I can think of many reasons, why a limit is somehow hardcoded/assumed throughout the entire system including the history and probably a lot of optimizations around it. You can not think of any? In databases you also have limits, like character limits, like 16k for a varchar or something. Or memcaches with bucket sizes and so on. It is not just changing a number, i can imagine.

(ex-twitter engineer) I left before this project got started, and do not have any insider info on how they did it. Given what I know about the number of places tweet length assumptions were built into, it must have been a large, cross-team effort. It likely required thoughtful problem-solving.

Take, for example, search. An early iteration of Twitter search relied on this limit to pack term positions into 8 bits (Source: https://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~jimmylin/publications/Busch_etal...). 280 > 256, so if this was still around, the whole approach had to be rebuilt, and the indexes recreated. That's ... non-trivial. And that's just one subsystem.

Even more of a reason not to make this large, system breaking change.

And i can imagine, when they just doubled the amount of possible characters, they just correlate these tweet buckets now. Like, maybe each tweet already had space for attributes/opcodes, so one can express things like "deleted". Maybe there is another attribute now: "has successors". And in the API one just return many tweets as one. In that way, one does not have to rewrite history. But who knows!

Wow, sounds like Y2K.

At the volume Twitter works at, you take the constraints you can find.

There are databases with arbitrary limits on strings? That strikes me as really poor design.

You must be really new to databases.

Why you are being down voted: As far as I know in most databases TEXT and BLOB types have no "arbitrary" length parameters but are stored at the end of the database file making access slower especially on spinning rust, VARCHAR(x) can only be x characters long but is stored inline with the table so it's much faster. If you know the length of a string won't exceed a relatively small number of characters VARCHAR is the right tool for the job.

Fun fact: Postgres is one of the few databases to do this right. "varchar" is just an alias for the "text" data type, which has a limit of 2GB (last I checked). A small amount of text is stored inside the row, and the overflow is compressed and stored in a series of linked child rows. The system is called TOAST, and quite fast. So the underlying storage is completely abstracted, and setting a limit doesn't impact storage; it only enforces a limit on what input is allowed. MySQL's text type, on the other hand, is like a binary blob and has (last I checked) different semantics than the varchar type.

Not string lengths, but definitely other things. For example, Oracle is notorious for only allowing 1000 columns per table:

https://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUE...

They bumped it up to 1000 from 255 a few years ago. It was a major engineering effort to support that. It's unlikely that they will be willing to do it again.

They aren’t arbitrary.

Almost every SQL database has arbitrary limits on text. Personally I find it ludicrously anachronistic.

I mean, there’s good reasons to limit the size of fields in database tuples - relational databases are made for storing small to medium amounts of normalized data, you can abuse them (and I have, storing a couple million 60-200K PDF’s in a Postgres database at work) but you can shoot yourself in the foot by creating tons of 60% full pages and the stupid amount of extra IOPS those wide columns create.

Still, not allowing unrestricted text and binary columns is still silly, so I agree for the most part - but you still need to know what you’re getting yourself into when you start making wide tables.

I am sure that after a well deserved break from such amazingly hard work, they'll tackle the next increase in characters. Their solution makes it look so easy, but it isn't. /s

Does "Hail Mary ..." fit in 280 characters?

As a Catholic nerd, I had to check. Yes. :)

    echo -n 'Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.' \
    | wc -c

    210

Depending on the translation(i.e. trespass is too long), the Lord's Prayer either fits or is a few characters too long.

Does the regular prayer refer to the "hour of our death"? Or is this only for last rites?

Always.

I'm unable to parse what is meant by "twitter hashtag hottake". If anything, hashtags are already overused on twitter, and I imagine this will make it worse (like the neverending stream of useless hashtags on instagram that nobody will ever ever search for). Are you saying the hashtag hottake is to use a single (?) hashtag to provide a meta-description of the content?

I think perhaps the problem is, try as I might, I can't really get my head around the term 'hot take' and it alway seems to lead me astray when I try to figure it out in a new context.

Hey man, Jack's been putting in 23 hour days for the last seven years to make this happen. Not cool to mock his effort.

But seriously that Tweet shows the usefulness. For them not to have tried it until now shows how scared they are to make any real changes. 1) Guess 2) this 3) doesn't 4) fix 5) this 6) nonsense? Those comments are absolute youtube quality cancer though. Goddamn tragedy that this is the pinnacle of human discourse right now.

These are the first five replies to that tweet:

Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 1h1 hour ago Replying to @jack

I will reserve my full response until I get 280 characters but this is a slap in the face to everyone harmed by your lax governance 1 reply 15 retweets 109 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 57m57 minutes ago

Your platform has been co-opted and manipulated, turned into a megaphone for hate and propaganda. 3 replies 20 retweets 154 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 56m56 minutes ago

Your response? Remove the last filter forcing careful selection of words. This makes Twitter boring without making room for real thought. 4 replies 14 retweets 107 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 55m55 minutes ago

And yet again, another surface-level tweak that fails to deal with the rot inside this community. 1 reply 10 retweets 82 likes Near deGrasse Tyson‏ @DrNeilTyson 54m54 minutes ago

You have failed signally in your responsibilities to your users, investors, and frankly to all of humanity. Thanks, Jack.

What a weird platform.

"Your platform has been co-opted and manipulated, turned into a megaphone for hate and propaganda."

Yet here you are using it.....

Why do people really think that x or y company is to blame for minority opinions getting so much traction on the internet. The very definition of public speaking/communication is that it gives small individuals big voices, no matter how big or small of a following they have. They cannot be stopped from expressing their opinions unless a. The platform they use is tyrannical (picks and chooses the ideas it likes or doesn't like) or b. Is actively committing a crime ( excessive cyber harassment and doxing).

If Twitter wanted to actually fight "hate and propeganda" you would grow to hate the platform! How long untill your ideas are silenced?? I get that the Nazi and white supremacist propaganda is right at the line, but make no mistake, untill they commit acts of violence ( which of course, they have. These instances should be punished) _it is merely an opinion and does no more damage than your opinion._ If you wine about how they shouldn't have a voice, you are wasting your breath (although you have the right to do so). With the internet there are so many ways to propagate information that the Nazis and white supremacists will find a way to get their message out. Fight ideas with ideas, not censorship.

You can get so close to that line without crossing it though, plus policing 300 million users is hard enough.

The problem is that both extreme fascism and communism might actually be a very tempting response to everyday problems to a lot of people, which means that the only reason we haven't had issues with either ideology is we had a media who complied with the censorship of both those viewpoints. Online anyone can say anything and promote anything, which means people who have problems that aren't being solved by their current leaders can easily turn to ideologies which we had all previously agreed to censor out of normal discourse.

>Your response? Remove the last filter forcing careful selection of words. This makes Twitter boring without making room for real thought.

Ehhh, one of the reasons Twitter is useless for actual conversation is that you can't express a thought. You only have just enough room to say something that you can't flesh out such that you can enrage other people. Twitter is built on anger and misunderstanding, interpreting 140 chars least charitably as possible.

Then someone tries to organize their thoughts into a tweet storm, but there's no real way to respond to it without more small bite-sized misunderstood/misunderstanding comments.

Increasing the limit is a good thing in this regard.

That the 140 char limit forced people to "choose the best words" is laughable.

Yeah, it's a parody, but why after a decade has Twitter not figured out a way to avoid giving the trolliest of trolls such exposure? It seems like 140, 200, 280, or 500 chars is the smallest and least of their problems.

For whatever reason, they do not look into impersonation reports at all. Their team is too focused on deciding the content of people's speech that it doesn't care about their actions.

They let David freaking Duke onto their platform, I think you can't accuse them of being censors beyond blocking active threats and harrassment.

For what it’s worth, they acted quite quickly when I filed a company impersonation claim.

they don't look into racist posts at all, either. I've only reported like 10 posts (that had overtly racist messages and calls to violence in 5 cases) and I was quickly informed that they were fine (despite their TOS). It really seems like the management has a bigoted bent.

This must be the backup plan when turning “Favorite” stars into “Like” hearts wasn't enough to have the world exist in harmony.

It is a parody account.

Never implied otherwise. My point was that the CEO's post announcing such a feature has multiple garbage comments from the same individual at the very top. That it's a parody account just makes it worse.

You should probably edit or delete your comment. It reads like FUD against neil degrasse tyson

HN users should have reading comprehension.

Worst thing Twitter ever did was teach you what people you once respected are really like.

Can't believe I ever looked up to him.

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, that is a parody account, not actually Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

I believe the name says "Near" instead of "Neil", so probably not the real guy.

I don't see how the real NDT would benefit from such bad-PR comments.

O ye of little faith. Those tweeks are fake, the Neil is still awesome.

A vocal contingent think that Twitter shouldn't allow one of its users to initiate nuclear war using the platform.

And all they had to do was to remove URL from character count. Now we will be staring at Twitter trying to become Tumblr.

In moments like these, I'm reminded of the scene in the Simpsons where the cartoon director asks the writers to come up with a name for the cool new dog character. He says "Come up with something catchy, like Poochy". He leaves the room and the writers say "Everyone good with Poochy?".

When I think of it, this 140 -> 280 might have been the same. But when I think harder, I can picture a bunch of engineers debating over this for many weeks.

Someone needs to make an Apple-style video of a Twitter employee talking about this latest breakthrough in human communication. Oh, and they have to use the word "courage"

“It just fits” (TM)

Twitter is saving its courage for enabling nuclear war. https://twitter.com/biz/status/912526977361264640

Don't understand the criticism. If the world goes to nuclear war, it won't be because of a Tweet, it'll be because of a conflict going back to the 1950s, a lunatic dictator, and an elected maybe unstable authoritarian. You don't think those guys have lots of other ways of talking trash?

Is the suggestion that banning Trump from Twitter will prevent nuclear war? That sounds like armchair virtue signaling of the highest order. Or is there more to it; am I misunderstanding?

edit, so after searching, this is based on this:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/25/553475174/...

North Korea's foreign minister says President Trump's tweets about the Korean nation amount to a declaration of war and that under international law, his country can legally shoot down U.S. military planes — even if they're not in North Korea's airspace.

We pretending that the North Korean government hasn't justified a lot of crazy stuff? They probably have a good justification for the invasion of South Korea, too.

Twitter enables the toddler in the White House.

Current issues in USA politics are larger than just a toddler on twitter. Source: disappointed American

Not just any toddler, the Toddler In Chief!

Would you please stop violating the guidelines with flamebait like this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

true disruption