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Yeah, /get or :get would have been way better commands, and they have precedent in preexisting social media like IRC and MUDs.


They would be very inconvenient to type on the traditional cell phone though.


Well it doesn't have to be a symbol, just something that would not be likely to start a real tweet.

Just as an example let's say "q", followed by a space, followed by the command with the appropriate number of parameters, e.g., "q get username". That would allow otherwise-reasonable tweets that are currently being mis-interpreted ("get better" vs. "q get better").

That's just an example. There are other ways around the problem too without making things too inconvenient on a smartphone user. And sure it's possible someone somewhere will want to write a real tweet that says "q get better", but that's far far less likely than someone somewhere wanting to tweet "get better". And the point is that allowing a non-trivial portion of the tweet-space overlap with the command-space is a bad decision. A trivial overlap (like "q get better") would have been a much better decision.




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