Dear Salon:
With your new letters policy, you've lost me as a commenter. It seems you valued me as a commenter, given that about half my letters got red stars (which seems significant in light of the fact that your policy is to favour signed letters). That's probably because I comment only when I seem to be the only one who has thought to say what I have to say.
Given the combination of the size of your readership, and the hatefulness of certain parts of your readership, and the fact that every comment I have to make that's worth making is either highly personal or highly political, and the fact that I must retain a certain anonymity WRT my real-life identity for the sake of my loved ones, and the fact that I must maintain the impression of a certain political neutrality WRT my real-life identity for professional purposes, and the fact that if you collected together all my comments it really would show a lot of myself, I'm just not comfortable with that.
I censor myself a lot when I'm posting under a consistent identity - yes, even here, yes, even in other online communities. I wasn't censoring myself that much in the Salon comments in order to produce unique and insightful comments. If I do censor myself as much as necessary, what I can permit myself to say there wouldn't be worth saying.
Yes, I have this blog, but I only get 10-20 hits a day (mostly from people googling for pictures I once linked to), plus I don't seem to get that many nasty trolls. There are more nasty trolls in a single Salon letters page than I've gotten in the entire history of this blog. I'm just not up for exposing myself to them under any consistent identity.
PS: On top of all this, I have also noticed that the most annoying posters do use consistent handles.
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