Hee! I've mostly forgotten what size stories are by k, probably because I left fandom when LJ was just becoming popular and then came back when LJ was the main thing. But speaking of bloat, I remember that for a while around the late 90's/2000 a lot of (clueless LOL) people were posting fic to their personal web sites using Word or other bloat-inducing programs to format things in HTML and then using the size of that bloated file to describe their story. So, like, I'd click on what I thought was going to be a 50k story and find what was by all rights a 20k story. *headdesk* Wordcount does eliminate that uncertainty.