Firstly, this isn't meant as a slight to any individuals, there are lots of smart individuals, as far as I know, there is more per capita smartness here than anywhere on earth, I wouldn't know. But I have not been reading dkos as earnestly as I had in the past, or very much at all and
this caught my eye... and I knew well what sort of comments would attach themselves.
Let me explain the dumbification of dkos.
Now again, again! You are very smart, please understand I validate personally your genius. That's not really the question, this is about community, a bunch of smart people sending smart letters to the editor do not make the paper "smart"... and what has happened to dkos is more about the structure of organization than it is about adding up the sum of its parts, the flow of a community, in other words, has it's own character and "intelligence".
Things that dumbified dkos, in my opinion:
- Duplicate Diary Police: I bitched about this idea of clamping down on duplicates for fucking years, and the main proponents were really loathe to engage a discussion on this, and it was, I believe, because of a lack of understanding... they know the speed of flow bothered them and by god this was a way to slow that, that would be a "good thing" and good things are, well, good. But we are talking about smartness, not "how much can you read". The first diary is not the smartest one, no one ever denied that when I pointed it out. And that is all you need to admit to know why it made dkos more stupid to remove thoughtful summaries of the news in favor of whomever happened to be on right then.
Btw, as far as I know I've never had a recommended diary at dkos, and I don't want one. I don't think you've really understood my point, you have no place going around recommending what you have yet to understand, I want you to comment, not recommend, so I live totally in the diaries, and if I can handle the flow, then anyone can. Why slow it? Is a smart mind recognized by being really slow? or fast?
- "Tin Foil Crackdowns"... the way to increase quality regarding conspiracy was the Armando 1.0 way, he challenged the fraud community and, iirc, it was a current front pager that stood up and summarized the information in a qualified way. The way to make the community stupid was the Armando 2.0 way, threaten everybody and say it's the boss' will. Fuck that. You can't stiffle creativity as a way to INCREASE intelligence. When you help set standards and give a path via those standards to the vaunted front page of dkos you train communal intelligence. When you threaten people to watch their step and threaten banning, you make the community stupid because you favored those that are just here at the right time but not willing to say risky things... i.e. "stupid people".
- Hating specialists... single issue people, whatever you think of their strategies, are experts with deep knowledge of an issue. The well rounded people are less expert, jack of all politics, and sometimes don't understand any particular issue very well and are prone to "just shut up and win" type ideas. Need I say more? When you send off these specialists you can no longer disagree with them on strategy, you merely compete with them, you ensure that what could be a discussion becomes instead a battle that distracts you from common enemies. Thanks for that. I guess you didn't know this was an old problem that you looked like you were going to solve... probably a mirage all along, but a hard one to forget. You gave up deep knowledge for other reasons... you gave up knowledge for strategic conformity, that's stupid and stupidifacationalizing as well.
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Basically, dkos was bigger than people could understand, especially anyone that hasn't watched online communities for years and years, but even for those of us that had. The powers of dkos tried to cut that down to something understandable... and unfortunately have succeeded. Now while it still grows quantitatively, it's become very understandable... it IS a noise machine, as hoped, it is a "flak generator" in the Chomsky Model and that is very understandable and unfortunately very easy to see coming. I suppose that's better than nothing, but less than "netroots" by a light year, far short of "peer to peer politics".
To those that say, "it's just the size"... a big fuck you for saying people are stupid, and only small groups can be smart, fuck you, you're also wrong. Not that I like the behavior of groups, but it's because they attack their smarter parts, not because they don't HAVE smarter parts.
To those that say, "blah blah, you're whining"... maybe, but then, I don't tell you to do a damn thing to do about the state of affairs, as far as I'm concerned it's fine, I mean, web sites evolve and whatnot, devolve, whatever. It's just information I'm giving you, an informed opinion nothing more, I hope it's not too harmful to your state of mind.
To those that say, "No! It's smarter!"
Ok. Have it your way.