Letters to the Editor
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Great Move!
And please ban abusive posters with names. I have been all over my local paper about the abusive posts on their website, and just no longer bother to read any comments there. It is a shame to let a few ruin the ability to share opinions and ideas. Thank you for stepping up! I am a long time subscriber and value Salon greatly- to much to watch the discourse go much further south.
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Good call.
No complaints from me, but I second the suggestion for a hierarchical, threaded layout. I think that would make the comment sections much easier to read, especially for articles and blogs that get a lot of responses.
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This will certainly
--impoverish the dialog in the comments on "Since You Asked" and personal essays. Nobody's going to talk about how she dealt with her boss's alcoholism or her brother's bipolar disorder when someone who knows who she is will therefore know who that boss or brother is.
I suppose there's no technical fix to let Anonymous work in some areas but not others.
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keep the threads
"I second the suggestion for a hierarchical, threaded layout."
I actually find the comments here much easier to read, follow and respond to, than "hierarchial threads" of other sites.
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Why Bother
Salon Letters to Joan Blog:
" I like Hillary"
"I like Obama."
Joan is shill for Hillary."
"Joan is fair to both Hilly and Obama."
"Hillary is ______."
"Obana is ________."
"I will vote for McCain because he is ________ if Hillary/Obama
is the candidate."
"Letter write "A" you are great."
"Letter writer "B" you are stupid."
The above pretty well sums up what I read each day at "Letters." While eliminating people who won't sign their names is a good and overdue action, the rest of your letter writers might do well to read a book or something rather than just repeat the same thing five times a day as if repeating it often enough will make them be thought wise.
I have come to the conclusion that the smart people who read Salon write very few letters. Either that or your audience is the left equivalent of those who think Jonas Goldberg is a writer of great insight.
I suggest you ban idiots.
WHS
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Thanks, Joan!!
Wise choice. Let the trolls go a'trolling at some other web site. They really ruin the experience here. It was becoming intolerable to try and wade through a lot of garbage and ugliness and repetitive stupidity just to try and get to the thoughtful and rational comments. I will spend more time here now.
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vetting anonymous letters for SYA
I agree with Nancy Ott -- can personal letters be reviewed by a live person, then posted anonymously if the subject matter is not mean-spirited or inflammatory? If it's too much to do that for all letters, can it be implemented for Since You Asked?
Although I typically post with my screen name, I've posted anonymously to Since You Asked because the subject of the letter was a highly private (and painful) one that I unfortunately know quite a bit about. I hope that through my post I was able to help the letter writer, but I don't know if I would have had the courage to write what I wrote under my screen name, since it's one I commonly use for other communication with friends and family.
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@ keep the threads
I agree. The simplicity of Salon's letter set-up, is one of it's best features.
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@WHS
WHS,
kudos.
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Good Decisions
I know this won't get rid of all the abusers but I do think it'll cut the number roughly in half.
I agree with others that Since You Asked might have some way to post anonymously. But even there, I've seen some mean-spirited and ultimately pointless anon posts. So maybe on balance it's best to just eliminate as from the rest of the site.
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Bulls--T paternalism from Salon, which takes itself too seriously and is lucky anyone posts anymore
Preventing anonymous posting will result in fewer dissenting voices being heard. Notice how the majority of the posts to this article are bravo and etc. This decision is anti-free speech. The person who mentioned the ease with which one can scroll past anonymous or trolly comments was right on. I can't wait to enjoy the new nannified letters posting area.
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Banning anonymous could have a chilling effect
Not all anonymous posts are negative; some actually have good insight. Additionally, there are any number of legitimate reasons people post anonymously (I started doing it occasionally when I realized a comment I wrote on Salon appeared every time I was googled). I think a better option would be to just let people "ignore this comment" with the comment not appearing if enough people click to ignore. They do this on message boards at Amazon.com.
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Just for the record
I post as Portlander but my name is Darrell Zink. Just in the interest of disclosure.
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Thank you, and I've already noticed the improvements
I agree that, overall, the "anonymous" feature was not worth the trouble it caused, and whatever you guys have been doing to enforce your policies, it seems to have led to a marked improvement just in the last couple of weeks or so.
However, I would once again emphasize, as I did when Alex Koppelman first raised this issue, that the intelligence and civility of the letters section often seems to directly correlate to the thoughtfulness and civility of the Salon piece. My problem with the letters section in recent weeks had not been so much the level of vitriol, as the fact that many of the postings appeared to be a form of spam (and I would tend to believe the theory posited by one of the Salon posters that some of the spammers were paid campaign shills). Over at War Room, we clearly were at some point invaded by a group of interlopers, the quality of whose postings clearly distinguished them from the Salon "regulars." The main objection I had to that was the fact that the spam got really boring. How many times can you read the same posting from the same individual, declaring over and over again, "Get real!" or "Obama is an empty suit!" in the course of a 900-letter response to a one-paragraph War Room posting? Those interlopers appear to have largely vanished, so whatever you did to them, it's working.
But during that time period where things were getting really bad, I do think the spammers come out more in response to "he said she said" type postings we saw in War Room during that period, than in response to the more thoughtful, substantive pieces you've run about this campaign, such as the HTWW piece on Austan Goolsbee or the profile of Samantha Power. But if you keep publishing things that focus on "the dude vote" or "I'm voting for Obama because he's black," you're just asking for more spam, IMHO.