Don't get me wrong, I loves me some DailyKos. If you know how to use it, it's easily the most powerful liberal news aggregator out there. In a lot of ways it's like a drug to a chronic reader like me. I've learned about peak oil, constitutional law, how congress really works, how to boom spilled petroleum and so much more.
I also grok that I'm not exactly a poster child for the average user around here. For one thing, the approval of anonymous people over the internet doesn't appeal to me. For another, I do conflict resolution as my day job, so dealing with digital pie fights in the comments ranks somewhere in the area of digging out an ingrown toenail.
Moreover, my experiences make me a different kind of liberal. For example, I happen to think that a progressive tax is probably just as bad as a regressive tax because any system built around exceptions and loopholes ends up being exploited. I think we should stop pretending we have anything helpful to say in the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. I'm an incrementalist. I believe that we pay too much attention to what's going on in Washington and not enough to our neighborhoods.
So imagine my surprise when I see the little "1 new message" thing at the top of my screen and I open it to discover that I am suddenly a "trusted user" with four mojo. Now, I get that this is a byproduct of a computer algorithm - most likely a combination of the fact that I've created a few diaries, recommended a bunch more and been around for a while. None of that makes me inhuman, though. Despite the fact that I had done very little to earn it, that little TU button made me happy and proud. I'm one of the "cool kids" now, no matter how depreciated it might be.
Edit: I always thought it was "Fields".