Top Comments is having a birthday. Or an anniversary. Whichever it is, we're having lots of cake (and pie!), plus champagne, (dark) chocolate, and whatever else we decide to scarf up. I'm especially hungry because I haven't had time to leave the house to buy food, or cook up anything frozen.
I want to welcome one and all to a place where "Kossacks [can] gather and socialize and find friends, Cheers-like, each and every night" (quoting BeninSC from our last anniversary), where artwork and photographs, repartee and badinage, and the serious and the silly can appear, where top comments are noted and (every once in a while) created, and people just generally have a good time.
We're glad you're here, and will look for you on the other side of the jump.
When I was wondering what to write about to celebrate our four years of existence, it was natural to turn to my specialty here on Daily Kos: site history. It was, after all, in Top Comments that I did my first looks back at the goings on in my early days here (2004) and even before. And it was Top Comments that tempted me in, started me commenting with greater frequency and regularity, and then dangled the possibility of diaries in front of me. As I'm currently writing my 165th for the series, and have been in charge of the TC scheduling calendar for almost 34 months, those were some possibilities.
The dangling came on a day where the TC crew had a miscommunication, and when 10:00 came along everyone suddenly realized that no one thought they were supposed to be doing the diary. Thus was born Top Comments: By the Skin of Our Teeth Edition with MissLaura taking the helm, BeninSC supplying top mojo, and Cronesense submitting a fistful of comment noms.
I asked a fateful question:
You guys need more volunteers?
I'm not sure how good I'd be at a diary intro (I'm best with short comments), but I'm happy to try if it would help.
Great save, MissLaura!
Her reply: "Heh." (They'd already been bandying my name about.)
The inspiration for Top Comments was SusanG's Diary Rescue series, which started very early on April 6, 2006 (though, as she's from California, it was very late on the 5th for her) with Open Thread and Diary Rescue.
Diary Rescue rapidly became a mainstay of Daily Kos, so much so that little more than two months later, Carnacki started a new diary series for comments.
What surprised the heck out of me is that Top Comments, which I've always associated with being positive and concentrating on good writing while ignoring the bad and ugly, was first proposed by Carnacki as a diary to "highlight [comments] that were outstanding...as well as comments deserving of consideration for troll rating," and this came in a thread discussing autoban and trolls with AnonymousArmy.
Twelve hours later, Top Comments was born, called Commentary Central. True to its origin, there were three good comments nominated by Carnacki, and also three links to questionable comments. There was also a lively set of diary comments, 96 in all, from people including future TCers cskendrick, jlove1982, AnonymousArmy, and sardonyx; early adopters including PatsBard, buhdydharma, and ek hornbeck, site machers jotter (who showed up in the diary late the next day) and peeder (who'd written the new comment software rolled out a few months earlier, and explained the newly instituted two troll ratings per day limit), and still-regular-readers Dallasdoc, Cedwyn, guyermo, and llbear. (If I've missed anyone, I apologize; please write a comment and check in below!) In addition to Carnacki's three nominations, and a couple of commenters added more: murrayewv and sardonyx (in my case, a comment by teacherken).
It was clear when Carnacki published his diary the next day that the concentration was going to be on the high-end comments going forward, as the series was retitled Top comments of the day, and the diary made the Recommended list, and came in 15th in jotter's High Impact Diaries the next day. There were 147 comments, Carnacki listed ten Top Comments, and many more now-familiar names came through, including Meteor Blades, rserven, Land of Enchantment, boran2, Major Danby, Avila, Timroff, vcmvo2, GreyHawk, and PsiFighter37. Future diarists MissLaura and bronte17 also stopped by. buhdydharma presented a top ten mojo in the comments: just text without links. Clem Yeobright nominated Friend of the Court, who stopped by to thank Clem (as did Friend's cats); occams hatchet nominated Malacandra's response to mcjoan in a fun cskendrick diary I'm Spartacus!!! (which comment was subsequently supplied by Carnacki for the next day's Top Comments), and AllisonInSeattle, Cedwyn, bronte17, station wagon, rserven, and Shockwave all chimed in with nominations of their own. jotter gave us numbers that show us that May 2006 was indeed troll-war season (440 donuts on May 12; 409 on May 2), and a couple of people push their own comments, whereupon we get the first of many TC explanations of the difference between pimping and whoring comments.
The third day, Friday, saw Carnacki's goal of making this a group diary being met as a new diarist, jlove1982, took the Top Comments reins for the day; it was a slow day, only 26 comments, but there were a number of innovations. Top ten based on mojo appeared in the diary proper (our newest Top Comments diarist, Ed Tracey, was in ninth place in that list; PhillyGal's Pootie Pic Du Jour came in second). As Cheers and Jeers dominated the list, ek hornbeck provided exclusionary top ten mojo in the comments, removing not only Cheers and Jeers, but any comments a diarist made in her or his own diary, which is one way to remove the tip jar from consideration.
Carnacki was back on Saturday, and on Sunday AnonymousArmy did the first of his two Sunday diaries, which he called Comment-a-palooza, the last time the series would be named anything other than Top Comments. In fact, the name remained "Top Comments of the Day" with varying capitalization (Carnacki usually only capitalized Top, while others capitalized the three main words) until "of the Day" started being dropped on July 4 (BeninSC was being independent with his "Top Comments - Independence Day edition"); the balance shifted in August to mostly using "Top Comments", and by the time the equinox came and I joined, only Carnacki and gloriana were still using "of the Day".
MissLaura joined the crew on Monday, June 19, and BeninSC the next day, to round out the first week with five diarists. It took until the beginning of July to get the next two: gloriana on the first and va dare on the third, and another month after that until Ambrosius and noweasels joined on the fourth and sixth of August, respectively. carolita followed on the 26th, and September saw a number of new additions in the ten days following the "Skin of Our Teeth" diary mentioned above, including Cronesense, nonnie9999, me, emeraldmaiden, and Elise. At that point, gloriana was sending out scheduling emails, and she and BeninSC served as my mentors, and my early top mojo suppliers. I actually did my own mojo the first time out—by hand—and it's the reason my diary was so late. I left it to them until cskendrick finally figured out a way to let Excel do the bulk of the work.
One of my ideas for this diary was to look back at this day in history for the Top Comments of that Day, figuring with past anniversaries to work from, it'd be a piece of cake. I should have known better: there's a lot of data out there, and historians should never assume it's easy to get to.
2009: Top Comments - Third Anniversary Edition by BeninSC had 95 comments to its diary, and a number of nominations sent in. My choice for the best of the bunch was one of Ben's selections: a fine diary-length comment My Somalian Friend Margaret by mntleo2 on the problem of being poor.
2008: Top Comments 2nd Anniversary Edition: Coming Home (with Special Comment) was written by gloriana, with a Special Comment by va dare, and the diary garnered 259 comments. I probably shouldn't, but I'm going with this one that I submitted:
In last night's Open Thread and Diary Rescue, in response to Trix's post of Human ovulation caught on film for the 1st time, nonnie9999 decides to skip the eggs tomorrow at breakfast and starts off a punishing thread that pecks up nearly 100 responses, none of it chicken scratches. Modesty prevents any further characterization.
2007: Top Comments - 1st anniversary edition by Carnacki racked up an amazing 442 comments!! (What happened to all you crazy commenters? Isn't sanity overrated?)
Of the many comments, my choice is a nomination from teacherken:
On my diary A different approach to evaluating students which was posted on Wednesday, this was posted today (Thursday) by George Wood, one of the authors of the proposal about which I was writing in the diary.
Note: PsiFighter37 jumped Carnacki's tip jar in this anniversary with a "First!", and collected a well-deserved donut from Elise for his pains.
2006: The Commentary Central diary had only three comments to choose from. I'm going to mention two of them.
The first, by jfern, no longer survives because the diary it was in was subsequently deleted (sometimes comments survive, sometimes they don't):
The only thing that could get Bush above 45% is if in the middle of one of Bush's televised addresses Osama sneaks in and hits Bush from behind, and then Bush kills Osama with his bare hands.
In other words, not going to happen.
In my opinion, the best of the three given by Carnacki is The problems with corporate governance by stitchmd in Jay Elias's diary Why What Happened at Home Depot's Annual Meeting Matters.
That's as far back as Top Comments goes, but I wasn't about to let that stop me. No, it was time itself that stopped me...sort of. Let's keep going.
2005: There were 322 stories and diaries published on June 14, 2005, and comments into the five digits. There was no way I could get to that, especially with time being gobbled by an unexpected quick-turnaround editing job that suddenly dropped in my lap last night.
Fortunately, there is help: Before Top Comments existed, there was a mojo-based series entitled 17 Best-Rated Comments created by social democrat. This was a completely different take on Top Mojo, and based on the old five-tierd rating system of Excellent (4), Good (3), Marginal (2), Unproductive (1), and Troll (0), which were converted to a total number (deducting for the lower two), and eventually limited the number of comments that could qualify from a single diary (such as the ubiquitous Cheers and Jeers). The series was published from December 22, 2004 (first diary here) to October 26, 2005.
June 14, 2005 falls within that range, and social democrat fortunatelly posted an entry in his comment mojo series that day, 17 Best-Rated Comments, Jun 14 2005. The big news of the day was Jim Sensenbrenner refused to allow John Conyers to hold a forum on the Downing Street Minutes using congressional facilities, and comments from two diaries—one of which was later deleted, and (unfortunately) took its highly rated comments with it. To my mind, of the diaries with highly rated comments that day, it was Can We Slip Some Other Justice News Between Celebrity Trials? by Meteor Blades—a personal diary, not a front-page story—that impressed me with the quality of its comments, including this one by doorguy listed in social democrat's diary.
2004: Like I said, time disappeared for a comment search. When you consider that there were 147 stories and diaries in 2004, you can perhaps imagine how much time it would take to do a proper job. Not as bad as in 2005, but still more than I can handle. So, if you want to look around, click on the supplied link for a glimpse of six years agone.
2003: After kos posted the June 14 Open Thread, Steve Gilliard had front-page duty for the weekend. Again, no time to search out the best of the 344 comments from that day, so instead I'm going to send you to Steve's three posts: a superb two-parter on Iraq—McKiernan's dilemma and Bremer's dilemma—and Even the children scare me, which summarized the feelings of an American army sergeant in Iraq. Markos made a very telling comment at the beginning of the McKiernan comment thread; I'm going to cheat a little and pick it for display, because it's so very true:
I'm glad Steve is writing these pieces here and nowhere else :)
(But really, he should shop them around to the New Republic or The American Prospect. They're good.)
2002: There were three posts by kos on June 14, twenty days into the run of Daily Kos. According to the archive, two of the three garnered a single comment, but no comment appears now. The odds are these invisible "comments" were, in fact, later spam that was deleted. So no top comments from eight years ago. I did look very carefully.
That ends the trip down memory lane. Hope you enjoyed it.
We added three new diarists in the past year: Irish Patti, bronte17, and Ed Tracey; between them, they've written 22 diaries. Some of your old favorites have been going crazy in the diary department, including vrigomusic (66), brillig (55), emeraldmaiden (50), carolita (49), and your humble servant (62). We're going to try to be less crazy in the coming year.
I have a complete listing of all the diarists who have contributed to Top Comments over its four years, along with the number of diaries each has done, from most to least. In case of a tie, the order is determined by who started writing for TC earliest. There were 1459 diaries in the first four years (tonight will be number 1460): 363 in the first year (TC wasn't published on July 2 and December 31, 2006), 366 in the second (leap year), and 365 in years three and four. With today's diary we have published 1261 consecutive days, which I believe is a record for a community series.
sardonyx: 164
emeraldmaiden: 152
carolita: 148
brillig: 138
Elise: 113
va dare: 103
virgomusic: 75
asimbagirl: 57
BeninSC: 56
cskendrick: 44
kath25: 43
noweasels: 39
monkeybiz: 39
Ambrosius: 36
taylormattd: 34
MissLaura: 31
Cronesense: 28
Carnacki: 26
gloriana: 26
Light Emitting Pickle: 23
jlove1982: 14
bronte17: 13
Eddie C: 12
nonnie9999: 11
silvercedes: 7
Ed Tracey: 5
Progressive Witness: 4
Irish Patti: 4
AnonymousArmy: 2
MuffledDrum: 2
jessical: 2
pfiore8: 2
vertexoflife: 2
iliketodrum: 1
BuffaloGirl: 1
Craig Burnham: 1
OrangeClouds115: 1
One final thing about June 14: it's Flag Day. Fly 'em high!
~~~~~
There were a high number of emails today, doubtless in anticipation of this momentous event. Thank you one and all who submitted their nominations 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 RustyCannon:
peacemongrel posted this comment to calchala's diary on Afghan mineral wealth.
In the same diary, cskendrick also gives a great perspective on the "mineral discoveries" in Afghanistan.
From kestrel9000:
gerrilea issues this reality-based, fact-driven smackdown of one aspect of an unpleasantly authoritarian diary that seemed to me to be at cross purposes with its title of putting wedge issues to rest.
From BlueJessamine:
In a comment thread started by Julie Gulden, both bubbanomics and trashablanca provide some amusement with: "I made you say underwear!"
In Susan Gardner's front-page post Christian school fires teacher for premarital conception, Sam Wise Gingy has this comment.
From carolita:
Three comments struck me in the always-excellent Fishgrease diary Booming BP Execs:
• StrayCat nails the real problem with corporate 'citizens' and has good suggestions for dealing with them.
• Gooserock points out the role of Reaganocrats as architects of civilization's decline and the price reality must pay for hanging "around with disqualified extremists like the looney lefties."
• And best of all, joanneleon posts an outstanding video of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Morello, Little Stevie, and the E Street Band doing Ghost of Tom Joad. Way, way beyond excellent.
From trashablanca:
Horsefeathers never fails to crack me up as he did twice in possum's regular Monday Science Tidbits diary.
From bronte17:
Because it can't be said enough... what Dallasdoc said about the need for primary care physicians in RDemocrat's diary Rand Paul: Don't Cut my Government Money.
From emeraldmaiden:
I was moved almost to tears by BenGoshi's comment in RogerShuler's diary, Reagan Revolution Is Washing Ashore in the Gulf of Mexico.
And Happy 4th Anniversary, TC!
From sardonyx (your running-out-of-time anniversary diarist):
boophus reminds us what happened with the lumber industry when we were down to the last five percent of old growth timber.
hannah looks at the modern private corporation.
~~~~~
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) how many americans by dark daze — 214
2) That's right. by Fishgrease — 109
3) god. damn. right. by the national gadfly — 105
4) I can't get through more than a couple by Rei — 99
5) Reaganocracy Broke Our Civilization by Gooserock — 91
6) I agree with him by Demi Moaned — 91
7) I don't study transphobia. by psychodrew — 91
8) learn more here by dark daze — 87
9) Ooooops Ooooops! by Fishgrease — 80
10) Don't forget Nigeria and Angola... by ohcanada — 79
11) Corporatocracy by alkalinesky — 78
12) I want T-Shirts with this on it by weatherdude — 76
13) It ignores the real scandal here, too by Dallasdoc — 74
14) buhdydharma posted this from Chief Arvol by conchita — 73
15) They, the prime tranchs, the podunk of equity hol by mikeVA — 67
16) Nigeria has had 100 million gal + spilled by MD patriot — 66
17) A letter to the WSJ by jsfox — 64
18) Yep, It is a great film by dengre — 63
19) Badly phrased, but he's right by Dallasdoc — 63
20) and does this distract folks from by conchita — 62
21) Such a great clip by DruidQueen — 62
22) Or as John Fugelsang tweeted recently: by ScottyUrb — 61
23) Ooooops! by Fishgrease — 60
24) Hi, I'm Rick Barber by gchaucer2 — 59
25) If ever there were a time... by David Kroning II — 59
26) I don't think that's fair, Robyn by kyril — 58
27) Can you imagine by happymisanthropy — 57
28) "Over there" by libdevil — 55
29) Frankly, I was more disgusted... by David Kroning II — 53
30) Here's the argument: by AUBoy2007 — 52
Top Mojo with No Exclusions:
1) Tip Jar by Fishgrease — 558
2) Tip Jar by BruinKid — 393
3) Tip Jar by RogerShuler — 314
4) Tip Jar. by psychodrew — 254
5) Tip Jar by calchala — 234
6) Tip Jar by RDemocrat — 234
7) Tip Jar by dengre — 231
8) how many americans by dark daze — 214
9) Tip Jar by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse — 202
10) Tip Jar by Cenk Uygur — 194
11) Tip Jar by Unenergy — 166
12) Tip Jar by The Nephew — 164
13) Tip Jar by Leo W Gerard — 125
14) Tip Jar by Liveblog — 118
15) That's right. by Fishgrease — 109
16) god. damn. right. by the national gadfly — 105
17) Tip Jar by jamess — 102
18) I can't get through more than a couple by Rei — 99
19) Scritchie Jar by triciawyse — 92
20) I agree with him by Demi Moaned — 91
21) Reaganocracy Broke Our Civilization by Gooserock — 91
22) I don't study transphobia. by psychodrew — 91
23) learn more here by dark daze — 87
24) Tip Jar by conchita — 80
25) Ooooops Ooooops! by Fishgrease — 80
26) Don't forget Nigeria and Angola... by ohcanada — 79
27) Corporatocracy by alkalinesky — 78
28) I want T-Shirts with this on it by weatherdude — 76
29) Tip Jar by yawnimawke — 75
30) Welcome all who come to honor these men by SisTwo — 74
31) It ignores the real scandal here, too by Dallasdoc — 74
© sardonyx; all rights reserved
All quotes are the property of the original authors or the websites that held them