system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What affects whether rain comes down hard or soft?
gpt
The atmosphere everywhere (even outside the cloud) contains lots and lots and lots of water. And under a stable combination of temperature, pressure, and humidity, all that moisture is perfectly happy to exist in a completely gaseous state. But as differing air masses start to collide, the local atmospheric conditions can fall outside the range where water can exist in a completely gaseous state. That is known as the dew point.

A cloud is where two differing atmospheric conditions have met, and the resulting condensed water droplets simply do not have sufficient weight to overcome the updraft speed of the air around it. If the air masses mix slowly, the rate of condensation will occur slowly and over a longer period of time. The resulting clouds may simply "evaporate" as the local conditions stabilize, or the condensing water may slowly precipitate over the ground (soft rain), or the precipitation may never reach the ground at all. These gentler atmospheric changes tend to play out over longer periods of time because the air masses are moving more slowly so it takes longer for the differences to mix and settle down into a new steady state.

If two air masses have widely varying conditions (think warm moist air over the ocean meeting dryer hotter conditions over the land) and they meet more abruptly (higher wind speeds), this causes a more-violent disturbance; the moisture from the air will condense more quickly, the rain falls faster and harder, and the whole thing ends (relatively speaking) more quickly.