Adam Douglas
I think the character limit helps keep comments succinct and makes Sublevel a community that is easy to "drop in" to. Not that everyone would post essays without a char limit but still. The whole point of Twitter was to chop down and centralise blogging into microblogging and Sublevel is supposed to be a cleaner alternative to Twitter. It also enables posts to remain plain text: with no char limit, post formatting (via e.g. markdown) would be desirable to delineate sections and things like headings and bulleted lists would be required.