The other day, flagamuffin, veen, and I had an exchange about ways that we could encourage mindfulness about the quality of comments.
veen suggested that a word count for text boxes might make us a bit more aware of comments that might be interpreted as flippant, or perhaps not as thoughtful as they could be.
We thought it was an interesting suggestion, and easy enough to test.
As such, you will now notice a small word counter on the top right of comment text fields. If you don’t want to display this counter, you can toggle it off in your settings.
Let’s give it a shot for a couple of weeks, and see how it feels.
As always, feedback is much appreciated.
If I see that I'm spending, say, 900 words on responding to someone, I might just use that as a reason to cut down on my own words. My hope is that it discourages the shortest and the longest of replies. Neither are particularly insightful, and neither look particularly good with a word counter.
"Brevity is the soul of wit." - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, sc. ii. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal
No doubt, but it's a very easy hypothesis to test. My guess is that we won't be able to discern a difference, but I'm curious if it will feel any different. BTW, it was a real effort not to just respond with: "That's what she said." :) It wasn't the counter that made me reconsider though.
Heads up, if this is the only change you've made to the site in the last few hours, it did something that made NoScript really, really angry. I'll grab a screenshot in a minute. EDIT: Although I may have unearthed an early you-know-what surprise, now that I read the scrollover text on the NoScript icon... insomniasexx EDIT2: gone now.
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Yeah, it totally told me how many words are there