Completely agree. I don't use Twitter, but in a previous life, hosted a public bulletin board while at a company. We made everything public and told people th

Completely agree. I don't use Twitter, but in a previous life, hosted a public bulletin board while at a company. We made everything public and told people there is a policy of not modifying or deleting anything, so please re-read everything you post to make sure you want it there permanently. That worked great when we had < 2000 customers. Then we got a few bad apples who got off by stirring up shit on the boards and goading us. After the 9/11 incident, we announced a new policy related to payments that some people didn't like, so they started a shitstorm on the boards about it. One customer posted something to the effect of "I hope there is a terrorist on the next plane you board", and also sent an email pointing out her new email address, which was colt454u@xxx. It was embarrassing and deleterious to the entire site to have this kind of crap posted on our public boards, so we had to delete it, start banning the worst offenders, etc. Legal free speech is great. But a free-for-all isn't free speech. When the worst of the worst get going, it's a turn-off for reasonable people. A reasonable person realizes, "There's no point in countering this untrue, corrosive speech, because the person posting it is completely unreasonable, will never shut up or admit they are wrong, so my time would be wasted." Hence, the cesspool. I will never host a public forum again. Shortly after the above drama, we switched to a model where we posted customer support questions along with answers, then eventually shut the forums down.