To 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

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gjm11 an hour ago | parent [-]

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).

	▲	addandsubtract 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's Tufte's first guideline, anyway. Present data in a table unless it's better visualized as a graph.