Take a Look at 2+2's Future Design

[KJS]

Even without avatars, a response with one line of content takes up a ton of real estate, heightwise.

From my rough estimate, any post that is less than 10 lines is the same height, probably due to the stacking of the poster's information in the far left of the box [and the addition of the mostly useless, IMO, 'online'/'offline' feature]. I wonder if the boxes will grow even larger when there are avatars. Seems like a pretty bad use of visual space and will mean tons more scrolling to see a lot of posts that are not very long.

I would take a look at the pixel height of the box per post for a single line of text with avatar in the current UI and the new one and see if you really want posts with one line of content to take up so much room. Maybe consider making the width of the box with the poster's information a bit wider so there is less wrapping or get rid of the graphic next to "Offline".

You don't want a whole screen to be taken up by 2 or 3 people saying one word each.

KJS

Edit to replace width with height where i screwed them up in OP.