( – promoted by buhdydharma )
Before I and my pardners here started Docudharma, I spent months with a group of blogging luminaries trying to start a truly community owned blog. We ran into many obstacles, from tech issues, since Soapblox was at that time a truly inferior platform, (which still has issues) to the inability endemic to the Left, lol, of actually agreeing on anything.
But it was a noble effort and it is time to consider it again.
I certainly don’t need to tell the Refugees why we need a truly communally owned blog, lol. But above avoiding the intellectual repression inherent in the occasional purge…there are other advantages to a community owned blog as well.
We need a true Town Square. We need a Commons. We need a true democracy where every one has an equal voice.
The internet is the most powerful tool we have to achieve true equality and freedom. For the first time in human history, regular people from all around the globe can connect without the filter of a medium owned by the Ruling Class. For the first time, ordinary people have a theoretically unfiltered way to make themselves heard and to join together in solidarity, or at least flame wars. For the first time, the citizens of the world can join together to, if they so wish, oppose the Ruling Class.
They have the guns, but we have the numbers, as Morrison sang. For the first time, we have a way to truly USE those numbers…..other than armed revolt, lol. Which rarely turns out well for us.
For the first time, we CAN truly be heard, can truly have a voice, and can use that voice to yell louder for real change.
But that can’t happen as long as someone OWNS it. As long as one person has the power to control the conversation, it is not a REAL Conversation.
“Owning” a blog sucks. it has certainly given me a new respect for Markos….despite any faults he may have. People on the Left, like me, rebel against all authority. It is no fun being rebelled against I can assure you! You have to grow a whole ‘nother layer of thick skin. And you have to examine yourself deeply for any and all prejudices and biases. I certainly have not been perfect at it. I don;t think any one person can be.
Right now, I can ban anyone here at the click of a mouse. I hate that. I have hated every banning I have ever executed, no matter how good the reason. I have agonized it and discussed it with all of the ‘steering committee’ at DD in private and usually at length. And fortunately bannings have been few and far between. But I truly hate having the power of blog life and death over people. I detest shunning people. But….it is occasionally necessary for the greater Good.
The last three bannings….including Dave from Queens, have been for what could be described as mental health issues. Dave was obsessed, and the stress of his obsession surely contributed to his heart condition, which eventually killed him. NOT giving him another forum to pursue his obsession, as noble as it was, was deemed best for him and for the community.
I do not regret that at all.
But it is a burden. And not only should no one person have to carry that burden, but no one person is qualified to make that determination. Because we are all human and we all have prejudices and subjective views, no matter what. So it is better for that sort of decision to be a truly communal one. And as long as one person holds that ultimate power as I do here, it is never truly communal.
It is power.
And power corrupts. Everyone. No matter how good their intentions.
The last ‘banning’ here was quickly overturned, because it was an abuse of power. The person who abused that power is no longer here….by their choice, not mine. I did not, lol, ban them for banning someone.
.
Of course who bans them really doesn’t really matter to the banned.
But it does matter how. It matters to all of us how.
So let’s talk about it. How do we do it? What does it look like? What is the decision making process to arrive at the utopia of a worldwide Town Square.
And…what are the rules? Because there does have to be some minimal rules. PFF proved that.
The most successful recent blog startup has been Politico.
There are two reasons they have been successful. Content and funding. They got a group of already powerful well read writers together in one place, paid for a platform and paid for advertising. That is one model. What are others? And/or, how could WE make that work?
Any blog that is started to “oppose” another blog will fail. This has to be a whole new thing a hole new idea and entity. It has to be done for the right reasons, and it has to have guidelines for both the Admins (if they are indeed necessary!) and posters. Anarchy doesn’t work.
I have put a lot of thought into this and I will come back to it and share those thoughts in more detail. But for today, let’s get the conversation started!
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Maybe the hardest questions.
It seems to me that answering those would answer what is the decision making process to arrive at the utopia of a true participatory democracy, that is not ruled by an elite small aristocracy.
Maybe the Magna Carta was a blueprint for the ideal blog?
My head hurts a little now…
I saw your blog over on DKos with the goodbye from Tocq and decided to come along and see what you’ve got going here. I’ve always enjoyed your comments and presence on Dkos, and I see some of the same weaknesses in a single person “owning” a community. Communities like that are more like company towns. As long as you’re a member of the company (i.e. an employee) everything is relatively fine. Or if you fly under the radar. I tend to fly under the radar.
The issue I had with DKos, and one thing I am looking for still in a community (I think I get some of that feeling from Al Giordano’s blog, which is run as a non profit) is that the focus not be so much on party politics. I am not a Democrat, even though I have voted mostly for Democrats, and that is because I think there is something inherently limiting about the American two-party system. I think we are well on our way to a three-or-four party system, Democrats, Independent Progressives, Independent Libertarians, and Right-Wingnuts (or what will remain of the Republican party when the Independent Libertarians all pull out).
I certainly don’t think a healthy long-term community in the blogosphere can be maintained with an autocrat at the top. Well, it could be, if that autocrat set out limited terms for the community and maintained them. That is hard to do. It requires a very gentle soul, one I admit I don’t have. I’m a relatively merciless person, and while I’m good at following rules and badgering others to follow them, I am much too impatient with others to be the one at the top of the heap.
At any rate, I think it’s great that Inky and Tocq found their way here and that you’ve been blogging all along on issues i find of intereest, and that we don’t have to shake in our boots if someone looks a little too closely at what really happened on 9/11, because undoubtedly there are issues to be examined.
Thanks for letting me join.
Louisev
should have a rec button Buhdy.
So it will still be more visible as other stuff is fp’ed.
Even if you poll the participants to try to democratically determine what this blog is about, someone(s) gotta decide what the questions are and what the choices are.
But you have an excellent start, with the initial directive to be nice to each other, and a great understanding about how blogs should work. Good luck!
As you say, anarchy doesn’t work, simple majoritarianism can be oppressive to the 49%, and the CEO/ Autocrat model is what many here see as the hierarchical paradigm that is destroying the planet.
Nice of you to facilitate toque’s closing words at dKos.
I can’t say. You have a real job on your hands, and you must be a gluten for punishment.
I say that based on experience. I have worked in so many “left” groups that simply broke apart because they could not come to consensus. True, most of that was in the 70s and 80s. I suspect that it has not changed too much.
I agree with the assertion that political blogs should be better if “un-owned”. I have not looked up how this site was formed, how the “steering committee” functions, and how decisions are made. Yet, the concept of a open-minded political blog (I deliberately chose not to say left) not run by a benevolent dictator has appeal.
I do wish you all luck, and I will stop by occasionally for some sarcastic contributions. If you don’t mind.
sure, why not.
This whole concept will take a good bit more brain power than I have handy at the moment.
Look to other models, what has been at least somewhat successful, that’s what Id do first. And then, well, you know what it’s NOT… its not a democracy, in that strictest sense (49% end up oppressed as taoskier said).
I’d look at Six Nations, b/c while a “democracy” it had (has?) “consensus” as a big part of it. Also Id look at some other stuff (American Firends probably).
But a “community” on the internet, you are limited in how you can establish “alliances” or create “leverage”… things needed/wanted to create a consensus… how do you spell that! And this is not L.O.S.T. lol, a show I have never seen, btw.
Believe it or not, my “Ladies Club” has done a better job of it than any Ive seen. But its a private, invitation only forum. Each member is a Moderator, with powers. lol. And the Owner/Moderator is a rather awesome lady.
Interesting times indeed.
Be excellent to each other, or else…
I’ll think about that other question. But it seems like there are a lot of good writers here, and they have a lot of common interests. Maybe the writers can coordinate their postings to cover particular topics in a unique way — write cooperatively about a topic, rather than like a box of kittens that just got spilled over.
A lot of the writers here have particular strengths. Take torture, for example. I know very little about real law, and I’m not much of a wonk, but I do data analysis really well. So, I try to stick to things that are more analytical and scientific. If I paired up with a legal type and a wonk, we could do a pretty good cooperative series of articles. It would be unique, and well worth reading.
But any single post someone makes is one yell, and it will fade. Lots of people yelling together makes a bigger impression.
Anyway, I think if people here work cooperatively and consistently, this blog will get noticed. If it gets hits, it gets ads…
And I do think it is very difficult.
Using a committe helps and having an appeals process in which the banned can appeal seems fair.
What amazed me about Daily Kos is how so many “progressives” not only defended but argued it was good that private property rights gave Markos arbitrary and capricious powers.
You cannot have a progressive outcome is you don’t have a progressive process.
Arbitrary and capricious is how power evolved at Dkos.
People need some due process. Maybe not a lot, but some.
Toq was so right in his GBCW: no one would have provided Kos so much power from the beginning. It just happened and some people really like that. The Orange is the Orange, but we can do it different.
Already you have the benefit of owning and being a diarist on Dkos with no power. You have been persecuted by the gangs for supporting impeachment.
That is a start.
Thanks for asking for input and sharing your story, B.
I’m an older dkos-er who often visited here but until now never registered. Remembering passwords is a bugaoo for some including me.
My CV [profile at dkos] qualifies me as a political junkie but also lends credence to what I discovered empirically – that one gets further in life through civility than otherwise.
At dkos, where I am currently still TU as “puffmeister” – with only a very few diaries [ usually on the environment] and a blog list that has from the first included docudharma as a favored site to visit – I recently posted this same plea in a comment I’d hoped would be considered by the puerile nasty types in the community:
The diary that I commented on was a great one – also suggesting a more civil tone, since the nastiness has not apparently been toned down despite multiple bannings based on diary content. It followed the wonderful diaries by Inky and Toque, on which I also added a few words in support, along with my recs.
[It is possible that I too could be banned, as I also added a ‘rec’ to TokyoR’s diary about T’s text on FDR at this site; it was upon learning of that addl banning – along with the general nasty tenor there, that I felt compelled to pick up the thread here and perhaps even register – after all, this site is one of my listed favorites at kos [!!] – and see how you folks are doing these days. Ergo, here I am.
I ended that comment by suggesting that “perhaps each commenter should envision the one we address as, say, having just lost a father, who could use kindness in our manner of expression, rather than incivility and condescension.”
Yes, I lost my dad last month. But my point is that gratuitous cruelty and condescension is, in my mind, much more offensive than any particular topic.
As to flaming non-political diaries: I not only enjoyed reading diaries such as Inky and Toque’s but also enjoy respite of pooch/kitty pics and gardening, and see nothing wrong with the occasional non-political diary, there or here.
But logging on to a blog whose the level of vitriol and puerile sarcasm is in the stratosphere has been truly hard to stomach recently.
At kos, I had recently [on Inky’s diary] tried writing to someone who wasn’t kind to the diarist, by saying in effect “I’m sure you are a nice guy in other circumstances, just reconsider what you are saying here” but on that blog I merely earned increasing levels of vitriol – none of which appears to be considered a banning offense, so long as the writer is either some sort of big cheese or has a coterie of at least one or two who also go in for sarcasm, and the nastiness does not use actual foul language…
I hope not to find such ‘dreck’ here. It drives people away.
I wish you all luck in coming to a consensus on ‘community’ rules, buhdydharma.
There was a set process for creating new newsgroups, but literally no-one with the power to censor once a group was created. Remained functional for a lot longer than I’d expected, until the invention of spam by the infamous Green Card lawyers.
and I would be game for creating a new, more (little d) democratically-minded site. I do not mind rancor, even savage repartee, but the constant policing from the right by a handful of participants has lowered the tone of conversation there, especially since the election.
There was real tension about the actual reasons for existing of the place–promoting the Dem party or assessing issues from a progressive perspective. And Kos, for me, has always been an acquired taste, self-promoting, authoritarian, and unwilling to reexamine when he makes a mistake. I think he has made a big one in this instance. Had been smarter, he would have turned the site over to a board or made it a public company long since, freeing himself up for new projects. I wonder if the site has now endured a mortal wound.
Anyway, I would be happy if I could make common purpose with a more progressive crowd. I look forward to reading everyone’s ideas.
…that doesn’t think Obama should prosecute the torturers and restore habeas corpus?
Or maybe stone them…???
I guess not…huh?
Good luck with this. I have watched DK go from a really cool new way to break out issues that were being ignored by the main stream media, to a place where serious collaborative investigative work was accomplished, to an angry rabble that shouts down anything that does not conform to some sort of narrowly defined boosterism.
It has been a strange journey. Along the way I have seen many grow disaffected and leave to do their own thing. Success has been elusive since this form of media seems to require some sort of critical mass. Certainly firedoglake and emptywheel among others have established vibrant investigative communities and have done some amazing work in collaboration with their readers, but your vision of a truly open broad based community with the size of readership necessary to make a noise seems constrained by the presence of DK. It is hard to get people to go elsewhere when they know that their posting will be read by many fewer people.
Well, maybe that will change. It seems that many people are looking for something else. Heck, I signed up here today. Let’s make some noise.
{BTW: Tomorrow I plan to post a long diary called “Obama Is AWESOME” (in caps) with lots of pictures. Hope that won’t get me banned.}
I think it would be preferable to have the guns AND the numbers. That’s the best way for imposin’ freedom and equality on people whether they want it or not.
I have to say (gosh darn it!) that the current model seems pretty effective already. Your daily diaries serve to set an agenda even though ya don’t impose it in the tyrannical way I would prefer. Then others use their varying talents to add on. Maybe you could be more formal in havin’ front-pagers specialize in certain topics to avoid duplication of time-consuming research, and post more of it in the Dharmapedia for referrin’ back to.
Also I would suggest that some upgrades to your wardrobe might be effective. Why don’t you tax all your members $150,000 or so and do some shoppin’?
How long have you been there? Do you “work” in autos?
Michigan sure looks different than it did in the heyday (pre-1976). I went looking for an old neighborhood around 7 mile and Woodward a while back and the entire region had been flattened. It was surreal.
sheer size of a blog kills it. Too big not to fall. Especially if it a blog devoted to electoral partisan politics. I do not consider this a blog that is in opposition to another. I cannot envision a community owned blog as in the early days of blogging I used to read over my husbands shoulder the forums or chat room which seemed to me to be overrun with the most vocal of the assholes.
What a dilemma communities that self police have to have rules the keep the blog from disintergrating and turning ugly, and it also need not to have the rules wag the dog or become the tools of the thought police or who polices the police?. I know it’s hard work being a budhy but your main rule seems be pretty encompassing and pretty easy to grasp. Be excellent to each other.
Utopias like Nirvana are made of dreams that are the best of our selves. They are often not livable in the world we are stuck in. I think Admins are necessary which is strange as I have anarchistic tendencies, Perhaps a truly communal blog could hold election and have term limits on the admins? Nah that would in create huge backroom politics and would consume it. Self policing is the best concept and as long as stays balanced works, the system at dkos worked pretty well but power plays rule and people are such strange monkeys. They are the strangest when they form gangs or tribes or communities and yet this is what they do the best. Lets make utopia where we are.
…is finally at a place where you can, and perhaps should, take a top-down approach.
Traditionally, blogs start from the bottom-up — more of a grass roots approach.
Top-down planning is a corporate approach, but I think that may be the only way to achieve communal (shareholder) stability. This is because you establish a vision up front that is a shared vision in all of its myriad details: The look, the feel, the purpose, the business, the scalability, the user experience, and the exit plan. It then becomes referential and a clarity of purpose is established.
To begin this approach, you would describe what it looks like on the very best day of its existence, what it achieves, who its allies and sponsors are, what the press says, what the user takes away from the experience, what the rewards are, how management is structured. Down to the most minute detail.
I honestly believe that once you do that, it will spring into existence effortlessly. The proper leaders will emerge naturally.
There’s juju at work in the tubz.
1. Stick to substance and content. So many times I see those that disagree doing so without ever addressing the issue of the diary or the comment. Though I hate recommends and troll ratings (because they make it a silly popularity game), if there was to be a downgrade, it should be for not sticking with substance.
I often feel that there should be no replies, just comments. Then one can make a point and it stands for all to see and judge on its own legs.
2. Never make it personal or throw in a gratuitous remark, just because you can. We are supposed to be liberals and progressives, which entails inherent respect for others. Sometimes I wonder where this went? We should live by our principles and beliefs. Why is that so hard? Even when dissing the other side, we should remain true to these principles.
Guess I have the audacity to hope, but this is my first impression of what a true, liberal, community based blog should be about.
Lastly, in the current maelstrom over at DKos, I am amazed at how many support the power when they don’t have to. Kos must chuckle at how conservative it is. How predictable it is. Even if he owns it, I would think if he was a real progressive, he’d be delighted at a wave of protest, starting with the day that ads appeared from Chevron. But we can see that the site has become just a commercial enterprise, and it is moving more towards a facebook, back slapping place where the purpose is to agree and cater to the least common denominator. Where it’s like a pep rally and those who are the “in” crowd manipulate and exercise a type of tyranny in mob form. That, in my opinion, is what a true community based blog should never be.
I think repeatedly rude, disruptive, and disrespectful behaviors should not be the norm. I think flame wars happen, but when it becomes a pattern that someone is always rude and disruptive and disrespectful they should receive a warning or a time out. Then if it continues a banning. I understand things get heated and people get nasty, but it becomes a problem if those behaviors constitute a good majority of their interactions.
Secondly, although I love conspiracies, and don’t buy the official 9/11 story, I think it’s important to not let things get out of hand. It’s one thing to discuss new evidence etc, it’s another to say the remote controlled airplanes or aliens crashed into the towers. But I’m pretty liberal about topics, If I don’t like a topic, I don’t read it. And I think what happens over at dailykos is that instead of people moving on, you have a bunch of self-appointed witch hunters that harass the offenders, making the whole situation get out of hand.
Anyhoo those are my thoughts.
It would be one way for the community to (for lack of a better term) police itself.
I think there’d need to be a few safeguards put in place, though… one being the need for a lot of “smite” votes before a diary could actually be smited, in order to prevent the formation of a Dairy Police Squad as exists, ahem, elsewhere.
Another would be a (again, for lack of a better term) ‘three strikes before you’re out’ policy. In other words, someone would have to be smited [at least] three times before any kind of ban would kick in… and possibly a ban should be preceded by a suspension.
The third safeguard I think would need to be the ability for site admins to override a community-imposed ban, just on the chance that the community has lost its collective mind and done something a little crazy.
This would apply to diaries, obviously. Comments are a different can o’ worms.
Hello,
I’m a long time fan of TocqueDeville’s writing.
As far as making a true community blog– what about community ownership? Really, the legal ownership structure of the ownership entity will control the decision making process. Kos is an LLC. There are other options. You might be able to set it up as a co-op.
On the building community side I have two. The first may seem simple but it is not. I have noticed on several blogs that new members often get ignored. What’s worse is that there are often groups or cliques that get formed and it tends to get very inside and when new members try and interact they are sometimes met with condenscension. I am not thinking of Kos on this one but two other sites I was on from nearly the beginning and I saw many new people leave after only a few days or weeks. That is why I liked this site immediately because people were welcoming. I think if you have regular members go out of their way to look for new posters and welcome them that would go along way in keeping them coming back and feeling like they matter.
The second is trying to keep any eventual bullies in check. I don’t know how you do that, I have never run a website but I think it has been the biggest detriment to many sites and it really turns people off. Sometimes they can be useful. I have seen them spice up a thread and bring far more comments but sometimes it just goes too far.
I have a couple ideas about content. They may be silly or may be too hard to do but I will put them out there. One of the things I like about The Huffington Post is that it posts news in almost real-time and lets people discuss it as it’s happening, something that was missing from Kos. Maybe you could do a small section of news or headlines (maybe just a few a day) that members could discuss or comment on. Maybe some stories that are interesting but a little out of the mainstream.
The second idea I have is asking people to do a guest blog from time to time. Part of the problem with a site like Kos or Huffpo is that it has gone very maintsream and their sites have become too focused on politicians and celebrities. Maybe you could take the people’s angle and instead of trying to get someone like Kieth Olberman, ask someone like Amy Goodman or Howard Zinn or maybe even one of the many whistleblowers that are ignored by more mainsteam organizations. I bet many would jump at an invitation to get their stories out.
Last idea (sorry so long…thinking outloud) is an idea I got from C-Span. Maybe you could do a series with authors or new books (authors seem to be very accessible). For example, the book and author that got Inky banned is a new book by Phillip Shenon (who writes for NYT) about the 9/11 Commission. Perhaps you could get authors to do small blogs about thier work and than maybe answer a few questions from members. C-Span does something like that and they get so many calls, usually but not always with really interesting questions that sometimes takes the author into a new place they didn’t cover in the book. Maybe you could even generate some revenue out of something like that.
My best advice would be to keep doing what you have been, as well as all those around you. You have a great website filled with smart, friendly and interesting people.Hope you found at least one or two sentences useful in some way.
with Tocquedeville’s GBCW missive. I have been feeling the need to find a new home for awhile. I welcome the opportunity to speak more freely; I was feeling fairly stifled over there. I had also thought about the need for a community-owned blog. It is also not my overriding goal to concern myself exclusively with electing Democrats. (On the other hand, it is my one of my overriding goals to keep Republicans from being elected, which means I have to concern myself with electing Democrats, whether I like it or not!)
In any case, I like your deeply democratic sense of how this place should be run and I appreciate the default position of not censoring people.
I “own” WWL, or so my admins keep telling me, but I too, started it as a group effort.
Myself, M_A, asqv, Nonpartisan and Gottlieb were the formers of the “format.”
The problems with community rule is that “popularity” or formation of friendships themselves tend to make even the like minded nit-pick and gang up on unpopular opinions.
Usually there is a HUGE disparity on how “communities” treat people once they get “cliquey.” I’ve been on the bad end of that stick a few times, not only at dKos…. I digress.
I guess our ideal is that we disagree without calling eachother names like douchebag, without applying motive like “condescending” and to let it die after 3 or 4 comments if there is no chance of changing either’s mind.
Heck, I have a user who denies global warming, but we agree to disagree and not harangue eachother.
& More Heck, half the time I don’t entirely agree with my own admins!!!
But disruptive comments for the sake of disruptive abuse as pattern behaviour ruins a blog too. Sometimes you have to ban. It always sucks. I too, always confer.
I have learned to let people have their own disagreements and not feel the need to step in, yet once I stepped in too late and the damage was done.
Two people disagreed, and I was thrown into a “him or me” situation. I can’t ban for someone’s personal dislikes in a public forum as long as neither has been abusive.
I dunno much, budhy, but I do KNOW I find this community HIGH on my list as a standard of what good blogging looks like.
… associations.
One way to approach a Town Square would be as a blog of blogs.
Say five blogs … ordinary, proprietary, blogs … organize themselves so that they are in effect “tabs” of each other, and all have a tab onto a common front page … Town Square. People logged into other blogs in the co-op could vote front page pieces onto the common front page, and diaries from across the co-operative. Comments in diaries could be expanded with a press of a virtual button into the discussion about the piece from around the collective.
Of course, banning from one blog would not necessarily mean banning from the collective, so there would have to be a formal process in place.
Even though each blog might be proprietary, the cooperative could be under a rotating board with elected members of each blog, with the board then electing an executive committee from its membership.
if there’s any, banning someone should be a consensus or atleast a majority vote…I’m not sure you can expect the whole DD blog group to chime in., that might be more chaotic. I laud you for starting the dialog on this one.
dkos, although owned by one person (who imo went overboard on tocq) is effectively the Town Square you envision…and it’s chaos.
There are some fine diarists there, but other than the good frontpagers (and kos doesn’t rank as one of them – Meteor Blades and KagroX are examples of whom I mean here), finding them and subscribing (as I had done with tocq) is time consuming, a lot of work, and ultimately a hit-or-miss proposition.
If you want that kind of blog, that’s what you have to look forward to. You have to ask yourself if it’s worth the effort. Maybe it is, I can’t say.
::
First, like any media outlet, I suppose a blog needs an in-house curmudgeon, someone to truth-squad, guard against groupthink and edit (just to maintain some kind of standard). I don’t know the setup here, but I’m not presenting anything here that you haven’t thought of before, I’m sure.
Which speaks to a fairly large staff to maintain it all. Dkos does it well. They’ve even a staff (I don’t know how large) of tag librarians who daily go through hundreds of diaries, cleaning up the tags. Volunteers.
::
On banning, this is where kos went wrong:
(I had to dig out my old copy of Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy to dig up that quote…I’ve never forgotten it in the 25 or 30 years since I first read it.)
Any community is going to have conflict, and we already know that the best way to resolve disputes is with a fair, open and impartial justice system. Even if one doesn’t agree with a particular “verdict,” at least one can agree that the system has enough elements of fairness that it should be preserved. Is this possible online? Probably. The technology is likely available for an online “trial”. The rest is rulemaking, maintaining precedent, electing or selecting “jurists”. It sounds over the top, doesn’t it? If you want a Town Hall site to succeed, there will need to be some “justice” component involved that everyone trusts.
Just throwing it all out there. tocq, budh, bob johnson and likely Jerome by now. They’ll be calling it the Mid-May Massacre. (You heard it here first – what are my copywrite rights, anyways?)
Even before the latest brouhaha over at DKos, I had been increasingly thinking to myself, boy, would it be great if there was another, better place to post.
To me, there are two reasons I post at DKos: critical mass, and superior technology. The technology is partly software in the sense of how well the site actually works and how good it looks, but also in terms of the innovations for community self-regulation. The banning of Inky and Toque are actually exceptions that prove the rule, since they were clearly contrary to the will of the community.
As for a new site, I would make the following suggestions:
1. It ought to be owned by a non-profit organization, not necessarily charitable, but definitely nonprofit. That is not to say that it can’t be revenue-generating, but that should not be the point. The point should be fundamentally political — to provide a place for political dialogue and organizing. A 501c4 as opposed to a 501c3 is a nonprofit that can be explicitly political.
2. The core of the organization should really be a group of politically-minded programmers who would engage in a cooperative project to write the best possible software to run a site like this. It should blow everything else out of the water in terms of aesthetics and functionality. It should work flawlessly, and offer features that no one else has. I can’t emphasize enough that DKos is on top simply because his site is technically superior to everything else out there. Keep it open source too (see nonprofit status above) because ultimately we want not just one great, progressive political blog, but many and the software can be continually improved.
3. Standing behind that core group should be a group of funders who are primarily interested in furthering the progressive political agenda, broadly conceived. It would likely be the “usual suspects”, but just oriented toward a new goal not of a political campaign, or a candidate, but of building an online community where progressive dialogue and organizing can take place. It should not be tied to the Democratic Party explicitly, but to the broader progressive movement.
4. Once the software and funding are in place, then there should be a recruitment of as many good writers as possible to be a part of a founding group of “front pages”. Hopefully with enough funding in place, a number of them would be already known writers.
5. Good writing should be the priority. There are a number of ways to do this: maybe financial remuneration for diaries that top the rec list? Maybe if you get to the top of the rec list a certain number of times, you get automatically moved to a new category similar to a front pager. Maybe there would be a group of people including the recruited writers, as well as those who had been well-recommended a certain number of times, who would constitute kind of a Council of Elders who could front page diaries by vote and decide on bannings. By far the best thing about DKos is when I stumble on some truly, excellent writing. It’s such an incredible treat.
6. Get serious about troll-rating abuse. It’s rampant at DKos and killing that site.
All of that said, I’m actually optimistic that there will be new communities to emerge. In some respects, DKos is past critical mass. When there’s 1400 comments to a diary, you can’t read them all, and is there any chance that comment number 1401 is going to be read by anyone? Also, it can be demoralizing to spend 4 hours writing a really good piece only to have it fall off recent diaries list in 20 minutes, crowded out by pootie pictures and fawning photo tributes to Obama.
I think the ideal sized community given the current software environment probably falls somewhere in between DD and DKos. At the rate refugees are streaming out of DKos, DD might be there in a matter of weeks. Wouldn’t that be great!
that make “toward a more perfect blog” an extremely difficult proposition.
Bringing up the other, more orange place again for a minute: it’s biggest advantage is also its biggest disadvantage. That is: its size, and the associated traffic and prominence.
I’ve made the comparison to Microsoft before. By all accounts, Bill Gates was always a “nice guy”, a computer visionary (as Markos was once, I believe, a progressive visionary), and in many ways an idealist. He was “in the right place at the right time” (as was Markos), he made some lucky decisions, and his company’s operating system became “the standard” (isn’t dKos the “Windows” of political blogs right now?).
With Microsoft’s success came the traffic, and the market share, and the near-monopolistic control of the personal computing industry for years. And with those things came a predatory corporate attitude, a discarding of anything resembling idealism, a lust for more money and more power, a silencing of critics, and an obsession with fame and prominence.
And with those things came a departure from the original mission: excellent, innovative technology.
The Mac Os (MLW?) quietly maintained its loyal users; the Linux OS (DD?) emerged to compete with Windows…but none of them has ever yet reached the “success” – ie, market saturation – of MS. They don’t have the support, they don’t have the users, they don’t have the exposure, they don’t have the ubiquity. Anybody who uses them can attest that they are far better than Windows…but who uses them anyway?
Meanwhile, Windows – the dKos of operating systems – maintains its position of “lead dog”. And much of the strategy to maintain that position consists of turning the ideals of personal computing on their heads and acting – well, corporate and authoritarian.
And mediocre.
Every dog has its day, and the days of Microsoft dominance may be ending.
So, how do the Macs and Linux’s and DD’s and MLW’s and the other, superior, platforms attain the “status” of the “big boys” without turning into the “big boys”?
That’s the question buhdy is asking, of course, and that’s the question for which I do not have the answer.
Part of it is as simple as personality, I think. Human nature would dictate that most people would take the path of Bill Gates and Markos Moulitsas: the fame, the wealth, the prestige are all drugs that are too powerful for many to resist. The ideal blog would have a leader whose personality is immune to the temptations of such opiates.
Another part is the idea of more “pure” democracy, hand-in-hand with community control, if not ownership. The “big boys” find themselves with increasingly nepotistic and inbred boards: BofA and Microsoft with their cadres of “insiders”, rotting the corporations from within; dKos with its FP’rs and diary police suckups (sometimes the same people) slowly eroding the integrity of the entity.
Pure democracies, of course, are among the most difficult systems to administer. The ideal blog would have to employ some measure of community control, while still maintaining a “leadership” structure that keeps the lights on.
The key, I think, is finding “leaders” with the smallest possible egos and the largest possible skillsets. Difficult.
I belong to a motorcycle forum which functions much like a blog. While there is a world of difference between motorcycles and our very body politic, there is still room for comparison.
Anybody who spends any time on forums or blogs devoted to something testosterone-oriented like motorcycles knows that such places can – and usually do – quickly become dominated by arrogant kidz with nasty attitudes, big-ego self-proclaimed mechanical geniuses, brilliant and skilled (so they themselves think, anyway) riders, and more posers, “experts”, and hall monitors than any one member should be exposed to in a lifetime.
Our forum has never gotten that way. There is an “owner” (who really “owns” nothing), and several co-admins. Nothing is prohibited (except porn and, believe it or not, politics). There are no ads. There is no quest for fame and glory. The posers and trolls show up; they quickly get a feel for our laid-back environment and, generally they either “come around” (it’s amazing how many of the worst attitudes evolve into valued members) or they leave. With our 6,000 members, I think there have been two bans in the 5 1/2 years I’ve been there.
The “owner” is a guy with the personality I’ve described as essential for the “ideal” blog owner: no visible ego, no desire to make his forum/blog anything other than the best venue possible to fulfil its mission. Every other motorcycle site I’ve looked at has either been over-regulated and megalomaniacally administered (sound familiar?) or a free-for-all of flame wars, trolls, and worthless content.
One more point that somebody here brought up: +1 to the “welcome wagon”. We have one of those, and I think it works wonders to help newcomers feel comfortable.
Anyway, sorry for the extra-long treatise, but there’s my $0.02 (actually, it’s probably long enough to qualify for $0.03).
I actually did my dissertation on the evolution of dKos as a “Democratic” vs. “democratic” space (May 2008), and one chapter focused on the spinoff blogs (like yours) that actually made a “democratic” space the central goal. So this is an awesome conversation for me academically as well!
I’ve noticed that few people mind a king/queen if s/he’s a just and trusted one. That said, there’s a different between “ownership” and “management,” and maybe they should be dealt with separately.
I do like the idea of more open community ownership (and I would invest money). I also like the idea of selective advertising for green and progressive products and causes (given the progressive goals your articulate).
In terms of “management” I like the “committee” process you already have in place, but perhaps “close oversight” on a day-to-day basis could be rotated?
Some of the big problems I’ve seen on larger blogs are:
1) Astroturfing. Some of these folks are paid and some are not, but it’s people whose chief focus is not the quality of the community, but the use of the platform to advance (or curb) a cause.
2) Spamming. Unfortunately, the “truthers” can be TERRIBLE about this. Obvious spamming is easy to deal with, but spamming WITHIN a topic or conversation might be curbed by encouraging people to provide links and to keep comments on the briefer side.
3) Obsession. We’ve all seen it. Some of us have lived it. But it’s characterized by imbalanced and very strident views, over-posting on singular and (often) inflammatory topics over time, threadjacking, and real nastiness with people who disagree. Sometimes it’s just a matter of someone being too close to an issue. (E.g., when I first came out as gay, I was a nightmare to argue with. I was oversensitive, accusatory, paranoid, and mean. Most people agreed with my points, but I wasn’t very persuasive, because I was quick to call people “bigot” and such. Unproductive obsession can occur even when someone is on the “right” side of an issue.)
4) Assholery. What else to call it? Stalking, flame-baiting, thread-jacking, excessive use of straw man, ad hominem, etc.
5) Promoting POV’s counter to the goals of the site, and seemingly without respect for the goals of the site. It’s one thing to post as a conservative knowing and respecting the terrain, it’s another to post as though it were Redstate.
I like the “warning” process, and also like the “suspending” process–cutting peoples’ posting privileges for hours or days or weeks, and asking them to cool off. (Some of the best of us lose perspective and could use that from time to time.) Banning is sometimes necessary.
Thanks for this discussion, Budhy. Go with your gut. You’re a good leader. Like I said, few people mind a strong leader if the person is also a good one.
It feels funny that my first post here at DD is in a diary discussing how to organize the site since, as a new person, it feels presumptuous to wade in on a topic like this.
But after reading through the thread comments I just wanted to agree with some of the ideas I’ve seen posted and toss in my own two small cents.
Louisev said:
and I second that idea wholeheartedly. I’m an Independent who has never voted for a Republican but who has also sometimes had to withold my vote because the only other candidate, the Dem, didn’t, in my view, deserve my vote either. A site where “throwing ones vote away” by going with a third party or simply witholding vote is acceptable and not called out as “Naderism” would be most welcome to me.
“a love supreme” said:
This is a more difficult question for me. On the one hand, I can understand that at some point a decent enough number of people who want to get something done are going to have to achieve consensus in order to actually work to get something done.
On the other hand, I also wonder if it is necessary that each and every diary thread be filled with back and forth debate heatedly trying to force consensus where one doesn’t exist. Isn’t it ok, on a blog, to sometimes just agree to respectfully disagree? Isn’t it ok to come to the realization that reasonable people of good-will may not always arrive at the same conclusion on each and every issue?
This isn’t to say that debate isn’t a good thing – but does the debate have to have as its final goal an absolute lock-step consensus? Isn’t the process of the debate – the actual discussion which allows others to understand what may be a new point of view for them also important?
Which brings me to pufferfish’s point:
If the main goal is to nurture progressive thought than it seems to me that the language used in debate does matter. And perhaps the language used in debate matters just as much as the topic under discussion. I’ve seen, at other blogs, posters who flit through a thread simply repeating the same insult over and over to anyone who disagrees with their idea. And, IMO, this does nothing but stifle debate. The problem I have with blogs that allow this kind of behavior is that there does seem to be a “party line” and as long as you’re supporting that party line you can be as rude and content-free as you like.
This kind of thing doesn’t nurture progressive thought as much as it squeezes out those people who don’t feel up to being flamed on that particular day.
Tom P makes a very good point IMO:
And monster points out one such progressive process that I think is worth considering:
A warning should always precede banning IMO. This warning should be more than simply a “you have been warned.” The warning should specifically lay out the offensive behavior and allow rebuttal from the warned individual. It should be clear which of the site rules has been violated and specific examples should be provided. This would allow the warned individual some insight into how their words are being perceived by others and serve as a learning experience rather than as a punitive measure.
FallOutGirl wrote:
And this is a simply great idea.
dmc wrote:
And to this end, and I apologize if this is impertinent, but one thing about dKos that makes it so easy to read is the thick dark grey line that divides one person’s post from another. The thin yellow line on a white background that is used for the same purpose here is not as effective IMO. I’m not trying to be insulting, but that thin yellow line following the thin black line that separates the person’s actual post from their name makes it difficult for me to follow who has posted what.
Lastly, about the Pootie-type diaries and others of a non-political nature. I agree that having that kind of diary helps build community and enriches a blog. I also agree that having this kind of diary bounce a great political diary off the rec list can be frustrating. Is it possible to have two rec lists? One for politically related material and another for things like food, art, and pets? I don’t know what others will think of an idea like that but it might be helpful.
All of this is just my two cents of course. And since I’m new take it for what it’s worth 😉
Thanks for posting the goodbye from Tocq at dKos Buhdydharma – I appreciated being able to read it.
I used to go to Kos for the NEWS. And I could get the news (breaking and other) there more quickly, often, than–say–from the NYTimes, to such a degree that the trad sources came, to many people’s eyes, to look like dinosaurs. For some reason I don’t feel I get it there anymore, except from the likes of the Patriot News Clearinghouse.
That’s partly because a lot more petty stuff is filling the front page–disputes that amount to a kind of gossip, etc. I have yet to see a single parsing of the much-anticipated Obama-Netanyuhu encounter, though the darned Times has one. (What’s more, that Times article is more critical of Obama than many of the ‘bots would tolerate! That’s when you know you many have vaulted the proverbial shark!)
But what you have to admit that also makes that site neat is that it is multi-tentacular. So my ideal new forum is also really a place where I can get things like the news, from diaries or in a separately-designated space. (Science issues might constitue their own realm, though as some of you designers know better than I, it all has to be visible and accessible from the opening.) Perhaps it’s worth considering whether some areas might be designated for different sorts of content and discussion?
Is this necessary?