There have been hot feelings on this blog since election night, and perhaps even since the explosion of new users in the month or two before election night arrived. The end result of having this larger, more robust community is that most people here don't know each other. That wasn't particularly true six months ago, when nearly all the handles you might run into on a given day would be familiar names. Recently, we passed the 35,000 user mark, and we are almost certainly over 36,000 by now.
Obviously, the explosion of new DailyKos members is something to be celebrated. Where we might have five or ten people investigating a particular issue a year ago, now we might have fifty or a hundred. Where fundraising might have netted a few thousand in the past, it can now net multiple tens of thousands. That's a wonderful thing. On the other hand, however, discussions between a hundred people are necessarily less pithy and more emotional than discussions between five or ten. That's just the way it is.
If you are a new user, give it time, and you will come to recognize most of the influential voices here. If you are an old user, give it time, and you will recognize which new users have that special voice that makes dKos such an effective and influential community.
There is one issue I think we all need a refresher course on, and that is the use of ratings. This is all covered elsewhere, but I hope to present this in a very practical and informal way, as a springboard for discussion...
Ratings
If you are a registered user, you can rate the "quality" of a comment on a scale from 1 to 4. If you are a trusted user, which means you have been around for a while and have generally been well-rated in your own comments, you also may give 0 ratings, which are special.
Here's the ratings you will find yourself using:
[4] Give a four when you find a post that is especially well-argued, well-researched, funny, or otherwise contributes to the discussion in a way that you appreciate. That doesn't mean giving fours to posts because you agree with them. It may be a post you disagree with strongly; if it is still a well-said argument, it still deserves credit. In short: Give a 4 if you find a particular comment exceptional in some way, and want to express your appreciation to the author.
[1] A "1" rating, or troll rating, is used to mark posts that are clearly intended to offend, which are intentionally misleading, or otherwise "troll" posts, i.e. the comment is clearly intentionally destructive to the community. Using a "1" to indicate that you disagree with someone's argument is abuse of the rating system. Never use low ratings to indicate agreement or disagreement with the author; only to critique how they said it.
[0] A zero or super-troll rating is an administrative tool only. Unlike all other ratings, it allows an offensive post and all comments underneath that post to be made invisible. If a comment has an aggregate rating of less than 1.00, the comment is hidden. For particularly offensive posts, users may pile on additional "0" ratings as a sign of just how offensive the post was. If a user frequently posts comments that garner "0" ratings, that user have their account removed, thus banning them from further posting. (Offensive in this case means advertising, extreme vulgarity, threats of violence, etc. Again, it does not mean "disagree with".)
Those are the "major" ratings. There are, obviously, two other ratings levels which are seldom -- if ever -- used by most established community members.
[2] A "2" rating indicates a post that isn't quite a troll post, but that is close enough to it that you want to warn the author that he's on thin ice. Giving a two because you disagree with someone's position is ratings abuse. In general, you should be giving out "2"s approximately once per blue moon. If something's a troll post, troll rate it. If you aren't sure if something is a troll post, don't rate it at all.
It is exceedingly bad form to give a "1" or "2" rating to someone you are actively arguing with in comments. If you are arguing with them, that's a pretty good indication you disagree with them. It's also a pretty good indication that they managed to say something at least sensical enough that you feel you want to argue the point.
[3] Ah, the dreaded "3" rating. In theory, a "3" means slightly-above-average. In practice, it isn't of much use. Merely not rating a post at all means you find the content of the post to be nothing special: why go out of your way to single out particular posts that are really nothing special?
Yes, in theory, a "3" is still a "good number". But in practice a "3" is just a dilution of other people's "4"s, and no commenter is going to thank you for it.
For most long-term posters here, I'd wager "3" is the least-used rating of all. Personally, I don't recall ever giving a three. If a post catches my eye for the quality of the argument, the humor, or other intangible factors, it gets a "4". If I don't think a post is special, but other people do, I'll let the other people give tips, and I won't butt into it to mathematically announce "meh, it wasn't that great." It strikes me, personally, as rude to both the poster, and the people tipping the poster.
Far more often, people use "3", again, to display their relative level of agreement or disagreement with the post. That's not what ratings are for, that's what "reply to" is for.
Something else to keep in mind here: Ratings are generally to be used as positive reinforcement, not negative. Give "4" ratings where deserved. If you're giving more than a handful of non-4 ratings out, you're doing it wrong. Or rather, you aren't doing it according to the community standards that have informally developed here.
So that's that. Feel free to use the thread below to disagree, to ask questions, or to generally discuss the state of discourse here in our ever-more-popular home.