I hadn’t noticed before, but Discourse does seem to prefer single-word buttons. It certainly seems like a deliberate choice.
Yep.[1] This is largely an aesthetic consideration. As long as it hits a minimum standard of usability, the choice of words (or even icon) hardly matters. People stop noticing after the first few times they use it and just think of it as “that button I press to send things”.
It seems to me that what you are sending is more important than that you are sending. The button is in a very standard place for sending things on the internet, but on Discourse the same UI could be a message, a new topic, a reply, a whisper and probably a few other things I’m not thinking of right now. It’s helpful to have a reminder of which thing on the button that sends it out.
For those that don’t know the reference, it’s the law of triviality. ↩︎