Salon.com is no HuffingtonPost.com
At Salon.com, a blogger can, at whim, delete any comment that he/she does not like. That's not a salon in my America but it might be one in Stalinist Russia, though. This does not happen at Ariana Huffington's site. Sure, they can delete your comments if they are off topic, abusive, ad hominem, and a few other criteria. But those are site-specified rules not the whim of the blogger who is posting his opinion on a site that has full public access. I'm had stuff deleted on the HPost but I knew after it was deleted that I had gone BloggerPostal according to the rules of the site. What's wrong with the salon.com methods? If we are told that we can comment on a posting/blog, we are tempted to read the whole thing knowing that we can disagree in public with the writer. We take the time to read it and to compose an opinion that was at variance with the blogger. We feel that, in some small way, we can temper the opinions in a balanced way. But instead, the blogger decides that ...