I was part of the wave of new users who came here looking for information during the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. You'll still find a bunch of us, hovering in the 60000 to 80000 UID range, people who joined up when the live coverage at CNN updated too slowly or the boards at Nola.com got too explicitly racist to handle.
Daily Kos was not the only site I joined, but it was the only site I stuck with. Over the years, a lot has happened, and despite the occasional political in-fighting this group of people never fails to join together when people are suffering, through more hurricanes, floods, a tsunami, tornadoes, earthquakes, heating shortages, cancer, and through some events I don't want to relive at all. I've gotten to know many of you in person, and to cultivate some of those friendships in real life.
To riff on the state motto of Michigan: if you seek a strong community, look around you.
(More below the fold)
All of this is to say, we don't have to pay attention to Markos' self-described nagathon, and we don't have to subscribe, or buy subscriptions for others. Being a member of this community costs nothing; reading the diaries costs nothing; getting tangled up in the comments while we're supposed to be doing work costs nothing.
...Well, it costs us nothing: it does cost Markos quite a bit, some of which is defrayed by ads, and some of which by subscription. It costs even more when the site grows and the functionality increases. So if you've ever thought about investing the community which has given back so much, now's a good time.
For those of you who are newer to the site, you may not even realize just how much stuff is here. Yes, the Front Page is packed with information, but have you visited dkosopedia, for example? Or any sites in the 'network', like Congress Matters? You can get lost in here for days.
It's not just the election coverage, although that stuff is important, too.
It's also the personal stuff like Got a Grip's "I'm scared. And I'm really f@cking angry" and luckydog's "They Are Not Coming...A Katrina Diary", and two roads' "My July 4th in prison, or what it really takes to be a foster family".
It's also the educational stuff like sricki's "HIV/AIDS and Mental Health: An Overview", sdgeek's series of Immigration Primers, or anything from Unitary Moonbat's long-running History for Kossacks series.
It's also the useful stuff like Seneca Doane's "DKos disaster preparedness primer" or PDNC's "Copyright or Copy Wrong: Posting Pics at Dkos" or any of the diaries with the Action tag that get us off the computer and into direct engagement with change.
I have all these diaries hotlisted, and I still go back from time to time and re-read them. I re-read some of the stuff I've written over the years and sometimes I cringe and sometimes I think, hey, that ain't too bad—and I'm thankful that some readers were there to encourage me in the early going. I remember the first time I had a diary rescued, back in 2006 and when Susan Gardner was doing the whole thing by herself—by October of that year I was part of the recently-formed Rescue team, and I've tried to pass on some of that encouragement to new writers.
It's been a long six years, and some of my favorite users are no longer blogging here, and that's okay too. Communities grow and change, people come and go. If I've learned anything from years doing Diary Rescue and the new Community Spotlight box, it's that this community continually renews itself, and the next generation of writers is right around the corner to take up the next cause and to sustain the sense of camaraderie that kept me coming back. I miss some old friends, I treasure the ones who are still here, and I look forward to the opportunity to make new ones.
Why subscribe? Because it's another way of giving back to this community, either for yourself or for another user who may just need a little Holiday uplift.
We're all in this together, and this is one good way of showing it.
You can buy a subscription for yourself or a friend on our subscription page. If you would like to make a donation to the site, you can do so on our donations page.
Mon Dec 12, 2011 at 11:44 PM PT: By the way, a warm thank you to the person who sent me an anonymous subscription. I'll be paying it forward to another user.