There have been a handful of fascinating posts about Open Salon lately; what it is, what it needs to be, what it isn't. We're reading them all. And if there's a common thread that runs through them all, one that bubbles up periodically here, it's: Is this a community site or not?

It's not, at least in any traditional sense. Open Salon is designed as a publishing platform with curatorial tools -- for you and us -- to help readers of the site more easily find valuable content. The sociability of the site (messaging, commenting, etc.) is deliberately bare bones. We wanted to make it easy for you to communicate with each other, and encourage you to gather in any way you want. If you use it as a community site -- that's great, too. But that should come with an understanding that, as Open grows and we spend more time developing it, we're investing in ways to better optimize it for writers (or cartoonists, videographers, photographers, etc.) so that they can build a bigger audience. We want members to have the best experience on Open that they possibly can, but it's a site that's skewed toward creators wanting to create (or readers wanting to comment or rate) and less toward social networking. (If you're interested in joining a moderated online community, I'm happy to suggest two exemplary ones: this one and this one.)

Relatedly, when we're making an Editor's Pick or moving content to the Open or Salon covers, we're just looking for posts we find smart and interesting. That's it. I elaborated a while back here. We're not trying to use the cover as a community page, as a reward for new members, or a way to curry favor with any particular bloggers. We try to treat each post equally. You might not agree with all of our decisions -- we're human, there are great posts we miss -- but smart and interesting are our only real criteria. And the number of posts that meet that criteria daily is growing at a mind-blowing pace.

We also know that the experience of putting yourself out there as a creator can reap wonderful rewards -- and bitter tears. Feedback is great, and the connections you can make with readers through a blog, I'd imagine many of you would agree, is amazing. It's utterly transformed the media.  But ask anyone who writes online about the downside of reader feedback and I can pretty much promise you the reaction will echo Joan's description here or Gary Kamiya's impressions here. Each of my Salon colleagues can probably recite a tale of being the subject of an unspeakably cruel post -- we're not talking about a vicious critique, but a personal attack -- if they've followed the Google trail far enough, or if they've read the letters on their stories. People on the Internet can be unspeakably mean. And if you're creating content online, they will find you.

We've deliberately given you tools to minimize the threat so that you can edit your comments, close your comments and filter your messages. But Open is. . . well, an "open" site, that's free. Jerks will continue to join. And, in my semi-scientific observation, will leave when people refuse to listen them. I'd like to take credit for keeping out the trolls and riff-raff, but you're the ones who have largely shooed them away, using the only proven method known to work: Ignoring them.

That doesn't mean we don't take complaints seriously. We monitor all complaints as closely as we can, and we move when we feel we should.

But. The vast majority of the complaints we get on posts/comments/bloggers are that they are "creepy," "inappropriate" or "annoying." And I'm not trying to minimize those complaints: Lord knows there have been posts -- and posters -- that fit those descriptions well, and I would've loved to have zapped them into the ether. But the standard must be kept very high. And rather than going into contorted specific legalese, let me just say that for content to be deleted, it needs to be pretty damn bad. When the threshold is crossed, we move. When it's not, we don't -- and urge you to ignore it.

I'll keep this comments thread open and answer questions as often as I can all day.