As some of you may have noticed, I've been away from dKos in recent weeks. I am not coming back yet (not to rub it in, but I am just past the halfway point of what are, to be fair, unusually long holidays), but I felt it was a long enough time to share with those of you that, like me, are usually on dKos every waking hour or so what it feels like for a newsjunky not to have access to news and more specifically for a kosjunky not to have access to the site for days on end.
(Plus, I may not have any internet at all for the next 2 weeks).
I'll acknowledge that I was never yet cut off from the internet completely for more than 48 hours, but on most days, I've been able to spend only a few minutes altogether online.
One thing I must say first is that I consider myself lucky to have been away in a period dominated by news I have little to write about - the Israeli-Hezbollah war on Lebanon, and the Lamont-Lieberman primary, and which I don't mind missing too much (I actually think the Lamont challenge to be more important in the long term than the newest episode of the levant tribal wars).
But, despite my lack of interest for current topics, the difficulty to get any kind of news beyond the big headlines that make it even to Australian tabloids, or during the cursory glance at the Yahoo headlines I could see when consulting my email an a dollar-for-five-minutes internet kiosk with a beat up keyboard has taken its toll on me by also cutting me off even more brutally from the European Tribune or DailyKos, where not only I find my news but where I meet up with many of my friends.
The main things I would like to note, in random order:
- the sheer volume of information on ET and DKos. When you get to download the main page after a day or more of not being on a site, you get overwhelmed by the number of things that you want to read. Front page stories with deep threads, brand new recommended diaries, everything looks new and interesting. And when you have just 5 more minutes of reading in front of you, it's discouraging. So you randomly select one post or thread to read and get, hopefully, a glimpse of what's going on; (a side note: that volume is overwhelming to someone who is intimately familiar with the site, how it works, who's writing stuff I like, what kind of topics generate more heat than light, etc.. to newcomers, it must be absolutely intimidating or confusing. It would probably be useful to create a well placed and highly visible box with one link saying something like "New to the site? Click here for a guided tour").
It's absolutely impossible to read all that's going on, and to know what the hot topics are from a cursory glance, even when you are a regular. Which means that most people reading the site have little idea of all that's being discussed beyond what they can read from a first glance. This is of course inevitable for any community - there's a shared language, shared experiences (good and bad), habits and taboos that are not usually immediately obvious to outsiders. But it's interesting to note that in the frenetic world of the blogosphere, even regulars can get lost after being out of touch for a few days (in so far as they miss out actively used recent referentials). I thought this was worth being flagged.
- more specifically as a regular, I realize that I miss knowing what's going on in the community. what the latest GBCW diary is, the latest in-joke or the latest obsession of the kossacks - or, in the case of the European Tribune, the latest esoteric discussions, the latest outrage at our sad excuses for governments in Europe, the newest puns or the topics that generate a hundred-comment thread. By dropping by once a day or less, you simply cannot participate in the community life. You can drop a comment or two, but you cannot see the answers, and you cannot respond to these before the whole thing has gone hopelessly stale. I really miss these interactions, as I miss feeling the pulse of the sites.
Again, the experience of these community sites is totally different when you are there occasionally and where you are there many times each day, or semi-permantently. Regulars can enter into dialogues - indeed, many of them in parallel - with other regulars, banter, trade personal news, provide updates, etc... and that is just as important to their participation to the site as the on-topic posts.
Some of that dialogue comes in almost invisible ways: to me, many of the '4's in my daily tip jars are just like morning hellos from friends or close colleagues - and diary recommends are like a heartfelt handshake after a good job has been done. Missing out on all this is quite painful, not unexpectedly.
- but I'd like to note as well that even a glimpse to the site (and this applies, again, to ET and DK) shows its incredible quality and wealth of contributions - the greatness of the ratings system and the well deserved star quality of the front pagers. Even if you read only the front page and a couple of recommended diaries (which is usually all I have the time to do these days), you come out of the site having learnt new stuff, gathered most of the useful news of the day, and you feel better about the future of the human race - at least we still have great writing, and great humanists amongst us. On European Tribune, I just read Fran's European Breakfast and I get the news of the days, analysed, deconstructed and put in context by other eurotribbers.
- in one way only, the experience of being absent changes nothing for me: I contribute little to the site, but my reading experience has not changed. On DKos this is logical as the site is so big that the loss of any contributor will change little, but on ET where I run the front page, it's funny for me to see that my absence changes almost nothing for me in terms of the perceived quality and interest of the site, and I wonder how others see it...
The lesson I take from all this is that for regulars, the site is more than just words on a screen. It's home, and you can get homesick for a website. The other lesson is that regulars have to realize that their experience of the site is not really the same as that of the majority of the readers, and they/we have to be careful not to become too obscure or clannish. I am not saying that this is happening (I'm sure it comes and goes depending on events in and out of the site), but it certainly is a danger that lurks about. So let's all try to always be as welcoming as possible towards newbies, and to be forgiving of their mistakes, fauxpas or missteps, so long as it's all in good faith.
And I really look forward to being back in full in a couple of weeks' time.