There is no rational reason for Mastodon to limit posts to 500 characters by default.
If the limit was 100s of KB, people who still wanted to divide every thought up into a thread still could; nothing stopping them.
But if someone wanted to post a gigantic essay, they also could, and I'd see a little "More >>" link and I could ignore them faster.
We have decades of history proving that length limits do not make people concise: they just make people post threads.
1/1
@jwz I don't know if this is just me but I would always rather see a 4000 word post than an 8 post thread, so much easier to read.
@treeico @lanodan @jwz I’d argue that short character limit is a dark pattern that encourages superficial discussions and low effort comments. It proliferates loss in attention span and reduces the ability to think critically.
And yeah, seeing the icon is annoying at best and infuriating at worst. I’m not looking for dopamine hits and cliffhangers in every post.