I've been a reader of Daily Kos for quite some time. I believe I started reading in the summer of 2002, back when the site was on Movable Type and anyone could leave a comment without creating any kind of account. I believe a thread of thirty comments or so would have been pretty remarkable at that time. I still remember once from the old days getting into an argument in comments with Steve Gilliard, back before he was a main pager, and being surprised at how you could randomly run into extraordinarily smart people on the internet (I'm not so surpised when that happens anymore -- it happens all the time on this site).
I happened to be reading Kos the day he switched over to Scoop -- so mostly through good luck, I've gotten an extremely low user ID # -- 77. I'm actually proud of the low number -- I'm rarely an early adopter of anything that turns out to be be "hip" or "popular," so this is one of the few times I recognized something valuable before everyone else did. (Now if I could only do that with stocks!).
Despite my long-time use of the site, I wasn't what you would call a "heavy user" until much more recently, probably some time over the summer of 2004.
Also, to a certain extent, I stayed away from the site a bit during the heat of the primaries -- partially because I didn't have a strong allegience to any one candidate, and wasn't particularly interested in reading about the Dean v. Clark v. Kerry v. Gephardt wars.
Anyway, since the election, I feel a sense that my "moral universe" has been upended. To put it in simple terms: on some primal level, I feel that Evil had been exposed and held up for all to see, and despite the fact that Evil was known and seen for what it was, evil triumphed.
This outcome has made me somewhat depressed about the ability to be rewarded for living a good and just life in this world.
Anyway, perhaps because of this extraordinary disillusionment, this site has become more important to me in terms of affirming my faith in the world then it may have been before the election.
For that reason, I've become interested in learning more about this site -- and perhaps getting a "social history" from other long time users. There are a lot of undercurrents going on beneath the surface, which I think many of us would like to hear more about.
To begin, here are some questions:
(1) How did the wars between the Dean people and the Clark people start? What were the charges and countercharges? How did the community manage to come out stronger because of it?
(2) The three mainpagers who did not complete their term were Ron K Seattle, Melanie, and Theoria. What is the story behind their unsuccussful run as main pagers?
(3) Did the SYFPH diary lead ultimately to the Liberal Street Fight Blog? Or am I missing several steps? Or was LSF in place long before SYFPH?
(4) Who is "Petey"? What's his deal?
(5) What would you consider to be the great "events" in the history of Daily Kos. I'm talking about events that fundamentally changed what this site was about in ways large and small.
(6) Finally -- is it fair to really call this site a "blog" anymore? I consider a blog to be a person's personal op-ed column. This site seems to me to be so much more. What word could we use instead of "blog " to describe it?
(7) What are the "unknown unknowns" I'm missing with this list of questions?