No, it's not a race.  It's almost the opposite of a race in that's it's a limitation.  We've decided to cap comment postings to 300 words.

Now, that's not exactly haiku.  300 words is a lot - I'm at 41 right now.  I could write all of this 5 times and still be well under the limit.

The idea is that short and sweet will help engender further conversations, long-winded rants will kill them.  We've also noticed that folks like to paste entire articles into the comment space.  Way wrong.  Publishing outlets need traffic to pay for those things - so link to an article, don't copy-and-paste.

If you REALLY need more than 300 words, perhaps you should be writing a letter to the editor?  At any rate, one can post more than once to get additional points across.  Keep in mind, we may still recognize this practice for what it might be (a rant) and go ahead and remove said posts from the public eye.
More commenting improvements on the way.  While we're at it, what commenting features would you like to see implemented?