alt Hacker NewsTo be fair, if someone wanted to present that exact dataset efficiently, they would have probably proposed something much different, like an horizontal chart with thin lines, eg
North [------------] 7
South [--------] 5
East [--------] 5
West [-----] 3
or something, which would have saved a lot of data/ink ratio
You could just remove the bars and present the numbers in a table. In this case I think that would be a considerable improvement (unless the chart is one of several similar charts that one might want to compare, in which case being able to compare their shapes at a glance would have value).