I see all sorts of comments about the software running this site, or how original this site is, or how great of an idea it was. Kos has set up things his own way, but there is a long history of sites like this that go back for years and years, of which this is the evolutionary result.
Inside, there will be a brief history of the Scoop software as well as some of the other software that predates it, plus some of the similar communities out there that affected it in some manner. There's not really anything political here, so unless you are a software person, interested in internet history, or care about the evolution of online communities, you may not find this to be your cup of tea. Also, it is an unauthorized telling of the story, so if Rob Malda, Rusty Foster, Markos, or anyone else wants to argue against my opinions or understanding of the events that happened previously, feel free to comment here and correct me.
Predecessors of Scoop
We can go back really far to the days of dialup BBSes to find the precursors to dailykos, or more recently with usenet, but I'd rather just look at the more direct ancestors. There have been many types of software similar to this in some way. The really popular one used on many sites that I used to visit was originally called Matt's Forum or something like that, but eventually became
WWWBoard. It was good, but not entirely hack-resistant. It was later remade by a hacker group called
Cyberarmy, amongst others, and became a fairly popular BBS software. It was not a "blog" as this is, but rather a message board. I feel that message board types of software are more of an ancestor to scoop than things like early blogging software, because the focus of the forums was to discuss, rather than to simply post text. It was interactive and built communities around it, rather than just readerships.
At some point in 1997, a geek named Rob Malda created a site called Slashdot that used a message board to discuss technology related stuff. It was fairly informal, and started gaining in popularity to a point where the software they originally used was a pain in the butt to maintain. So, a new piece of software was developed which was named Slashcode. It was an ungodly perl hack of all sorts of bad code, but it worked better than anything else out there at the time. They made the software available to the public by using an Open Source license.
Slashdot
The Slashdot community, both the editors and users, pretty much loved Linux, hated Micrsoft, and hated government intrusion into rights relating to technology. Copyright law is a major sore spot for most slashdot readers, as is monopolistic business practice (e.g. Microsoft.) Most Slashdot users claimed to be libertarians, although I think most of us were uninformed about what that meant at the time. We just didn't want to be Republican or Democrat. We had a fairly socialist attitude when it came to software, which is what helped Linux, Apache, and other open source programs gain in popularity. We felt charity towards others when it came to software, even if we were very Darwinian on social and economic issues. Copyrights were bad because they introduced an artificial monopoly on ideas, and it gave us our digs in hating bug business. The RIAA and the MPAA are hated around Slashdot as much as Neocons are here. We learned that Metallica were sold out anti-technology scumbags, and we learned that the Scientologists were sons of bitches who dared to anger the technological elite.
During this period of time, Slashdot developed a bit of a troll problem. Trolling had been around before the invention of the internet, but it became a bigger problem on Slashdot that had to be dealt with. So, comment moderation was put in place as well as some other means used to ban bad people. Lots of whining, fighting, and arguing occurred over the first systems of comment moderation. Unfortunately, it never stopped. On the other hand, some users, who were sort of trolls in that they were insincere, posted a lot of comments to get rated high in order to get special priveledges associated with a high "karma." These people became known as karma whores.
Eventually, Slashdot grew more and more popular in the midst of the dotcom boom. Unfortunately, it got so big that it was not uncommon to have thousands of comments on a single story, so the site lost it's sense of community. In addition, the dotcom bubble was getting close to bursting, and there was less and less to talk about technologically. Thus, other people were starting other sites because they were tired of what Slashdot had become. Eventually, Slashdot became corporate, and many accused it's editors of selling out. There were other events that made a "final straw" for many users that are not really worth discussing except to say that the admins lowered themselves to the levels of some childish users. As a result of this, as well as the smaller sites that were cropping up as clones of Slashdot, quite a few users went elsewhere.
Kuro5hin
A guy named Rusty Foster, along with some of his friends installed Slashcode on their own server and called it kuro5hin in 1999. It was similar to Slashdot in that it was about technology, but they also added a focus on the element of "culture" which wrapped up pretty much everything else. It also seemed fresh because a few well-known Slashdot trolls became users over there and engaged in thoughtful conversations. However, it was still a small site that didn't have a large userbase until "The First Great Downtime" or whatever you wish to call it, when the site was down for a month or so. After it came back up, there were many Slashdot refugees (myself included) who flocked to the site after we got sick and tired of the editors of Slashdot's shenanigans.
It was with because of Rusty Foster and kuro5hin that we got Scoop. Scoop was originally a hacked version of Slashcode, but eventually was completely redone to a point where it was nothing like the original. Scoop attempted to resolve some of the issues with comment moderation that made Slashdot unpopular. Not only that, but the people running the site did so less with an iron fist like the Slashdot admins, but more openly and democratically. It even has a system where users can submit articles to be posted on the front page, and the userbase gets the right to vote stories to the front page or not, rather than leaving it in the hands of a few editors. For a while, things seemed to be great and rather than argue and namecall, people tended to discuss things in such a way that they usually ended arguments on friendly terms.
Over time, kuro5hin had it's fair share of problems. One was that it evolved from a technologically based site to one that was heavy into discussing politics. This was a result of the 2000 elections, but became even more obvious on 9/11/2001. A lot of the earlier users of the site got angry and left, only to be replaced by more and more people who wanted to talk about politics and social issues rather than technology. If you compare earlier articles posted there, they were nearly identical to the articles posted on Slashdot, but the discussions were much better. By 2001, technology-related articles were being voted down as "boring" and the admin of the site seemed to be trying to find a way to make his site fresh and solve some of the issues. Many things were tried and a few stuck, but nothing really major worth discussing here.
The general political spectrum on kuro5hin, like the rest of the U.S., got to be fairly polarized. Most of us that claimed to be libertarians became further to the left, although some went further to the right and kept the arguments going. We started posting quite a bit of anti-Bush stuff. Also there were some unfortunate incidents, one of which involved the secret service harassing an innocent user for simply trying to guess what the next terrorist attack would be.
There were some other issues amongst the community and there was always infighting. I was a part of this on quite a few occasions, so I can't really comment on what happened in an unbiased way. I'd also like to not start some of the old arguments up here. Suffice to say, I stopped reading kuro5hin, and only made brief returns on occasion. However, there are other Scoop sites out there which deserve mention before I get to Dailykos.
Satanosphere
If you live in Washington or Oregon, then Satanosphere is probably the site for you. Even if you don't live in the area, it's a site with some great people on it. In fact, you may recognize the "Captain Tenille" as the "ct" that occasionally posts here when the server is down, since he is one of the people that maintains it, even if he isn't really a known member of the community here.
Adequacy
Adequacy was a troll site, which was occasionally very very funny. These people managed to troll the band Anthrax as well as Tech TV among others. They're a dead site now, but you can still see what they were all about.
HuSi
Not too big of a site, but I'm a fairly happy user of HuSi, which is a smaller scoop site without a real point other than the community itself. It's sort of based out of the U.K., although most of the people posting there now are American. Still, it's a good place and if you want a general all-around community to participate in, I'd reccomend it. Diaries are the main focus of the site. Other than that, there is no agenda and no theme.
Others
There are other sites that probably deserve to be mentioned, but I'd rather not do it because they are either owned by disgusting trolls or people that annoy me. So, I won't. However, there are probably other sites out there that I either forgot or never saw, so there are many reasons I would not have discussed them here.
Daily Kos
I don't know the history of Daily Kos as well as many others here, so I won't make a big attempt to discuss it. If you really want to know, read about it here and probably in other diaries. In any case, at some point Rusty Foster teamed up with Markos in order to turn Markos' blog into something more interactive and using a more robust software package than what he used before Scoop. As a result, we come to where we are today.
The diary section of Daily Kos is a leftover of kuro5hin, and something that has been fairly controversial over there at times. It allows people to build a better sense of community because you get to "blog" on your own, and talk about what matters to you without the admins or editors of the site setting the theme. This allows a lot more democracy and spontaneous discussion. It lets people other than the main article writers to become known here, and it lets people write and become successful without having their own blog to write on and worry about how to build up a readerbase.
Comment ratings are a leftover of Slashdot, but are closer to the ratings that were in used a while back on kuro5hin. There are other ratings systems in use on many sites, some better, some worse. However, the one used here is not bad.
The front page here is a regression below even that on Slashdot, especially after the democratic way that kuro5hin started, but probably necessary for a site like this. In any case, it is interesting to see the more interactive ways that other sites let users control the content that gets posted to the front page, rather than leaving it up to the administrators. Still, this site belongs to Markos and it is probably best that he controls the direction, because letting this site get a life of it's own is a potential liability. We would lose credibility if someone was able to get an article discussing Bush's time travel conspiracy to work together with Hitler on killing brown people.
Conclusion
There is quite a bit more that can be said on this topic. Follow any of the links I mentioned above and you can spend weeks or more learning about the histories of those sites and software. Even more important, the vast majority of the predecessors to this site are still in operation and still evolving themselves. You can participate in them if you want to talk about something other than politics. Even better, you can set up your own site to put your point of view on things and hopefully build your own community. Who knows, you may be the one to make the next site that will eventually replace Daily Kos.
About Me
I haven't been extremely active here, nor anywhere else lately. I've had front page stories posted on Slashdot, kuro5hin, HuSi, and other sites. I've used various nicknames but usually it is some variation on the one I have now. I also have run a few sites of my own, and do have a personal website under my real name that has no link whatsoever to this nickname and I prefer to keep it that way. In any case, I'm never one of the first users on online communities that I participate on, but I see enough to learn about them. Over the years I've grown and adapted as well, so my early writings such as this have given way for what I hope is more mature and thought out. I also used to participate in another side of the internet, which dealt more with hackers and parallel technology and hacking communities to the ones I have mentioned here.
So, I think this pretty much wraps things up. Feel free to discuss whatever you want here, correct any mistakes I may have made, or ask questions. This is a really brief summary of everything that has happened.