[WiseWeasel]

If that's truly the case, then it feels like it would be rewarding the lurkers and penalizing the loyal readers, as the lurkers would get a much faster effective response rate.

But by far the worst offense to me is that it kills the community aspect, elevating the words and whims of the blogger much too high above the rabble's hobbled forum; they should consider themselves lucky to have been tossed these few scraps. Who wants to invest their time contributing to such a stodgy environment?

[pohl]

I agree with respect to the proposed stodgy environment, but I find it strange to suggest that lurkers are, a priori, somehow less loyal than chatterboxes. To me loyalty and a willingness to post are orthogonal to each other, for the most loyal reader I can imagine is someone who comes every day to check for something new and expects nothing out of the exchange beyond what they read, and one can also easily imagine drive-by commenters who never return again, or - worse still - those who persist and actively drag down the forums in myriad ways.

I wonder what it is about the web that makes people forget and/or denigrate the silent majority. It seems to be something unique about the web, mind you, because no one would imagine that the handful of cranks who write weekly letters to a newspaper's editor are, ipso facto, its longest-running subscribers - except, perhaps, the cranks themselves. Maybe I've just answered my own question there.