[HN Gopher] Twitter Now Counts Every Emoji as Equal
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter Now Counts Every Emoji as Equal
Author : heinrich5991
Score : 5 points
Date : 2021-01-09 19:36 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.emojipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.emojipedia.org)
| umeshunni wrote:
| What a brain dead solution. The right thing to do would be to get
| rid of character limits altogether But that would require Twitter
| to actually have a leader and product innovation, which it
| doesn't.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Clearly your idea is revolutionary and something twitter could
| not have possibly considered before.
|
| Twitter should take the bold innovative, leadership showing,
| step of "getting rid of character limits" even though it goes
| against the core product design of twitter i.e. forcing smaller
| packets of thought per post.
| tenryuu wrote:
| I don't think turning a microblogging platform into a more
| generic one is any sort of innovation
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Twitter's character limit is part of the definition of the
| platform. It's a constraint of the type that can spark
| innovation and creativity. It encourages people to be brief, or
| else go to extra trouble to not be brief. It encourages
| individual messages to be quickly consumable. When interacting
| with Twitter, the character limit isn't just about the length
| of _your_ messages, it 's about the length of _other people 's_
| messages.
|
| This is part of why the emergent property that "languages that
| express more in fewer characters tend to use characters that
| count as more than 1/240" was not removed, and was instead seen
| as desirable. The real limit is a rough "how long does it take
| to process one tweet".
|
| "get rid of character limits", in the context of Twitter, would
| not be product innovation, nor an especially good marketing
| move. It would substantially change the nature and character of
| Twitter. At the very least, it isn't obvious that it'd be a net
| positive. It would also remove a major point of
| differentiation.
|
| This announced improvement is the net result of "how do we
| solve this problem while still having a character limit". It's
| a natural evolution, rather than a massive change to the
| landscape.
| julienreszka wrote:
| Twitter was a mistake. Think about it. It just pushed people
| to reduce the depth of the expression of their thoughts to
| the size of of a slogan. What could possibly go wrong? I will
| tell you what: It incentivize laziness. It makes people less
| patient. It reduces our ability to argue, make a point. It
| reduces the quality of the conversations in general. You
| can't really clarify what you want to say in such a limited
| number of characters. Is that what you really want?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I'm not going to argue here about whether Twitter's
| character limit produces better or worse discourse by any
| particular metric. My only point in the comment above was
| that the character limit remains a fundamental
| characteristic of Twitter, and removing that constraint
| would _qualitatively_ change Twitter, in a way that "emoji
| now always count as 2" and "we're moving from 140 to 280
| characters" did not.
|
| Constraints _can_ lead people to be more innovative and
| creative. That does not mean they universally do, only that
| they _can_. Removing such constraints is thus not an
| _obvious_ improvement with zero potential downside.
| nomagicbullet wrote:
| I 100% agree that constraints can be great fuel for
| creativity. Innovation is not about examining all
| possibilities, is about finding the unexplored paths.
| Sometimes fewer options means you can more easily focus
| on discovery something new vs exploring what's already
| out there.
| julienreszka wrote:
| I used to believe this too but I changed my mind
| eventually. Do you know what changed my mind? I was
| swimming in the Lac Leman in Geneva. I decided to go
| underwater and hold my breath for a while, I noticed that
| I couldn't stay that long while my brother who had his
| gear could look underwater for a long time and enjoy it
| way more. That's when it hit me. Constrains don't make
| you more creative per se. They only force you to create
| workarounds, but in the end that's all it is, workarounds
| not really a good breath of fresh air. Hopefully the
| analogy makes sense to you too.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-09 23:02 UTC)