I had been thinking how bad Salon letters had become, how many of them there are now, how one does not have to read the article before clicking on the 65 letters on it within hours of the posting of the article. Today I saw this headline shouting out in all bold letters on the first page by Gary Kamiya.

Very timely. I read Salon less and less and avoid reading the letters. For the same reason that I do not listen to right wing talk radio, or to TV shouting heads policy wonk noise.

I had stopped posting to avoid contributing to the noise level. I am making an exception here to encourage Salon to consider supporting interesting articles, researched opinion, journalism.

Most days you know what the letter will say or even whom it will attack just by looking at the handle on the signature line.

Salon membership is a questionable use of funds these days.

Thank you for pointing this out Gary Kamiya.

How timely! A regular Stendhal, you.

I love to talk into and hoolw chamber! Chamber! Amber! Mber!ber!er!

A. While reasonably well-written, I couldn't help but consider this piece fundamentally condescending. Personally, I come here most BECAUSE OF the readers' letters, which by my purportedly very dim lights often exceed the articles they reference in a number of aspects, including insightfulness, depth and levity, not despite them. Should you end the practice--and one cannot help but consider this article the first step in a crackdown on the letters section--I would certainly curtail my reading, or cease altogether. No offense, but Salon's journalistic standards and credentials simply aren't that impressive. The readers add a lot to your site. Frankly, a number of them should be on retainer, or hired outright to replace some of your weaker staff members.

B. Citing Waldman and Traister on this issue is simply farcical. Waldman especially. Her (evidently reader-forced) departure only reinforced and legitimized "the masses'" interpretation of her "work", which was of course amateurish, at best. Those who go about blithely sticking their hands in hornets' nests should expect to get stung. I fail to see the problem here.

C. You state, apparently without any guile: "Pro athletes have a saying: "Respect the game." It may be too much to expect the mouse-wielding masses to embrace that credo." Are you serious? Have you ever actually been a sporting contest? I'm not talking about your 8-year old's field hockey team, I'm talking about college or pro team sports. Turn on sports talk radio. In America, and elsewhere, pro athletes are routinely exposed to incendiary and whithering assaults on their "game" and character alike. Certain athletes hardly ever experience a reprieve from the attacks. Given the tone of your letter, I really doubt you or the majority of your colleagues could withstand three innings in the shoes of, say, Alex Rodriguez (aka "A-Fraud", "E-Rod", "Double Play-Rod", "May-Rod", "Gay-Rod", "Ole-Rod", and about a thousand more), let alone 162-plus games a year. This allusion is simply fantastical. Rein it in, man, rein it in.

If Salon is serious about this and not simply attempting to generate yet more controversy, I urge someone there to take an hour of their time to go to slashdot.org and see how they deal with their copious levels of user feedback. Tiered levels of readers with greater rights accorded to moderators based on experience and commitment, reader voting as to any particular letter, readers permitted to winnow the letters field according to general perceived quality, etc., etc.

The site is called "salon." (Do you know what a salon is?) You open the letters to anyone. Then Joan Walsh assigns your whiniest male writer to pretend to investigate--only Farhad Manjoo could have done worse.

OK, crybabies. Turn off the free and open letters to the editor. See how long you survive on the clicks of the subscribers.

As with all huge societal changes, things'll settle down eventually. There will be some need to gate-keep, writers will get thicker skins, yada, yada, yada.

In the meantime, the passengers should remain calm. This ain't the Titanic.

I do not suport the idea of moderation (rejecting letters) as proposed by others here, since the standards of moderation will likely be based on the assumption that all letters should strive to greatness. To borrow Gary's word, it will "flatten" the letter writers' participation.

For example, the letters I and others have posted in response to recent Tom Tomorrow cartoons are throwaway good fun at the expense of the "phone it in" troll. In fact, for me, the entertainment value of the responses to the "phone it in" troll rivals that of the cartoon itself. Here is a case of Salon's LWs entertaining me in a way that isn't particularly high or arch. And I like that. Baroque is better, but possibilities of diverse response will likely be lost in any attempt to "clean up" the LWs.

And Salon does already provides a form of moderation with the editor's choice stars.

"Fiction writers do not aim to communicate facts, make an argument or convince anyone of anything; indeed, it is questionable whether fiction is a "communication" in the sense that a conversation is at all. "

What you say? I was mostly nodding along with this article, until I reached that utterly strange assertion. Fiction writers often are trying to communicate something far more profound and important than merely a set of facts that is the providence of non-fiction writers. Fiction at its heart deals with the human condition, and at its most profound can cause readers to completely renegotiate their relationship to the world. It is no accident that a list of the world's greatest books contains very few non-fiction titles. When I think of the writers who have managed to convince me to change my thinking in a life altering way, it is works of fiction that jump to the top. The rather obscure junior fiction science fiction book "This Star Shall Abide" by Sylvia Louise Engdahl first read when I was 12, lead me to question the nature of religious faith which eventually resulted in moving from devout fait to atheism. The very famous "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayne Rand in which she uses fiction to articulate her philosophy, Objectivism, rocked my world in my mid 20's when I was in my idealistic anti-Capitilist period. For a while I was quite the Rand deciple, until other works tempered my ideas into something more workable and just. Gary, if you think fiction isn't trying to have a conversation with you, you just are paying enough attention.