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Ask HN: Would an HN comment length minimum improve quality?

3 points by mrspeaker ↗ HN
I've recently found myself grumbling at some of the shallow comments on HN - especially around topics that are more subjective or open to opinions. Most of these were snarky one-liners, very minor points, or snap replies to other comments.

Do you think doing a "reverse twitter" and enforcing a comment minimum length would help stop fly-by not-very-helpful comments?

I'm not saying all short comments are useless (I'm a short-comment kind of guy myself: I blame the internet) - but perhaps longer comments would force people to only speak when they had stuff to say. Any guesses on the side-effects of such a change?

15 comments

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kissmd
short.....................long?
mrspeaker
A comment like this (aside from being an excellent example of a short comment) would be seen as just what it is: an attempt to circumvent the "crap comment" policy and would be downvoted into light-grey hell. Actually, I was just going to start downvoting minimally-useful short comments but it's not very fair when the authors wouldn't know why: hence this AskHN!
kissmd
ok, a try with another one: "42, but since that * mrspeaker got hn to allow only long comments, i must do some trolling here to match minimum character restriction"

if i want to make a two char comment or even a 2000 character comment, pls let me decide!

beeneto
I don't think so. People posting overly-wordy comments is already a problem here, I assume because it makes the comment seem more "in depth". I think a minimum length would make that problem worse.

The redditification problem comes up every so often, but from what I've read in those threads I think it's being dealt with by other means, i.e. by tweaking the vote weighting.

tptacek
This has come up before. To ban short comments would be to ban a sizable amount of Paul Graham's own comments.
rdl
No.

Banning the single word comment "This." or any close variation thereof would improve quality, though.

dfc
Haha. In my HN profile I have had an open call for a valuable comment that starts with "This." for a little while now. To date nobody has brought a useful comment to my attention, but that is most likely due to how many people check out my hn profile...
rdl
I remember reading this when I read your profile when trying to figure out who you are :)
dragonwriter
No, brevity is a positive feature.

Stupid comes in all lengths, and long stupid is not better than short stupid, it just takes up more real estate and time to slog through to figure out that its stupid.

staunch
At first I thought you were suggesting that comments should be limited in length. I think that would actually be a nice idea. Bad short comments are easy to get passed. It's much harder to dig through bad long comments.
Mz
I used to participate in a forum with a ten character minimum. For a time, I was one of the mods. I and other people figured out how to make a shorter reply and add invisible filler to get around it. Since most of the people doing it were moderators, some folks thought it was a mod privilege (to use fewer characters -- they didn't realize the hack). Other members would just add visible filler, like the phrase "10 char".

It seems pretty dumb to me.