You can usually identify rants from being incoherent to start with, as well as looking at the thread title.
Keeping people from expressing themselves fully, in as many words as they deem is needed, is borderline censorship - and just look at stuff like Twitter, how fights and misunderstandings happen just because people can't actually express themselves the way they want to. Or in some cases, have to.
I am sorry if you consider 1001 characters a 'novel', but to some of us that is a below-average message length when we want to express ourselves clearly rather than so to-the-point that the actual point is lost.
