It’s about insight density. It’s not as if you can take an insightful comment and write it really short to get a certain upvote. If you have a longer comment, you have room for more insight. If you have a short comment, you can’t be all that insightful.
You can express an insight succinctly, or you can be long-winded. A long comment has space for more insight, but that space is often wasted. Stunk and White’s The Elements of Style makes that point for prose, and Edward Tufte’s The Visual Representation of Quantitative Information makes it for plots. Every element of a piece should do work.
I’d rather follow your first point up as, if you have a short comment because you took the time to purify and condense your thoughts, that’s a good thing.
But, don’t forget the overhead for the comment simply existing in the first place. You rapidly run into diminishing returns for shortening a comment to less than a few lines. Ten words conveying a thought is not effectively twice as dense as twenty words conveying that thought.
It’s about insight density. It’s not as if you can take an insightful comment and write it really short to get a certain upvote. If you have a longer comment, you have room for more insight. If you have a short comment, you can’t be all that insightful.
You can express an insight succinctly, or you can be long-winded. A long comment has space for more insight, but that space is often wasted. Stunk and White’s The Elements of Style makes that point for prose, and Edward Tufte’s The Visual Representation of Quantitative Information makes it for plots. Every element of a piece should do work.
I’d rather follow your first point up as, if you have a short comment because you took the time to purify and condense your thoughts, that’s a good thing.
But, don’t forget the overhead for the comment simply existing in the first place. You rapidly run into diminishing returns for shortening a comment to less than a few lines. Ten words conveying a thought is not effectively twice as dense as twenty words conveying that thought.