Internet character limitation fad

Is it just me or websites that allow you to comment or post threads starting to limit characters more often? For example, I noticed that YouTube limits user comments to only 500 characters per comment. They have even started to do it here on ATS! I joined ATS to speak my mind with as many words and characters as I wanted but I guess that's starting to change because of a stupid fad started by forum moderators and site owners/developers. Is this a way of limiting our free speech on the internet probably because of a group of stupid people doing stupid things on the web?

Websites in question for doing this are; YouTube, Netflix, and Above Top Secret have all started this unnecessary rule. ATS; please don't get sucked into this fad just because other websites do it to. Above top secret if I'm mistaken, is a place for free speech and should not be limited to how much you can talk about a subject in a thread, comment or a reply! If its because your server sucks at handling a certain number of characters per thread/reply then get a better one! In the past ATS or YouTube didn't find it necessary so what started this change?

While I understand what you're saying, ATS character limit is 5,000. That's a pretty big post by anyone's standards.

Also with websites like Youtube, do you really want no character limit? You'd have jackasses hitting the keyboard and posting page-long lines of letters that mean nothing. So there is a reason for it.

reply to post by paranormal78

That's not always necessarily a bad thing though. It can force you to put a bit more effort into it. Editing your thoughts down into fewer words, does not always mean that you're not saying as much. Often people tend to ramble on and on and on. My point has already been made, yet I'm still just typing away. I can type another 2000 characters, without actually saying anything else, but I don't particularly wanna do that. So I suppose I'll just go ahead and stop babbling on now, because people in general, have a very short attention span. Many may have already fallen asleep before making it this far into my silly post here.




There is another alternative solution. Scroll down.

Wooooohoooo. I doubled it.

I now have a 10,000 character limit.



Wanna see me go for 15,000??








ETA:

Originally posted by paranormal78

Above top secret if I'm mistaken, is a place for free speech.....

I believe that you are mistaken.
ATS is a privately owned website, wherein you have no basic rights.

reply to post by paranormal78


I tend to write on occasion very long posts. Did one today, in fact.

I'm both annoyed by the character limitation and see the need for it too...

Ask me one day how I apparently brought ATS to its knees with a single post.

Some old-timers will remember that well.

*shudders*

Usually 5000 characters is more than enough. I prefer forums that support double that, just because I like to format my detailed submissions a lot. When you limit the character limit, it saves a lot of processing power for the server's CPU and in turn costs less money to operate. Obviously this cost is negligible for ATS or other small forums but if you comment on twitter, youtube, and so on, there's a lot of data being transferred all the time so the less stress you can put on all servers the better.

Twitter is that way because of text messages which have limits on them (stupid that it's so small but I guess it wasn't meant for conversations back in the day). I don't really mind, quality degrades from user submissions the more they limit their users so it's the website's loss.