Comparing a fanfiction comment to an email is shifting the goalposts.
So what is their baseline? A03 comment limit? But why choose that as a baseline?
Because the only place to comment on AO3 is AO3. If the limit was 9000 characters then even multiple comments would end up at a single one most of the time. If the minimum limit was 100 words for a comment then that would be the shortest comment that could be left on AO3. Someone else set the guidelines on this site and we have to work within them + it's the only relevant site to talk about when it comes to Yuletide.
As you said, typical comments are only a couple of sentences so something that is many times longer than an average comment would naturally be considered long. The typical comment seems like a much more coherent baseline to measure short/long against than the max AO3 allows you in a comment.
Even if you do that it still ends up being in the same range though? A short comment is a few sentences as per the typical average comment, a medium comment is a couple paragraphs which is the typical extended comment, a long comment comes close to 4.3k characters or goes over which is more rare.
Switching around the baseline when the underlying principal is pretty much ironclad is a bit redundant to me. It's like Glossier calling their light brown skin tint "Dark". Sure, you can call it dark since it's darker than the palest shade, but it's not dark -- and when you have to expand to actual darker shades, having that one dead in the middle with the label "Dark" looks a little silly.
Re: Ways in which you are petty
Comparing a fanfiction comment to an email is shifting the goalposts.
So what is their baseline? A03 comment limit? But why choose that as a baseline?
Because the only place to comment on AO3 is AO3. If the limit was 9000 characters then even multiple comments would end up at a single one most of the time. If the minimum limit was 100 words for a comment then that would be the shortest comment that could be left on AO3. Someone else set the guidelines on this site and we have to work within them + it's the only relevant site to talk about when it comes to Yuletide.
As you said, typical comments are only a couple of sentences so something that is many times longer than an average comment would naturally be considered long. The typical comment seems like a much more coherent baseline to measure short/long against than the max AO3 allows you in a comment.
Even if you do that it still ends up being in the same range though? A short comment is a few sentences as per the typical average comment, a medium comment is a couple paragraphs which is the typical extended comment, a long comment comes close to 4.3k characters or goes over which is more rare.
Switching around the baseline when the underlying principal is pretty much ironclad is a bit redundant to me. It's like Glossier calling their light brown skin tint "Dark". Sure, you can call it dark since it's darker than the palest shade, but it's not dark -- and when you have to expand to actual darker shades, having that one dead in the middle with the label "Dark" looks a little silly.