In a social application focusing on a niche community where the level of comment quality matters, is it a good idea to enforce a minimum comment length?
For example, see this set of comments on a photograph:
You get the usual litany of responses like "Very nice," "Excellent," "Beautiful," and "Nice shot." All of these, of course, are super helpful, and could never have been expressed by simply clicking the like button.
So does it make sense to set a bar? Be the anti-Twitter, so to speak?
Of course, there are ways to judge how valuable a comment was after the fact (voting systems), but there's no first filter there.
Answer
To me, this is all about alternatives, providing the "value menu" of things most people would want to say in a tiny comment, in one click.
Provided you have made the alternatives, e.g. "click the +1/awesome/like button!" discoverable and easy, I favor a blocking message like:
We prefer that comments be longer than 15 characters so they add substantively to the discussion. Click the "like" button if you just want to say "nice shot!"
You'd need to look closely at the pattern of comments to make sure you've provided the right one-click actions for the particular emotions they want to express, though. You might look at Buzzfeed, which has a ... lot ... of actions.
That feels like way too many to me, but the only way you will know is to look at the data of what your users are actually doing.
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