The purpose of this post is, first, to raise awareness (as this, reasonably, might not be clear) that the way some (and it seems to me the number is growing) use MathJax to create 'white space' (or to otherwise influence formatting) creates problems or at least inconvenience for others. And, second, to potentially discuss the implications of and potential solutions for this.

To be more specific what I am talking about, a main usecase:

There is a lower bound on the length of characters a comment needs to have, sometimes one might wish to post a shorter comment and then a way in which some proceed is to add some MathJax code, like ${}{}{}{}{}$ that after having been processed does not display anything (under normal circumstances).

There are also some related things like, displayed equations to have a paragraph in a comment and so on.

What is the problem or the inconvenience?

The problem is that some (or at least I) also view the site on devices where MathJax either does not process properly at all or very slowly. Then, this 'invisible' formatting code is visible, and distracting, and it is not only distracting in the way some normally visible 'filler text' would be distracting, as for example it can happen that first it grays-out (slightly changing size) to then reappear as normal text. So that automatically attention gets focused on this 'movement' against the static background. Or, it simply contributes to slow down the site, impeding smooth scrolling and so on. Also, the paragraph in comments can 'suddenly' open-up while reading the comment when the MathJax is eventually processed. (Besides it being quite a bit too large for a paragraph, which can be inconvenient on devices with a small screen.)

Since this was already misunderstood, let me stress that my problem is not with the fact that some post short comments. I do not mind this at all, and would not mind were there no character limits (actually I would strongly prefer it as then the issue discussed here would dissapear). I only mind that this is done using MathJax.

What could be a solution?

A simple solution could be that those that use the formatting tricks, now that they know about the negative side-aspects, will use them less often as most of the time it seems to me they could be avoided without much loss.