EDIT: Good suggestion: Software tweak: Make it take ten troll ratings to neutralize one recommend.
Second edit: The troll gangers have arrived. Posts are going missing. Sorry it won't make much sense now. QED.
Third edit: If you have Trusted User status, look at the Hidden comments. If you click on the TR section (the numbers) it will show you who troll rated. Since none of the comments violated any rules, it means that all the troll raters were violating the FAQ, and should be banned, although I'd warn them a couple times first. I wonder what Markos will do?
When I first encountered DailyKos, after migrating from blog to blog, I was uplifted by the range of topics and the quality of the writing.
It became apparent that the quality of the writing was due only to the merit rating software and the steady approval of the community peer rating system, free of the bias of the site owner(s). Of course, you need the writers, and there are always writers working to be heard, on any topic.
I really didn't notice the troll ratings, because I didn't see them for a while, being a newbie and not writing to the audience.
My joy didn't last, however, because I, like many, do not wish to censor myself, to see little red flags popping up in my mind, saying "Don't Go There!", so when I did start to write and comment on the more controversial subjects, like I/P and feminism and race, I was surprised to see my comments seemed to disappear. Then I became interested in the fine structure of the place, and the Rules of Posting.
For those new to DailKos, I'll state the critical ones:
- This is a blog to elect Democrats.
Well, I thought, that's OK. All this discussion has to sharpen the wits of the ardent activists so they can do a better job of convincing the undecided and totally wrong to vote Democratic.
Silly me. I didn't realize that the site owner was essentially a control freak, and not interested in the First Amendment, but only in HIS understanding of how person to person communication worked.
I dug deeper, trying to understand why he'd have such an idea, that limiting the subjects under discussion would not eventually stultify the discussions, and lead inevitably to political correctness, and the kind of Party Line that befalls all the Berkeley discussions since the Sixties.
I thought, maybe he's young, and unacquainted with the ACLU concept of the marketplace of ideas, or with sociological understandings of idea cross-pollination leading to hybrid vigor.
Maybe he's been so busy with politics, stemming from his upperclass irredentism, military officer yearnings, and Chicago Studs Terkelism that he hasn't learned about William Calvin and the evolution of thoughts, or Susan Blackmore's ideas about memes and their cauldron. Maybe he regards George Lakoff as a fuzzy-minded academic who is only glancingly useful with his concepts of metaphors we live by.
Regardless, Markos made a big mistake in the kernel of his idea-sorting software: he made it possible for people to game the merit system. Perhaps he was unduly frightened of the concept of wiser heads, not yet being one. Maybe he was also in Libertarian love with the idea of free speech, but didn't understand the heckler's veto. (Feel free to wiki this stuff.) But he ended up with an unintended consequence:
- PC people, either mistakenly sucking up to him, or to each other, can qualify as censors too easily, by mojo-whoring in social diaries set up for that purpose, and then use their Trusted User status to form small gangs and eliminate ideas they don't like.
And of course, as any subtle student of social movements who has read The True Believer, or Mein Kampf, or Madison's comments on mobocracy and the need for delay in adopting ideas as legislation would know (See the new book, The Genius of America for a full treatment of why the constitution slows legislation down so much.)
DailyKos has a constitution. Markos wrote it, but then didn't set up a competent judicial branch. He also, as most accidental dictators do, didn't delegate any wisdom or checks and balances.
So you have the phenomenon of some of the best, most fruitful, most dazzling and most perceptive writers quitting in disgust, because they're being censored by roving gangs of immature and adolescent ideologues, of all stripes.
You get the impression that Markos thought that there would be some sort of automatic weeding process going on, that the ability to remove comments from view would be enough, and that wiser heads would prevail. He didn't have enough wisdom to understand, from his personal experience, that if you give the politically correct gangbangers a way to game the system, they will, and then the bad ideas drive out the good ones, a process that I would say has already begun.
And it's the best ideas, the edgy ones, the lateral thinking that is needed to counter the psychwar experts of the oligarchy, that go first. And the bread fails to rise because the yeast is gone. The wildness, the hybrid vigor, the desire to return to see what's new, all gone.
So the imagineers find greener pasture. And the monoculture trudges on.
I'll once again make the mistake of making comments. I hope that nature of the diary will crash through the PC gates in the minds of the trollgangers. We shall see. I'm expecting subtlety. I should know better.