.
Not being a woman gives you a big advantage against harrasment. But it can come from all sorts of weird places. My wife is a big Eurovision tweeter and encountered people who search for "Macedonia" to tweet Greek nationalist abuse at.
You're only likely to be 'targetted' by anyone if you post strong opinions on contentious topics. Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't, but you should be prepared to defend your views or ignore certain reactions. This is all just real life, after all.
I think it depends who you choose to follow. Twitter can be different things to different people. I've never been a big fan of Twitter myself, but I follow about a dozen programmers and a few sporting brands and I get some value from that.
Your argument of Twitter being better when only programmers used it doesn't really apply if you only follow programmers, does it?
I have never been a fan of the concept. You have to work really hard to force an interesting thought into 140 characters, which leads most people just post throwaway snark and dark humor. And reading backwards through a chain of posts to simulate a real post is just stupid. I made several attempts to use the thing, anyway, because "everyone else was using it."
I eventually came to use 2 accounts, one anonymous, to interact with brands and personalities (but I repeat myself), and one personal, to keep up with people I knew first-hand. The former devolved into just ranting about everything that I found sub-optimal (usually about the .NET workflow for my day job), and the latter didn't generate enough interesting activity to care about. Both were just negative pressures on my daily activity, so I finally just shut down both.
Twitter is not great for complex arguments over differing views. Hardly anywhere on the internet is, though! In order to do that you need a small heavily moderated community.
Twitter is great for zeitgeist, silliness, mass-participation solidarity politics (this isn't very thoughtful, yes, but that's not always the most important thing), following live events, international fandoms, and kibitzing.
It was originally a blogging service - people would use it as an online diary (like livejournal) and follow personal friends. The broadcast/aggregation aspect came later.
that's correct. don't know about today, but SMS users were still fairly substantial in 2011 when Twitter introduced native photo uploads. they wanted to be able to include the photo URL in the SMS.
Essentially a tweet ID should be a pointer to "latest version", but with historical versions preserved and available at the same visibility level as the parent (typically public) and a small indicator would show that it has been edited and the history is available.
But all of those, "Damn I made a typo or dumb spelling (thx mobile keyboard) and yet it has been replied to or re-tweeted already"... all of that is solved by edit with visible history.
I write "I love cats!" You RT it. I edit it to "I am Al Queda." The FBI visits you.
Case 2:
I write "I am Al Queda." I edit it to "I love cats!" before you see it. You like cats, too, so you RT it. The FBI has a slow feed, so they see that you endorsed my Al Queda membership. They pay you a visit.
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From a systems point of view, when your whole stack is designed around immutability (so you can serve archives of past tweets from append-only CDNs, for example) it may be nigh impossible to add editing.
I think it already happened with a troll baiting racists. He waited for a lot of RT then changed the source of the embedded racist picture with something like "I am a big disgusting stupid racist". Something like that. It was a good one, though.
Just imagine the gargantuan changes that could be necessary for small tweaks like that. Twitter was built on RoR originally, so it was probably a pretty standard relational model, then they did massive scaling for huge read/write loads, then they did massive scaling for real time features, god knows how hard it would be just to add a foreign key. I really, really, want to take a day and just go through all their engineering blogs after only glimpsing a few..
Honestly, if they only designed to scale and did not anticipate iterating on the product, they deserve to fail. My guess is that this not a trivial change but worth the effort.
I can see the use case if it's a extremely short edit window.. something like 30-60s, basically to catch that stupid typo. That doesn't solve the abuse angles but it gives a much smaller opportunity for it to happen.
Short of [mega star], few tweets see much favoriting/RTing in that window.
Exactly! I'd say I am strongly against the ability to edit tweets. I'd even put it higher than the strict reverse chronological flow of tweets that I prize so much that I still allow Twitter to send me tweets by SMS.
Edit seems much harder to implement. This basically adds some metadata to the Tweet model instead of embedding it within the body text. That's a change and it needs to be implemented all over, but it is pretty backwards compatible.
It seems that one of the fundamental assumptions is that Tweets are immutable. Changing that could break all kinds of things and would probably their systems significantly more complicated.
Facebook posts aren't as public-facing by default. AFAIK there's no FB equivalent to the retweet, in that the content of a FB share is not quite the same as the relation between a retweet and the original tweet.
Do you think these moves can save what Twitter use to be once? I believe not. Twitter has lost the social game. They never pivoted when Facebook was making continuous efforts to slay them. And in that time, they lost a lot of their audience to SnapChat, Instagram, WhatsApp and many other apps.
Isn't that the difference between Facebook and Twitter? Twitter got stuck on their once-innovative features. Facebook is changing more quickly than people can keep track of.
