I see very little upside and TONS of downside to this limitation. Can we please remove this?
If not, can anyone convince me why we shouldn’t?
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Your complaint would be more convincing if you’d include more details.
And that is exactly the point of the character minimum: to encourage longer, more thoughtful, and more complete posts, rather than a ton of single posts with a smiley or a single word, which add literally nothing useful to a conversation.
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The onus to explain it’s use and purpose is on those who support it existing (you) not on those who don’t think it should. Which is why I do apprecaite you saying
This IMO is a fallacy. Longer does not mean more thoughtful, or even more complete. A person can agonize over writing just the right response, even if it’s 3 words. They could also dhiarrhea out the mouth over the course of 5 paragraphs.
Secondly something being “complete” is almost never dictated by it’s size or length or anything of the sort. IMO often, the most important aspect with creating anything, including insightful forums conversation and content, is about editing down, and staying on point.
Also, when you say
To suggest that a smiling face between friends during a conversation, or a single word or two, like ‘thank you’ or ‘that makes sense’ as “adding nothing” is again IMO, just flat out wrong.
The limitation seeks to add depth to the conversation, which at it’s core idea is good, but this isn’t how you add depth to conversations. You add depth by creating a culture that discourages shit posting, and rewards good stuff. Even if I was wrong regarding cultivating the culture, it seems evident to me the limitation is not functioning as intended. The “30 minimum” meme that’s being utilized by myself and others creates the opposite of your stated goal.
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On the contrary, the overall quality of posts here and the lack of pointless “yeah” or single-emoji-containing responses suggest to me that it IS working. Of course some people are going to work around it – that’s human nature. But if it makes people think (and I know it does me, when I see the little red box flash when I type a reply that’s too short), it’s serving its purpose.
This, by the way, doesn’t make any sense from a debating standpoint. If you want to change something that’s established, you need to support your argument to do so or there is no reason to change anything.
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This might be confirmation bias speaking, but from what I’ve seen, posts that have “30 character limit lul” at the bottom are rare, even in off topic posts, where shitposting generally has a much greater prevalence, which pretty much confirms that the character limit has more or less made useless posts nonexistent.
When someone creates a law or rule, it is not the public that must explain why the law is erroneous, or bad, it’s the lawmakers who have to explain to the public why the law is good and should exist. Does that make sense?
Equating this to a typical debate format is wrong because a debate would assume equal say and power on the matter. Since you’re the mod, and I’m the user, it’s not really the same thing.
I mean it’s very difficult to just point to one thing and say
It may or may not have had any impact on that. Lots of variables and factors to contend with. I will say this though, again we come back to this concept about “useless” posts. What defines a useful post? A character limit? Obviously not. Furthermore, as I said to hazel, short sentences like “thank you” are not useless. In fact they are very useful and a huge part of human communication.
I think the 30 character limit is dumb for replies, but is fine on actual posts. I also think messages should have no character limit since they’re just private messages.
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I agree with some of your points - great posts can be short and snappy, just as some long posts can be pretty unhelpful or incoherent.
That said, short posts are much more likely to be impulsive and unthoughtful. It’s good to have the reminder there, not strictly for the limit, but for the reinforcement that posts should be re-read and considered before being sent off. People will get around the minimum if they really want to, but having that check is good, imo.
I think 30 characters is pretty short, personally. But I can write and write, so I get that I might not be typical. We can keep watching and see how we all do with it, but I’m not seeing it as a real problem yet.
Thoughtful replies are just as important as thoughtful original posts though. Some of the best stuff in the old forum came from people responding to ideas, rather than starting their own. I think we should foster that kind of behavior here. You wouldn’t believe the number of “k” “git gud” and “rekt” posts I had to remove because people didn’t bother writing fuller responses. Any structural incentive against that is good in my book.
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Thanks that was really helpful!
edit to add: just testing… ^ that’s enough characters.
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You have a point, but messages certainly should not be limited. Also, can you clarify exactly what the “unclear body” message’s rubric for an unclear body would be? It gets annoying sometimes as I would have a memey reply, but it would still not be a thoughtless reply
I don’t actually know what that is. When are you seeing it? Sounds like a setup for some kind of lewd joke…
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lol ok… does it happen when you’re trying to post something that isn’t complete nonsense? 
Yeah and sometimes I just add REEEEE to the end and it says my body is unclear lol. Does it just check the last word?
This is the setting that’s flagging your reply, at least in the screen cap you posted.
I didn’t realize you used to remove them. That might change my mind as crappy 1 word comment responses were definitely a thing on the old forum (i never thought it was an issue) but perhaps the more outrageous garbage ,off topic ones were being taken care which is why it never bothered me much.
This is a forum and not a chat. If the post uses more screen space for the avatar than for the content, it is likely of low quality.
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I tried to reply to a thread a few days ago and got boned by the limit. It was one of those snazzy yet hilarious replies that may have went down into the history books, but I’ve already forgotten it and that moment is just gone now!
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