"Respect The Game" comparison, huh? You've clearly never listened to a sports radio talkshow or been to an actual game lately. They make the Salon letters sections seem like a tea and crumpets affair.

Sorry Gary, it's too late to close the barn door. You have to take the good with the bad.

Readers' comments are easy enough to evaluate. If you skim them quickly you will see that most of them are alike..and every once in awhile there is a novel idea or comment that will enlighten you. The foolish and self-serving comments appear to be..foolish and self-serving..and you writers should just ingore those and look for the ones that might be honestly written and informative. It's OK..we don't bite. Sticks and stones... If you can't take the heat....

Keep writing and keep posting those comments.

allow a one page download of all letters. this would allow search, so conversational threads could be easily followed. another advantage, by getting it all at one splash it would soothe the more sensitive by seeing their own position more often. as for filters "(At Salon, we have a few simple changes in the works.)" may i suggest simple spell and grammar checkers. if the aim is to foster more considered replies, without censoring adverse opinions, this might help. i really don't think obscenity checks ought to be instituted. i think it's part of free speech, however insulting. finally, for those who use pseudonyms, they *may* seem to free you, but really, nothing beats the thumb-in-your-eye sang froid of one's own real name.( and this from one who was given, gratis, the wonderful, "Super-Troll" (thanks, "Lola"))

...and still pulls the in revenues from the clicks and ads. Surely there must be a happy medium, and if not, then those who control the apparatus can fix it, schlep along or kill it. I'd vote to fix it, or experiment to fix it.

For one, how about some instant letter editors who can sort and balance things and try to be fair. Newspaper editoral sections weed out letters all the time. Why can't Salon? Sure it might kill a bit of the democratic discourse, but there's no such thing as pure democracy, nor pure captialism for that matter.

If fairness and honesty in policy are used and if Salon isn't addicted to the clicks that the instant feedback is bringing, then it can be done reasonably fairly. Writers have had their cake and ate it for the longest time without interface with readers. Salon can also have it all if figure something out in mediating the whole mess...because the schlubs that write in (good and bad) simply can not.

It's your boat, you steer it. You decide ultimately who gets on board.

Gary Kamiya's article speaks to a general phenomenon of technology accelerating what people call the "democratization" of crafts or art forms that were previously too difficult for the "unwashed masses".

A while back I got into home recording right when the personal computer (PC or MAC, your choice) and Pro Tools "democratized" the recording industry :).

The audio pro's gnashed their teeth and lamented that the "art" of recording was dead because all these half-ass amateurs were out there overcompressing or underwhatevering and using crappy mics and generally making really awful recordings. It followed, then, that all these bad recordings would dilute the overall quality of recorded music and people would "forget" what good recordings sounded like.

But it cuts both ways. It's the Long Tail, baby. There's more great music out there than ever before. Find a few good websites that focus on music and community and you can listen to all kinds of crazy and great music recordings (sprinkled like little gems among the crap, of course -- as it ever was in this world I think). I think recorded music is having an incredible renaissance on the web.

So is it a good analogy to journalism? I don't know. Journalism has the part about having to get the facts straight. It's not just art. But don't worry too much about the "democratization" of journalism.

Take a stand. Grow an even thicker skin. We'll be along for the ride. Hell, we're all on this thing together now. No more drivers and passengers. We're all drivers. So move over.

"For some reason there's a tendency for the very worst of people to be expressed online," Waldman says.

It's called the lack of real threat of physical harm.

When you read a long letters section, it soon becomes obvious that a good number of people who are writing letters either didn't read the article in question or are using the forum as a springboard for their own agenda.

Now granted, you can't do much about the latter and, even if the article is read, reading comprehension could still be a problem but at least the letter stream might be more on topic and based on what was written rather than imagined or whatever else.

Regulation of comments is not evil as long as it's done well. Moderation seems like the most sensible approach. Slashdot gets plenty of trolls, but I don't see them when I read comments; they're generally hidden below my threshold. Salon gets plenty of trolls and their letters look just like mine. Editor's Choice does not work to filter like this; lots of well-written letters do not get starred and more than a few badly-written ones do. I admit being lost as to how those decisions get made; most of them are certainly not as insightful and well-written as the original letter pages used to be, and I can't imagine why the standards have changed.

Aside from moderation, I think a "report this comment" feature would do a world of good. Get an intern to monitor the reports. Or a volunteer or, heck, a tech support worker in India for all I care if they're trained well, I'm so frustrated at this point. Give them a way to 'hide' a comment without deleting it--I couldn't say if you've already got that feature or not--and take a zero-tolerance approach to abusive or trollish behavior. Hide the post, if there's some question about it email the given author address (if it's valid) and tell them why it was removed, and if they can cogently defend their position you can put it back. Some people should probably be banned by IP since a lot of the troll messages read like they were written by the same few authors.

If Salon is a serious news organization, it should not feel obligated to post every piece of dreck that someone can manage to type up and submit. Put some controls on it. Remove the trolls, the posts that have nothing to do with the article except an attack on the author, the anonymous personal attacks on other posters. And don't feel bad about it for a second. I really think that the authors and readers here deserve that much.

I apologize if I repeat anybody else's suggestion; if somebody else said these first, just mentally edit what I said to "I agree with !" I'm not reading the comments to this article precisely because I'm afraid they're going to be ugly.