Well it could be.
I thought long and hard about writing this. It's a lot like work for me, yet worse that I won't get paid. Besides, free advice is never appreciated much anyway. Then yesterday, Granny Doc published her diary and Ellinorianne wrote hers and they both, for a period of time, ended up on the rec list.
There are valid arguments in both. The truth here isn't mutually exclusive. My 13 years in the digital channel tells me this. See, it's less about what happens here on the site, and more what happens here that fosters, enables, and encourages off-line behaviors and attitudes.
Both diarists voiced valid needs that this site isn't fully meeting. Needs that allow them to contribute to the site's goals.
Yes, it can be argued that this site cannot be all things to all people; big deal, tough it up and deal with it or leave. I'd argue that posture demonstrates a lack of effort.
I know there are new site features coming soon, and I gladly offer this free advice but by then everything will have changed again.
The point:
The Problem is Congestion
Both of these diaries identify symptoms of an uglier underlying problem.
And maybe it's here where everyone except Kos should stop reading because I'm speaking directly to you.
Or rather, the lack of congestion control. When a farmer puts one cow out in the pasture, she has all she needs to eat. When that farmer put one hundred cows in the pasture, all of them starve.
This lack of control results in the effects already described. Fewer voices are being heard. Influence is tightly held amongst fewer and fewer members. Loss of influence results in people leaving. Attrition is natural, but there are long-time contributors who had important things to say and have left or no longer contribute. Too many important voices get pushed into the nether regions because people are talking about any number of things, both political and otherwise. Trollish diaries hide important things, too. Eight duplicate pseudo-diaries about the same Guardian article and 16 pseudo-diaries expressing outrage at the same Faux News interview dilute important things. Front page stories that duplicate someone's hard worked diary dilute influence, too, particularly when no hat tip is given. Oh, and the 34 Sarah Palin PBS Freep this Poll diaries. No, seriously -- 34, not counting JeffLieber's insightful snark.
Congestion causes this and it needs to be brought under control.
Facebook has 10 million members and doesn't experience this. MySpace has more than 100 million members and doesn't experience this. DKos doesn't need to experience this, either.
My professional experience shows that this always happens on high-traffic blogs. The growing number of people means that early joiners no longer have the share of voice and position of influence they once had. They end up leaving.
So it's important to note here that success will produce counter effects that need to be recognized and dealt with. The resounding success of attracting so many people to join, to be part of what informs and motivates people into action for the cause of electing more and better Democrats will increase the attrition rate and likely outpace new memberships if structural changes aren't made to alleviate congestion. The result of that is obvious: less community influence and less activism. It means less awareness of the issues and people migrating to competing sites. It means fewer page views and loss of advertising revenue to support the goals of the site. It means fewer Democrats regardless of quality.
And congestion is something that needs to be actively managed. Site participation needs to be channeled into productive avenues described by Ellinorianne. Doing so also means that Granny Doc gets the focus she wants on the issues. It also means that more people will be viewing more of the site, increasing overall page views per visitor, and therefore creating leverage to increase ad revenues.
In fact, creating networks of networks, similar to Facebook and MySpace, will further the goals of the site by allowing community members to focus and mobilize at a national, local, or issue level based on their interest. The challenge here is designing the site to leverage the focus and influence that smaller networks offer while maintaining the tide and force that the larger network brings.
Funny thing about the networks, Kos, is that you acknowledged recently that people are already creating networks. In my line of business, when you observe people working around the system to do something they need or want to do, you offer them better ways to accomplish that. Ignoring people's needs will only exacerbate the problems. (Again, I'd link but search isn't giving me the story).
And make no mistake, what we're talking about here is user experience at its most fundamental -- the way in which it directly affects business success or failure. In fact, Kos, you recently acknowledged that user experience is important -- when you chided Microsoft for being too late to the game to be considered hip. If the user experience here becomes indistinguishable from any other progressive blog, then what will bring them back? What will make them join? What will make them stick? (And as an aside, while I'm glad you understand that Mac has an edge in the arena of creating a better user experience than does the PC, I'm telling you as someone who consulted on that Microsoft campaign, it wasn't created it to speak to you, so Im not surprised you missed the point, which is just because you don't use a Mac doesn't mean you don't do important work, too.)
And while you've added features and functionality to the site over the years, it still retains its basic structure. No judgment call on that, though I believe there's a significant opportunity in front of you to truly create something that has the potential for continued and scalable momentum to achieve the goal of electing more and better Democrats -- and that time is now, if not past.
My intent is not to be prescriptive, but to point out the challenge; and while there are different ways to solve the problem, each approach has it's up-sides and down-sides.
Specifically, in an attempt to reduce the negative effects of site congestion:
Create Localized and Issue-Oriented Networks
Support people's desires to focus locally, whether that's by city, state, Congressional district, or school board. Keep the issues-oriented venues including Hell to Pay, IGTNT, and others top-of-mind. Make it easier for What's for Dinner, Ask a Kossak, Paintingpalooza, and Home and Garden Blogging, Hadrian's Forum, among, others, to coexist without nudging issues out of view.
Approaches may include creating a news channel and, during election cycles, an events channel, and enabling people to see topical headline titles within their profile. I'm not suggesting changing the metaphor from a tabloid format as DKos is today to something more profile-centric like Facebook, but it does work.
Reduce the Number of Duplicated Diaries
This isn't hard. Rule number three on the diary page says "No repetitive diaries" and links to the search page. But search sucks. It sucks so much, in fact, that there are instructions on how to use search. In the era of "google it," why would search be so complicated as to need instructions?
With search being so closely tied to a site rule, I would think that search would be supremely capable of helping people adhere to that rule. I'm wrong, obviously. Not only does search break all the rules of known usability principles, but people likely don't use it because 1) it doesn't work, and 2) it isn't integrated into what it's intended to accomplish.
Search, like anything else, cannot be all things to all people. Either make it work for reducing duplicate diaries or not, but if so, then make it only do that. Otherwise, using the free Google search appliance is going to be much better in creating a topical search than anything you can construct on your own.
In fact, in the effort to reduce duplicate diaries, there are better, more user-centered ways of solving this. Tags are already being used, so it's easy to alert someone when they're writing in a manner that, "33 diaries have already been published with the tags: Sarah Palin, PBS, poll. Are you sure you want to continue?"
Make the Profiles More Robust
Allow people to link to friends, channels, topics, and subscriptions within their profile. Encourage enough information to be shared to allow people to connect with other people, because doing so is what will mobilize people offline to achieve the goals of the site. Enable people to invite their friends to join and create personal networks within the larger DKos network. As a site that has mission reliant on offline person-to-person interaction, encouraging this should be intrinsic to the site's structure.
Make Better Use of How People Consume Information
Informed people make different decisions and take different actions than those who are uninformed. The Obama campaign demonstrated a clarity of strategy seldom seen amongst even the smartest and most nimble corporations in its use of web sites, blogs, texting, email campaigns, in-game advertising, video, and real life on-the-ground activity.
Consider the upside to things like email alerts, text messages, Facebook applications (rather than just a group as it is today), gaming, and news feeds. Here I ask, why isn't the original and analytical writing by the front pagers fed to Google News?
Someone, maybe one of the front pagers, recently lauded you for having some sort of instinct for what people wanted -- I'd link to the story but search pretty much sucks -- and I believe that's true in the context of the site goals. But understand that creating a sustainable platform for that is different.
As JeffLieber stated so succinctly, trust the plastic C.