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.