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Long answers on stackoverflow
Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand

Would it be possible to add some view which lists posts (questions or answers) that are long? Long being defined as a post that contains say, 5000+ characters entered.* Optionally, make length of a post a search option.

There currently is no method of searching for posts by length other than using SEDE. The usefulness of such a view can have many applications all important to different groups of people:

  1. Gives attention to posts where the author has spent a significant amount of time composing it.
  2. Provides a mechanism for people searching for these posts who would otherwise not see it in the homepage or other normal means.
  3. Long answers that missed the initial wave of viewers of a new question can still get some attention.
  4. Exceedingly long posts could be identified by all and could be cleaned up if necessary.
  5. Could serve as a way to identify plagiarizing posts which are copying a significant amount of content from other sources without attribution.

If this view is implemented, I would propose that it should ignore interested/ignored tags filtering. It's not every day that people have long posts. People not interested in such tags might have an interest in viewing the post if length is any indication of quality and could learn something from a good post.

Every once in a while, I'll compose a fully detailed answer to help teach a point, a lot of times, it never gets the attention I think it deserves. Some people often do this regularly. Why not give some recognition for these posts or at the very least, make it easier to find these bits of gold?

I'm not sure of where the best place to put this would be. It might make sense to add a tab under the review as this applies to all posts. But being there could have negative connotations and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps it could appear under the questions tab with a tab for "questions that contain long posts."

* To give an indication of length of a post, this one uses roughly 2500 characters. That doesn't include characters that don't appear in the final rendering of the post.

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