>In friendly dialog

That seemed to be what we were having, up until this reply from you where you seem to accuse me of conversing in bad faith or rudeness. My apologies if that was not your intent and I am reading too much into this accusation of ghosting. I even took the time, after seeing your reply before deletion and trying to address its contents, to still reply elsewhere to let you know, in essence, I found the deleted comment to be valid and deserved a reply of its own. Far from ghosting you, I un-ghosted your ghosting of me! :) Okay, now I'm having a bit of fun with the "ghosting" idea because I really do view this as a friendly dialogue as well, and I hope you take it in the spirit intended. So let me explain myself further, both in my original original comment and in reply to what you've written here.

1) My original comment: I merely chimed in to reply to the author of the linked article, who felt personally attacked by the previous comment by someone else, to give a perspective of why someone might be skeptical of their motivations. As you say there is no tangible evidence either way but the circumstances of their post-- new domain, anonymous, first-post... those do provide grounds for an inference that the blogger might not be authentic. I am being very careful to say might, because it is that benefit of the doubt that the harsh comment directly accusing sock puppetry failed to give to the author, an accusation I think was over stated and inflammatory. I attempted to temper that harshness with a less accusatory view, and thereby begin engaging the author-- if they chose-- in a more level headed conversation. They kindly took up that implicit invitation and I tried to provide a more thoughtful reply regarding the contents of their blog post than the original accuser did.

2) You replied to this by addressing only part of my comment-- that about the appeal for trust-- rather than address my underlying claim about why a person might be skeptical of the motives of the author. You ghosted me on that point! (again I jest) I don't see anything wrong with you choosing to only address the portion you disagreed with-- if I was mistaken in reading an "appeal" into the author's post then why not discuss that mistake before moving on? As you say, it's a dialogue, there's no need to assume I considered it ended and wouldn't engage in more depth on that or other points if you were willing & continued to reply.

3) Now I'll explain why I didn't consider the "...would have seemed weirder" context necessary to explicitly address when replying to you: We were then discussing whether or not an appeal had been made, and that is a question that is wholly separate from the question of it being weird to not make such an appeal. The appeal for trust can be there (or not) regardless of whether or not its absence would would be strange. Its existence is independent from the issue of it being expected or normal to include it. "...weirder" may be relevant in the broader conversation regarding the pragmatics involved (I use that in the linguistic sense of meaning) and logical inferences that might reasonably be made or not made by the author claiming a lack of conflicts of interest.

Side note: I hope you don't see the above dissection as adversarial. I am dissecting my own responses to explain them further, and dissecting yours in an effort to put what you wrote into my own words, in my own understanding, to make it clear what my understanding was, in case I did not accurately interpret your intended meaning. I enjoy questions of pragmatics & meaning in discourse, intended message vs. received message. In that vein, we've opened up 3 topics much different than the author's enterprise linux argument. I think we can leave that to the side as we pursue broader questions of meaning and trust. I'll be a little more comprehensive in this reply because we arrived at a point where you believed that my lack of a longer response implied something unintended, but in future replies I may address more narrow aspects of things when I think some particular point would be useful to discuss before moving on to others. That leaves, as I see it, 3 primary claims or questions with the first two pertaining to implied meanings in discourse, a fun topic. The 3rd is a question about the role & utility that trust fills when presenting ideas, claims, etc. Any content I don't list below I have interpreted to be premises in support of one of these claims. In the interest of brevity I will only address one of the following claims here, and we may choose which to pursue afterwards.

1 my claim) A person stating that they don't have a conflict of interest is asking for a certain baseline of trust. (actually I do address this in the above #3, but I am open to discussing my interpretation)

2 your claim) "ghosting your conversation partner's agreed to points is indistinguishable from ignoring points you simply don't have a good retort to."

3-a your claim) Trust is not strictly required when evaluating the opinions or ideas of another person. As such, 3-b your claim) Trust is not worth talking about in circumstances where direct evidence (as opposed to inference) is not present.

I welcome you to correct or amend or add to any of the above if you think I have not adequately covered things, and otherwise will choose to address #2 as I believe it important to do so before continuing:

I disagree with #2. I think its assertion goes against a fundamental guideline in discourse-- the principle of charity, i.e., given multiple interpretations of an argument a person should first consider the best and strongest. As such, while the absence of a reply to each and every particular point, premise, claim and sub claim might be interpreted as a person's failure, their inadequacy, their inability to form a coherent response, that may just as easily not be the case. A person may ignore some aspects of a comment for multiple reasons, including but not limited to reasons of preference (they're not interested in other aspects) practicality (keeping things brief so that participants do not have to, as I have done here, inundate another participant with large walls of text to be digested all at once when doing so in smaller pieces is also possible [look at the length of this! And I'm not even trying to response comprehensively to all aspects of what you wrote, leaving off claims #1 and #3 for future conversation]) or far myriad other reasons. As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of an absence and there a other plausible and more charitable interpretations to be made.

That's all I have for now, see you in the next exchange?