I have had a comment removed today because, purportedly, I was spamming too many responses to a single other comment. I find this reasoning to be specious: I provided just as much evidence for my position as the other commentor did for theirs, and did so succinctly. This isn’t spam: it’s a conversation.

I have noticed, in my tenure on the internet, that it is common for people to produce quite long, meandering comments in response to some quip they didn’t like. A failure to address each of these points is, eventually, and almost without exeception, greeted with “you didn’t answer my questions” or some variation. This tactic smacks of the Gish gallop: a rhetorical technique where you throw every concievable argument, no matter how specious, into the debate, attempting to make it seem as though a failure to answer ANY point means that point must stand.

I reject being told how long or thorough a response must be to any particular comment: if a claim can be rebutted in a single word, then that word should suffice. Further, if someone produces a great, meandering rant on the topic du jour, surely they understand each of the points tehy made, and can defend them even in isolation from the other, tangentially related points. So responding to each point in single comments, even if that means many single comments, breaks up the gish gallop, and allows the readers to see the problems with each point without subjecting them to multiple walls of text.

Finally, no rule explicitly says that a comment must meet an objective standard for length, nor that you may not respond to a comment more than once if you have two different things to say to that comment. It is my conclusion that the removal of my comment was, therefore, capricious and unwarranted.