brendonjason

My personal model for clear and concise communication is Stephen Hawking; perhaps his proficiency at getting to the point is based on the fact that it takes a lot of effort for him to communicate, and so he, unlike most people, is forced to think about what is worth saying and the best way to say it.

Having said that, perhaps it's time to entertain the idea of a word economy on Hacker News, ie, some sort of daily/weekly "word count account" ... perhaps based on seniority/points ... that would counterbalance the compulsive counter-comment inspiring nature of this service.

Debate is sometimes good; scrolling down and down and down to get past endless trails of points/counter-points of exponentially decreasing marginal value to the original post seems like an exercise in obsessive-compulsive disorder reinforcement.

Surely having a set amount of words one can use in any given day for comments/responses would inspire more "on-point" and brief commentary that would make numerous editing features of this site redundant?

It's still free speech, just limited, self-edited free speech.

Flame away ...