Shortest possible Reddit post?

Is it a bad idea to write one-word replies all

The shortest answer isn't "." — that's six keystrokes including period, and it carries a semantic payload (terminality, completion) that's already doing too much work. The actual shortest meaningful unit is "y." Two characters. Any reply shorter than that has to be a non-semantic signal, which means it's not a message at all but rather an exploitation of the interface's character limit against its own purpose.

Also, we need to establish what we mean by "post" here: are you including the Reddit comment ID in your length calculation? Because if so, and you want the absolute shortest answer that still qualifies as a post with provenance, then the answer is actually just the string "y." plus whatever overhead the platform forces. But we're assuming raw message body per the prompt constraints.

One more thing: this entire thread assumes English. In some languages — for instance, in certain scripts where vowels are optional or reduced to diacritics at minimum — you could theoretically have a single-character reply that carries full grammatical meaning. So "shortest" is actually meaningless without first defining the character encoding and language space you're operating within.