Or a Vice-Principal. Or a Cat-Herder. Or a Complaints Department. Or a Flak-Catcher. Or a Butt-Kicker. Or a Moderator. Whatever you want to call it, this site needs it.
DKos is supposed to be self-policing. But self-policing isn't working. People are spending too much time fighting with one another than preparing to fight the Republicans. I have seen several of the admins declare that they are stressed. This system is breaking down under the weight of 117,000 contentious registered posters.
It's time to realize that self-policing is a failure and bring in a full-time, dedicated cop.
Self-policing has failed because of partisanship. We are all, in one way or another, partisans here. We are all - or we should be - partisans of Democratic candidates and causes. But within this broad tent there are smaller divisions. When partisans on one side of an issue, or supporters of one candidate, feel free to make malicious personal attacks on the partisans of another, and these attacks are not TRed, the system has failed. When the TRs on these attacks are uprated by partisans of the attacker, the system has failed. When gangs of partisans TR the comments of their supposed opponents, the system has failed.
The problem is not partisanship itself, nor any particular issue [no, not even the I/P issue]. The problem is partisanship grown out of hand, into hate. The problem is partisanship that tolerates - that enables - toxic individuals as long as they support "the right side" of the issue. The problem is that too many people here place partisanship above the common goals of this site.
The method of choosing Trusted Users, who are supposed to be the backbone of the self-policing system, does not select trustworthy users. Instead, it selects for partisanship, as the partisans recommend the comments of those who most often agree with them. Instead of being the police for the site, with their power of TRing comments, many of them are the foremost abusers of it.
When the self-policing fails, the admins are supposed to be able to step in, but here, too, the system has failed. There are too many complaints, too many problems for them to be able to deal with. They are stressed. Consequently, complaints go unanswered, problems go unaddressed, and flamewars that might have be stopped after a couple of comments grow into firestorms.
The Front Pagers are chosen primarily to be writers, not cops. They should be spending their time writing insightful commentary to enlighten and inform the rest of us. This is what they are good at. Instead, they are bogged down trying to deal with the abuse that arises out of the failure of the TR system. No wonder they are stressed. Policing the site should not be their job. Let the writers write, and hire a cop.
Others of the admins are technical people, and should be spending their time doing technical stuff, which probably involves numbers and I don't want to think about it. But their job, too, is not to be cops.
Kos, of course, is the Boss and can do as he wills, ban whom he chooses. But Kos, far more than the FP writers, can not handle all the problems of policing the site. His email states upfront that he is just too busy to respond to most complaints. This is why he needs to bring in a deputy, a Vice-Kos, a cop, to handle the smaller problems that Kos doesn't want to be wasting his name with.
Because the primary elections will be coming up, and that means Hillary Wars. If we want this site to be standing by the time of the elections, we need a cop.
Update [2007-2-13 22:45:48 by curmudgiana]:
In the comments to this diary, the poster called richter has appeared and posted a malicious and abusive lie. He has been posting a series of such lies about me for several days now, and no self-policing and no admins have stopped him, altho mcjoan made a post in which she declared that he ought to stop this behavior.
All you NO voters who think that the system is policing itself just fine thank you as it is might consider dropping down to TR this comment:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Curmudgette called my 82 year old mom a bitch (2+ / 0-)
Recommended by:
buddabelly, greenearth
Not once but several times -- and just yesterday. A cop would help (two Kossacks who share her hatred of all things Israeli actually recommended her verbal abuse, while troll rating me no reason justified by the FAQs). But a conscience would be better.
In short, this diary is a bad farce -- sort of the equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger criticizing bad acting.
by richter on Tue Feb 13, 2007 at 09:14:30 PM CST
So far, no one has given this viciousness a single TR, and two persons have uprated it.
So go ahead. Prove me wrong. Prove that DKos doesn't really need a cop to kick the asses of people like this.
[UPDATE 2] Curmudgiana, Tenacious in Dispute, is retiring to her tent for the night.
At the time I write this, the NO votes on the cop are ahead, more than 2 to 1. However, I note that, as I write this, none of Richter's defamatory comments have been moved to hidden comments because partisans of his and persons with malice towards me have uprated his lies.
I conclude, being the judge, that DKos needs a cop.
And special thanks to SusanG, even though her action tends to argue against my point that the admins aren't effective.
[UPDATE 3] So here it is the next morning, and the pattern of partisan abuse is manifest. The lying personal attack from a manifest stalker is still not hidden because of partisan uprating. Even the welcome intervention of an administrator did not deter these posters from abusing the ratings system.
I did not write this diary with the intent of making this demonstration. I never expected that richter would stalk me to this diary to repeat his lies. But I maintain that the episode is a perfect unplanned demonstration that I am entirely right: self-policing on this site is a failure.
DKos needs a cop, no matter what the poll says.