....

I'm glad Salon still exists and is trying to find a way to make it in the online publishing world. I think the readers' forums have evolved well, but if what Gary says about their effect on writers is true, I hope Salon will find a way to keep its focus on the quality of the articles. I was always an avid reader of Eric Boehlert (please -- more hardcore-investigative reporting like his). I also always read Camille Paglia even though she tends to merge matters of taste and matters of knowledgeable authority into one occasionally annoying (but at least unpredictable and atypical) voice. Making Paglia an advice columnist was a novel approach, as was Garrison Keillor when he took over her job (I remember several of his responses to this day: When a woman asked about loving two men, Keillor said something like, "What makes you think you deserve the love of two men?" and when a married professor was contemplating seducing one of his students, Keillor wrote a detailed description of the professor's future alone, with only a fraying tweed jacket to keep him company.)

If Gary Kamiya and Joan Walsh want to make Salon's forums more friendly to readers and article authors alike, I think they should give all letter/form pages a prominent link to Salon's policies, which should urge people to be civil, to recognize that authors could be reading and do tend to have human egos, and provide a link to this Kamiya article. They should keep giving out editor's-pick stars, but perhaps with different colors (the red star is a little Communist, ain't it?) like blue for thoughtful or crrrazy purple for witty. I am only half-joking here. There are plenty of rating options for letters -- just don't spend so much time on it you lose focus on the quality of the actual articles.

One of the other web sites I read regularly is Fark.com, which is probably one of the best aggregator sites on the Internet. It has almost no original content other than what's user-generated, but it has one of the best message-forum systems I've ever seen -- and its management, while very hands-on, is nearly invisible. The moderators enforce the rules by deleting offensive posts and deleting every post that references the offending post, completely shutting down the source of offense. They also require registration, but you can use an alias and collect multiple aliases if you like. That said, there are enough hoops to jump through (such as a 24-hour waiting period before a new alias can post, and a limitation of aliases based on IP address) that people tend to choose one posting alias and stick with it. If they tend to write nasty, negative feedback, other readers have the option of blocking all of that alias's messages from their future view. There's more to it than that. It's quite an ingenious online-forum system that has been fine-tuned to fit the communicative patterns as well as anti-social behaviors of forum writers. If you're trying to find a good model for your own system, I suggest you give Fark's a look.

Anyway, I've written too much, and I'm worried this posting won't fit in the forum window, so.... Nice work, Gary Kamiya.

Good point about the misogyny that manifests itself in letter writing. But Salon also needs to look at the types of articles that they publish by women. Are women given an equal number of opportunities to publish more "objective" columns and articles that would elicit fewer personal attacks? I don't think so. It would be interesting to see a statistical analysis of this.

On the one hand, I'm annoyed how those who have all the power of publication complain about feedback. When you own the site you don't have to read or heed criticism, no matter how much of it there is.

On the other I tend to agree with some of this: "In the old days...Even the hate mail was pretty well thought-out. ...this has become about creating a spectacle of hate that everyone will notice...Salon contributors and staffers have complained to me that our open letters policy leaves the impression that our readership is much stupider and coarser than it really is."

The fact is Salon chose this policy of barely mediated and nearly anonymous comments, despite a long history of how this bring sout the worst in respondents. There are many forms of mediation and quality control and the Editor's Choice button is mostly a cop out.

Salon chose to create a forum akin to Craigslist's Rants and Raves, and now they decide to bitch about it.

Back when Salon introduced this new policy, I wrote several letters questioning the wisdom of it. There are many open but few decent genuine Letters to the Editor columns. Why not have both old and new formats? Neither total openess or heavy filtering is inherently good or bad, but when feedback reaches a certain incoherent volume people tend to hear less beyond their own voices.

Sometimes I wonder if such a wide open forum was picked to reduce the power of reader feedback.

A traditional Letters To The Editor page gives feedback a weight akin to a real article as it requires someone to read with care rather than skimming and flagging posts. An open forum gives the illusion of reader power, but can be easily dismissed. Writers can indulge their disdain and fear of the audience and ignore valid criticism. It may feed the self-absorption of some writers and editors in need of awareness (Ayet Waldman, for example).

In the end, there may be a two way issue of quality going on here, but it's not up to the audience to fix it.

As many have pointed out, the invective is often in response to the dubious quality and self-indulgence of the original article. The power rests with Salon, so perhaps you should give less weight to page views, exercise some control over both content and responses, stop whining and heal your damn selves.