Markos Moulitsas Zúniga formally opened Daily Kos for business eight years ago today, and in so doing, changed the world and many lives, mine among them.
He started as many bloggers begin, explaining what (if not who) he was in Day 1, on May 26, 2002:
I am progressive. I am liberal. I make no apologies. I believe government has an obligation to create an even playing field for all of this country's citizens and immigrants alike. I am not a socialist. I do not seek enforced equality. However, there has to be equality of opportunity, and the private sector, left to its own devices, will never achieve this goal.
This was the first of twenty-seven posts in two weeks, which are summarized here. The site would grow as the months and years passed, and the goals would grow, too. There have been many successes along the way, and not a few failures. The fight continues.
Happy Birthday, Daily Kos. We're celebrating all eight world-changing years over the jump.
First, you owe it to yourself to stop by kos's Happy Birthday to us! for some awesome stats about the site (36,135,698 comments on Scoop so far, if you add in the 10/13/03 comments), to pass along your own birthday wishes, read some reminiscences about the old days, and snag some cake pie. No fireworks as yet, but there's a picture of Markos flaming.
You should also stop by this morning's Cheers and Jeers: The Great Orange Satan Turns 8 for Bill in Portland Maine's take on the big birthday bash...and the resulting comments from the kiddie pool.
You'll also want to read about how Daily Kos came to be from the typing fingers of Markos himself, two years and change after the founding, wrote A brief history on August 5, 2004. Among the many fascinating paragraphs: the secret of his blogging success.
You could also take a gander at the diary I wrote two years ago today, Top Comments: Six Years of Daily Kos, which goes into some detail about the first year of the blog's existence. If you do, I trust you will discreetly ignore any similarities between that diary and this one.
But Daily Kos was more than its first year, or even its second. Eight years is a long time, and much as happened since 2002.
Kos went from being a three-letter pseudonymous name in May 2002 (how many of you thought it was pronounced "cawce"? Yeah, me too), to being revealed as Markos (but no last name) in November 2002, to Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, author of the forbes.com pick for the Best War Blog on the spring equinox of 2003. The accolade was earned thanks not only to the quality of the blog posts, but to the quality of the comment threads, populated by knowledgeable commenters like Steve Gilliard.
The comment threads of Daily Kos started taking off in the autumn of 2002; Markos has credited this, in part, to the migration of people from myDD (Markos credits Jerome Armstrong, founder of myDD, as his blogfather), where the comment threads had been closed down thanks to some toxic and highly disruptive commenting. Markos welcomed commenters at Daily Kos, but was an active moderator: he didn't hesitate to delete and block those who were there solely to disrupt the conversation, or failed to deal with reality.
The 2002 election was a severe blow, with Republicans regaining control of the Senate and broadening it in the House. It was a somber year end as an unjustified war in Iraq seemed increasingly likely.
In 2003, Markos started taking on guest bloggers for when he was out of town, catching up on work, or needed a break: Billmon, Steve Soto, Steve Gilliard, RonK, Seattle, Meteor Blades, DHinMI, and (for a couple of weeks around the time Ari was born that fall) Melanie posted to the front page of the blog. You can get a complete history of all the guest bloggers (aka front pagers) from the dKosopedia: Daily Kos Front pagers. It's complete through this month's addition of Laurence Lewis and brooklynbadboy to the roster of Featured Writers.
As the blog became increasingly popular and busy that spring, the traffic was straining the capabilities of Movable Type, the blogging software for the site. The site went down a few times, the comments had to be disabled...it was a real mess. For the full, er, scoop, read Top Comments: The Road to Scoop Edition, on the problems with Movable Type and the eventual transition to using the Scoop platform, with its community blogging capabilities. This tale continued as the short Scoop beta concluded and the site moved on under Scoop in Top Comments: Scooping Daily Kos Edition.
To get a flavor of the Movable Type site (which is still there at dailykos.net), taylormattd posted Top Comments: Pre-scoop Edition, with examples of comments and some representative comment names. He later posted Top Comments: First Comments Edition, featuring the first Daily Kos comments of half a dozen eventual guest bloggers, a couple of dozen folks from around the web, including Atrios, Mark Kleiman, Matthew Yglesias, Jerome Armstrong, digby, and John Cole, and another dozen of our own homegrown commenters.
And since this is the eighth anniversary, we should certainly take a look back at the Daily Kos first anniversary post. (Compare the stats in this one to the front-page story Markos posted today. Definite orders of magnitude, here.)
One new feature on Daily Kos starting in 2003 was Democratic fundraising: the site was the beta tester of the DNC's online fundraising program, ePatriots; Daily Kos first started taking donations on June 9. Here's a report on the first six hours. Allowing one-time and monthly gifts to be given online and tracked by the website from which they came was a new thing for the Democratic Party, and the tens of thousands raised gave Daily Kos visibility; Markos asked the site what they would like him say to DNC chair Terry McAuliffe, and eventually the call was made and reported on.
With the new Scoop site (aka Daily Kos 2.0) came diaries: effectively, all registered users could maintain their own blog at Daily Kos. Users could register and start posting immediately, and could write as many diary posts a day as they wanted. For some reason, Bill in Portland Maine decided that one Cheers and Jeers a day was enough when started posting them on December 10, 2003. There would be about 4600 user accounts by the end of 2003, 1850 of which were added in the final two months.
In 2004, the saying "If you build it, they will come" began to take on new meaning as the Presidential race kicked into high gear, and people flooded onto the Daily Kos, approximately 1800 in January alone, and only a few hundred fewer in February. More comments, more diaries...too many diaries, in fact. On January 27, a two diary per user per day limit was set, but there was still a problem with disruptive comments and troll diaries, so on February 7, new users were required to wait 24 hours before commenting and a full week before they could write a diary.
Details on this and more can be found on the Daily Kos History page, along with links to many diaries including some of those above; the page also has a partial timeline of events. Two major changes to Daily Kos debuted later in the year: the ability to edit diaries (June 4) and the ability to recommend diaries (August 10), along with the Recommended Diaries list.
Timelines never cover everything, and the candidate wars of 2003–2004 kicked into high gear as the former year made way for the latter. These made for interesting times in the diaries and comment threads, something we've all had comparatively recent experience of. There were also special congressional elections around this time, and for those it was clear that we wanted to support the Democrat, and we did with gratifying success: around $100,000 was raised for Democrats Ben Chandler and Stephanie Herseth.
Following on these successes, Markos decided to organize fundraising for House and Senate candidates in the fall: the dKos 8 was born. It would eventually morph into the Kos Dozen right about the time I joined Daily Kos, and that September, ActBlue was introduced as the way to donate to Kos Dozen candidates, and how we were able to keep timely and accurate track of donations from then on. The Kos Dozen raised $367,347.72 by the time the November elections rolled around.
Once Kerry had won the majority of convention delegates, things quieted down a bit, and fundraising continued for him until the convention when his government funding kicked in for the fall campaign.
Members of the site took the electoral losses in 2004 hard: George W. Bush, serial liar and incompetent idiot, had won. Worse, none of the Kos Dozen candidates we supported won, though some came very close. On election day, November 2, 494 stories and diaries were written; on the day after, over twice that number, 1112, were written, most a combination of anger and despair. Fortunately, two of them were by Meteor Blades—Don't Mourn, Organize—and Bill in Portland Maine (Cheers and Jeers), to help us keep an even keel. Even so, it was very hard.
It was also hard to say farewell to our crew of guest front-pagers: Meteor Blades, DHinMI, Trapper John, DemFromCT, and contributor Tom Schaller were replaced by a new crew at the end of November. To ease the trauma, Markos noted that they'd all be welcome to post when they wished, but the weekend and vacation duties were now to be shared by DavidNYC, kid oakland, Hunter, Armando, and a gilas girl.
The team didn't make it very far into 2005 before there were major changes. kid oakland and a gilas girl had left by early February, replaced by Plutonium Page at the end of March, and Armando stopped posting to the front page in August after an outside website revealed his real identity. Cheers and Jeers moved to the front page on April 5, 2005, a week before the 50,000th Kossack signed up.
On June 24, the site got a new look with Daily Kos 3.0. This didn't hurt the popularity of the site any; in fact, the ever-increasing number of users and diarists meant that the intermittent limit of one diary per user per day became permanent on September 28th.
There was a worry that Daily Kos would not be protected against regulation by the FEC as 2005 was winding down. Adam B, one of the attorneys working for the site, became a featured writer on matters regulatory and legal in November; the site, along with other online sites that were not affiliated with candidates, political parties, or campaigns, did eventually receive protection in time for the 2006 campaign cycle.
In mid-December, a new set of five front-pagers were announced. Although we lost one, Superribbie, even before he write a first post, the other four dug in right away, and started posting like crazy. SusanG, mcjoan, georgia10, and DarkSyde are still at it to this day (though georgia10's currently on leave); Susan Gardner has been the site's Executive Editor for two and a half years, and Joan McCarter was officially listed as Senior Policy Editor earlier this month.
In 2006, Daily Kos teamed up with MyDD and the Swing State Project to support a large number of House and Senate candidates, from Ned Lamont, Jim Webb, and Jon Tester to Darcy Burner, Paul Hodes, and Patrick Murphy. By the November election, $1,545,558 had been raised from 14,287 donations for these candidates.
A month after the election, BarbinMD (now DKos Associate Editor), Kagro X, Devilstower, and MissLaura joined the front page, where they still remain, although now using their real names.
There was a major change on March 9, 2007: Daily Kos formally became a group blog, with Markos as Founder/Publisher, plus fifteen Contributing Editors and two Featured Writers. The numbers of these last two categories have changed, but it remains a group blog to this day.
Sometimes you don't have enough time to finish; sometimes you don't have enough room. I definitely don't have the former, and may not have the latter; this has gone on longer than anticipated. Worse, it's thundering out, and the lights have already flickered once. So it looks like you get five years for the price of eight. Not a bargain, but it leaves me more material to cover next year. Besides, you don't want to relieve the 2007–2008 primary wars so soon, do you? Didn't think so.
I'm sure many of you have wondered about Markos's second post on Daily Kos that first day after seeing Cheers and Jeers this morning:
Embarrassing
Bush and Putin on nickname terms
Pootie-Poot? Is our 'president' in second grade? I dream of once
again having a grownup running the country. Sigh...
Posted May 26, 2002 01:22 PM
Aside from the fact that Bush was (and is) an idiot, and that Putin, refraining from replying in kind, emphasized that fact, the thought foremost in your minds is clear: was the original Pootie named for Vladimir Putin? Can George W. Bush in any way be responsible for the nickname for felines of all stripes (and solids and other patterns) that is sweeping the net?
I can at best be 99 44/100% sure that he isn't. Heck, only if the true Pootie was named before the above story ran can PhillyGal herself be more sure than that.
I can, however, be 100% sure that Markos's dream was finally realized on January 20, 2009. Even though said grownup can sometimes do maddening things, he is clearly a reasoning adult. And the country is far better off therefore.
~~~~~
It looks like Kossacks were in a party mood, which meant plenty of cake pie libations today, which may explain the lower number of submissions: everyone was so busy celebrating that they forgot to mail us comments. Thank you to those excellent Daily Kos readers who came through with submissions to the Top Comments mailbox today, all in advance of the 9:30pm Eastern Time deadline. The address of our mailbox for top comments submissions remains:
TopComments AT gmail DOT com
(change " AT " to "@" and " DOT " to ".")
Anyone can send great comments to our address. Be sure to include the direct link to a comment—the URL—which is available from that comment's date/time; we need that to find your choice. Please always include your Daily Kos user name in the body of your message, so we can credit you properly. I say again: both link and username are important; someone today forgot the latter, though I was able to do some sleuthing and determine the proper byline, and someone else forgot the former (ditto). Not all of us are sleuths, y'know. If you send a writeup with the link, we are able to include that, too, though we reserve the right to edit if desirable to do so.
From an unknown Kossack (perhaps fou, who wanted to submit it to top comments):
I'd like to submit this comment by bleedingheartliberal218.
From phonegery:
Here's a meme proposed yesterday evening by hotdamn about an odious Republican senator.
Replying to Heart of the Rockies, who's seen corporate 'principles', boadicea counters that corporations don't have principles.
From StepLeftStepForward:
What do Glenn Beck and Deepwater Horizon have in common? Ray Radlein shares this brilliant metaphor in this comment from Jaxpagan's diary. Love, love, love it!
From ScottyUrb:
There are a lot of remembrances of Art Linkletter, who died today, in sheddhead's diary. All of the comments are worth reading, and the videos are worth watching. I couldn't help but notice, however, jeroly's suggestion as to how MSNBC could honor Mr. Linkletter.
From sardonyx (your not-quite-eight-years diarist):
In Jerome a Paris's diary Now he tells us: Bush hates oil, loves wind power, 88kathy points out why this didn't help us when he was in power.
Giles Goat Boy has a thought about mile-deep technology, after which various spelling of "Oligarchy" compete downthread. More informative are this comment from KroneckerD and this one by JayBat.
In Laura Clawson's front-page story, Elena Kagan's legs and the sexist "news" tautology, RLMiller gives us a basic truism.
Little says that this is an American moment, and a simple ugly truth is being revealed.
GreenSooner has a different definition of delay...
~~~~~
Finally, we have today's top mojo using my revision of the cskendrick-devised mojo-to-Excel process.
First, Top Mojo excluding Cheers and Jeers, miscellaneous cute animals, search-identifiable tip jars, and first diary comments:
1) I am unabashedly rooting for BP right now by Blicero — 122
2) I think he is right...people DIDN'T listen... by APA Guy — 98
3) Quoting myself... by Fishgrease — 93
4) That seems pretty harsh. Not everyone lives by voracious — 88
5) Another gem Tom. by fou — 85
6) I wish. by greendem — 84
7) Not to mention by Jesselyn Radack — 79
8) Everyone has missed the main problem by FishOutofWater — 79
9) Too bad we can't use irony as a source of power. by ontheleftcoast — 77
10) Interesting by AndrewMC — 74
11) Give your brother a big hug for all of us by FishOutofWater — 71
12) Teabaggers aren't THAT dumb by gjohnsit — 70
13) Here's one that is even more of an outrage by alba — 70
14) Because Obama said this during the transition by Jesselyn Radack — 69
15) Rock Bottom by Ray Radlein — 69
16) The Administrations' war against truth by bobdevo — 67
17) Politics... by wmtriallawyer — 67
18) Unemployment is high. by TomP — 66
19) Sorry this diary by jsfox — 65
20) Because defend your state's right to kill itself by cskendrick — 65
21) Let's be a little understanding. There are also by ThisIsMyTime — 65
22) Shameful . . . but not surprising . . . by bobdevo — 64
23) Wow. How insensitive. by Gravedugger — 63
24) Right now, yes... by grannyhelen — 63
25) It's simple by CornSyrupAwareness — 60
26) I remember reading about Bush and Texas wind by Dave from Oregon — 59
27) The banksters have won - game over by deepsouthdoug — 59
28) ...and look at Barney Frank now... by The Lighthouse Keeper — 59
29) Unless he is an SES by ferallike — 59
30) Oh, crud, I just realized why he got the year by ontheleftcoast — 58
Top Mojo with No Exclusions:
1) Tip Jar by TomP — 437
2) Tip Jar by sallykohn — 411
3) Tip Jar by gjohnsit — 375
4) Suggestions welcome. Flame wars not so much. by Crashing Vor — 332
5) Tip Jar by Steve Bloom — 275
6) Tip Jar by Jerome a Paris — 246
7) Tip Jar by Drdemocrat — 243
8) Tips for Ian and his friends. by TheFatLadySings — 209
9) Tip Jar by Knights of Dusk — 208
10) Tip Jar by Jaxpagan — 207
11) I will get more up after I talk to Ed Schultz by Tomtech — 189
12) Alms (tips) by Muskegon Critic — 158
13) Tip Jar by yuriwho — 153
14) Tip Jar by Jesselyn Radack — 146
15) Tip Jar by Garrett — 139
16) I am unabashedly rooting for BP right now by Blicero — 122
17) Call someone. by Clarknt67 — 118
18) Tip Jar by teacherken — 113
19) Tip Jar by Meteor Blades — 107
20) I think he is right...people DIDN'T listen... by APA Guy — 98
21) Tip jar by it really is that important — 93
22) Quoting myself... by Fishgrease — 93
23) Tip Jar by Haole in Hawaii — 92
24) Tip Jar by sheddhead — 91
25) That seems pretty harsh. Not everyone lives by voracious — 88
26) Another gem Tom. by fou — 85
27) I wish. by greendem — 84
28) Tip Jar by slinkerwink — 80
29) Everyone has missed the main problem by FishOutofWater — 79
30) Not to mention by Jesselyn Radack — 79
© sardonyx; all rights reserved
All quotes are the property of the original authors or the websites that held them