News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around? by aphextron on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @12:48AM (#13761511)
>Why is exactly 140 still the right length? Why not 145, or 73, or 280?

Why are youtube videos mostly 5 to 7 minutes? Why are pop songs 3 minutes long? Why are sitcoms 30 minutes long?

Forms of expression are defined by their constraints. I think of twitter's relationship to prose as analogous to a haiku.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around? by snowwrestler on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @02:19AM (#13761952)
YouTube videos can be as long as you want.

Songs can be as long as you want.

TV shows can be as long as you want.

You think you're arguing the value of constraints, but you're actually arguing that different media formats have different points of cultural optimization.

If that's true, then is there any need to enforce an artificial length limit on tweets? If shorter, pithier tweets are better, then most tweets will be short and pithy--naturally.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around? by Godel_unicode on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @01:33AM (#13761725)
> twitter's relationship to prose

I think we read very different Twitters :)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around? by nandemo on Wednesday March 01, 2017 @08:28AM (#13763474)
Oh, do you read a lot of poetry tweets?
[ Parent | on HN ]