This place is going to hell in a hand-basket. At least, that's the feeling one would get from reading some of the "you people get serious" diaries that arise every now and then.
No doubt, communal self-criticism has its merits. But the bottom-line, sine-qua-non metric for a democratic site, whose purpose is to help elect Democratic candidates, has to be the number of people visiting. Assuming that the vast majority of those aren't trolls, O'reilly spies, or whatever else.
With that in mind, today seems to be a milestone in dkos history. According to the TTLB ecosystem, which ranks and compares various blogs based on their traffic and inbound links, the "daily visits" metric for the Daily Kos passed 1-million today.
TTLB history isn't available beyond the past month, but I visit it every so often, and I suspect that this is probably the first time for this event.
I realize Kos keeps his own metrics, and they may tell a different story in terms of absolute numbers, but the value of this is that it can be compared to metrics for our friends on the right. The highest-trafficked wingnut blog is that of the lovely ("yet completely out of her tiny little mind" ) Ms. Malkin, who comes in at about 17% of the traffic than that of the Great Orange One. [Malkin adjectives updated...ht Korkenzieher]
[An interesting aside is that the righty-blogs wind up hogging the top-ten list when ranked by the "inbound link" metric -- they love to link to each other, but the outside world doesn't seem too interested]
I realize that the average diary spends about 13 seconds on the new diary list these days, that many of them lack substance, and that we are all spending too much time focusing on the horse-race. But the bottom line is that people like the horse-race. If some of thousands of horse-race fans come over here and get a little-more engaged in the life of dKos and the life of our democracy...then that is all the better for the future of progressive politics.