How Many TUs are there? 8394 as of today, approximately.
Trools: Your Thursday Headquarters. At the Intersection of the Trolls and the Rules.
A Better Life.
Better Government.
More and Better Democrats.
More and Better Democratic Politicians.
More and Better Democratic Office Holders enacting better policies.
These goals are why we are here and they seem to imply
More and Better KOSsacks.
Where do they come from? They either follow a link from somewhere else or they hear about us on the news or a friend clues them in. They arrive knowing nothing about our mores and many make mistakes. Please be nice and don't let it get personal. Sometimes it's a troll but more often than not it's someone having a bad day or has made an error in cognition. Sometimes a little bit of education goes a long way.
Remember the goal: More and Better KOSsacks.
Most who would join us have already heard of us. We're not a viral meme anymore. Be nice to strangers and be nice to those having a bad day. Help guide the lost back onto the Orange Path. Please?
That being said some are up to no good. People experience conversion of one kind or another, an account gets hijacked, astroturf, ratfuck, psychotic, or Redstate. There it is. Right there in the thread. A troll. Maybe it wrote a diary. How to tell at DK4? More importantly, what to do?
These diaries are about techniques rather than personalities.
The technical means related to catching (or concealing) sock puppets are off limits. Don't give the bad actors any help.
Bold is new this week
Mojo and TUs
Mojo has been recalculated from scratch this weekend. It took three days and I'm not at all sure that it went smoothly but it is what it is. Or at least until it gets changed again. That being said I suspect that it is close enough to what it should be that collecting some stats might be in order.
There are essentially three kinds of readers at DKos. Most readers rarely venture off the front page and are not registered users. One of the site goals is to sign them up and get them writing. I don't have any special insight there.
There is another group, TUs, that does not see the same site that the first group sees. I have been curious for a long time about how many TUs there are and had no way to find out until DK4. Given the obvious issues surrounding Mojo of late which I have written about it made no sense to conduct a laborious investigation. Today I did it. My search was broken down into two parts. First I searched users starting 1 JAN 2009. There were 107,964 of them and I sorted them by mojo from most to least. Fifty per page and click, click, click . . . There are eight defined levels of mojo only seven of which apply to this group.
These numbers are in no way guaranteed to be accurate but I'm pretty sure that they are close and that the first digit is significant. The second is pretty close. There are three sources of inaccuracy. My error is an obvious one, the state of the data changes all the time and I did not get a snapshot, and my browser crashed partway through the 0 Mojo group. My recovery technique is not guaranteed but I'm pretty sure that I got within 2,000 so the second digit is not completely meaningless but if it's off by two or three it is.
My second search was of the users who joined before 1 Jan 2009. This group has an additional level of mojo not available to the later group, ∞. There are 25 such users. Surprisingly kos is not on the list. I have included them among the fives for simplicity.
Mojo: Early Late Total
5: 700 70 770
4: 1,840 181 2,021
3: 5,150 453 5,603 8,394 TUs
2: 28,525 3,335 31,860
1: 499 12 511 40,765 Active Kossacks
0: ? 35,000 ?
Bojo ? 70,000 ?
Several things stand out here. Least important but curious is the seeming shortage of users with one bar of mojo. Bojo is short for Boney Mojo, an expression coined by Bubbanomics, here and many users have that status particularly in latter years. Getting a better number for earlier years is on my list of things to do but not very high. If anyone has such a figure I will add it.
Something that isn't obvious from these numbers is how little it takes to get two bars and keep them. Maybe signing in helps but that wouldn't be obvious to an observer. That being said if you add up all those with mojo higher than zero it comes out to 40,765 Kossacks and Trusted Users total 8,394 which is about twenty percent.
All of us together are not enough to influence the Mayoral election in New York City.
There have been two changes in comment rating policy this week.
The first is that comments more than twenty four hours old cannot be rated anymore unless they are Tip Jars. The theory was that by allowing comments to be rated longer that useful discussions would be extended. It turns out that it also allows several days worth of HRs to be thrown in the same diary.
Diaries live for ten days. It hasn't always been that way but it is now and has been for several years. What that means is that comments may be made and responded to for ten days from publication of the diary. Comments may also be rated during that time unless they are more than twenty four hours old. When the diary closes, that's it, no more rating or responding even to comments only minutes old.
One of the things I've been looking at every day recently is freshly HRed comments in older diaries. There really aren't that many of them and most of them are new comments anyway so I doubt that the change in policy is going to make much of a difference to the way the site functions.
The second change is that HRs are no longer recyclable. They can be retrieved as before but not reused. In a perfect world an HRable comment is unambiguously HRable, is Hred, and is Hidden without any uprates. I am not a believer in piling on and have always retrieved unneeded HRs. On the vast majority of days I go to bed with five available donuts. That won't happen quite as often anymore.
Shills, Trolls, and Pie Fights
We haz them. I mostly stay out of the latter. When I think of trolls I have those who are here only to disrupt in mind. They come in three basic flavors, assholes, True Believers, and Shills.
Here at the DailyKos we're pretty good at sorting out the first group. In the long run they don't really matter. They troll for free and they aren't very good at it.
The second group is trying to make a positive difference. Libertarians, Greens, Naderites, Troofers, Pro-Nuke, Anti-Nuke, Article Five, Israel, Palestine, Obamasux, Obamarox or whatever. They are not all trolls though some clearly are. Many of them are basically on our side and these are some of the more important discussions our society must have going forward. Pie Fight City. Try to keep it civil because one thing that Civil Wars are not is civil.
Then there are the Shills. There aren't very many of them and it is against the rules here to call a particular user out without evidence which there isn't any of. Some have been caught and banned.
Democratic campaign staffers come to mind. Low level dirty tricksters, mostly.
I doubt that I/P lacks for True Believers so paid shills aren't needed.
I'd be pretty surprised if the MIC per se has any employees here.
Ron Paul has True Believers.
The Koch Brothers do not. They have the money and the motivation to be disruptive and they are not likely to hire incompetents. I bet that I'm following some and I bet that some of the 'sleepers' are accounts that have been hijacked. That being said I follow a large number of users for a wide variety of reasons. That I am following someone is not evidence of anything other than my interest. It's a tough problem for our admins because we want to keep out the bad guys but encourage users to return.
That's all I have for today. Please keep it civil.