A year ago today -- the day between Lincoln's Birthday and Valentine's Day -- was the first day of DK4. Plenty of you weren't even around then, so I'm going to indulge myself in a little history. For many of us (perhaps among the beta testers, a group to which I arrived late and onto which I landed hard), it was a day of terror -- as opposed to a day of horror. That is, it was the anticipation of calamity rather than its actuality. But calamity did not come.
The launch had been delayed for a week thanks in part to those of us who, towards the end, had been intent on trying to break the site so conclusively, so inarguably, that Markos would be forced to go back on his word to open it up the previous weekend -- going back on his word being something that he does not like to do. One of my desperate arguments a year ago, as I implored Markos to wait, because we didn't want to open on Reagan's birthday (Feb. 6) rather than on or right after Lincoln's. (I was that desperate.)
The real problem, of course, was that despite the long-standing invitation to beta test, we hadn't yet had the flood of users that would provide the necessary stress test. Markos professed that we were OK and that nothing was likely to happen that couldn't be readily fixed; many of us malcontents -- Clem Yeobright and I were among the most obnoxious, if not definitively so -- were convinced that without filing enough weight into the boat before it went onto the water the site would would probably do something seriously and hysterically twisted. Something like ...
this,
or this,
or this:
(This may be the last time I ever post those screen shots, all taken from the beta site for DK4 and none of them edited at all, here. Or, let's face it: it may not. I can be sort of lightly mean sometimes.)
In those days leading up to the intended switch, we worked frantically, until we obtained the above results and (arguably) worse. We won a week's reprieve. And then Markos's gang of merry code warriors -- they fixed it. And a week go today, DK4 floated onto the waters of history relatively well-patched.
Both the wonderful and the sad thing about the advent of DK4 is that it meant the end of DK4 Beta -- and DK4 Beta was a hell of a lot of fun. We had material from there that should never see the light of day -- like, for example, the "compose the most offensive possible hate mail for Markos." Sometimes I think that Markos should open a disposable "carnivale" site every Mardi Gras for a similar blowout.
(But, what happened in DK4 stays in DK4 -- unless I can find the files I saved. They seem to have eaten through part of my hard drive.)
A 1-year anniversary is a good time to review some of the concerns that many of us had, and the hopes that many of us had, to see where we stand.
For me, I approached the advent of DK4 the way many people approach the end of the Mayan calendar -- albeit with somewhat lower stakes. My concern was (and I will defend this to the end) the preservation of site-wide community. At one point, there was concern over the advent of groups (which, I think at the beginning, many of us didn't fully understand, partially because the explanations were a bit fuzzy and partially because we were a bit fuzzy.) Would they create Balkanization of the site? At that point -- after a year of great sturm and drang and the violent meta that derives from it -- it seemed like for Markos that might be a welcome event.
This was not a happy place leading up to February 2011; the meta sliced and contused and sending us to our respective rooms might have seemed like a good idea. But I think that history has shown us that something precious would have been lost -- and so far as I can tell it hasn't been lost. The Rec List and the Recent List remain, for me, the heart of the site -- or rather of the right half of the two parallel sites, placed on the left and the right like the halves of an actual heart -- that comprise Daily Kos. And for all of the insufficiently articulate arguments I tried to make at the time about what the Recent List meant to the site and how the Rec List wasn't really really broken, I can make a stronger argument now simply by pointing to the results and smiling. It works. This is a pretty happy place.
Markos was not at his most diplomatic (and neither were many of us critics of his) in the lead-up to DK4's opening, but I remember that Susan Gardner in particular was very diplomatic, although the occasional comment would be found in corners of the site suggesting that if some of us slipped into just a little harmless coma for a few months while the transition came into effect -- nothing permanently harmful, you understand, just a little distracting from blogging -- she would not be entirely regretful. But Susan G (as I always think of her, just like Joan McCarter is mcjoan and Barbara Morrill is BarbinMD and Kaili Joy Gray is Angry Mouse and DemFromCT is ... well, anyway) -- she said one thing that many of us did not believe, that that I believed somehow turned out to be true: that if we liked the site the way it was, we could pretty much still have it that way. And, for the most part, in many ways, it is.
For my part -- and your comments will, I hope, tell how it looks your part -- it is largely now the same, and the parts that are different are so natural is seems like I must have always had them. The Welcome Back Box, for example: newcomers of the last year, that's new. And yet I find that I use it for navigation continually. The only things I'd change, probably, is to put the list view of diaries there directly and allow us to turn off the display of our groups in the box itself.
That brings us to Groups -- a great, revolutionary idea that, for the most part, I've just not much used. (One exception was at the height of the Wisconsin drama, when Wisconsin was a must-follow tag and Badger State Progressives a must-follow group.) But that's my experience; not yours. If I were active mostly in Milk Men and Women or BlackKos or JTown or Cranky Users, for example, I'd probably have groups as a major part of my DK4 experience.
Part of the reason that I don't use groups much is that I've almost entirely stopped using my Stream. Markos and folks can look up whether it's true of the rest of you statistically, but I'm interested in hearing from my friends here anecdotally -- is this true for you? This is probably stupid because I have follow really wonderful writers -- but I find that the seven tabs (yes, seven) of DKos that I usually keep open in my browser give me enough of a workout even though I may miss the latest from blue aardvark or Pericles. (But one thing that I do on DK4 is sometimes stroll through other people's lists of recommended diaries -- I remember Susan Gardner saying that this had become a favored pastime of hers during beta testing -- to see what has caught the eyes of others. That probably serves much of the same purpose as the stream -- sending me to good reading that I wasn't looking for -- but with more serendipitous discovery. But I'd love to hear how others make good use of their streams.
The List view of my diary is one of those tabs that I leave open all the time. More than Recs, more than Comments, the number of Views has become the standard by which I judge whether a diary -- um, I mean, post -- of mine has been worth the time. If I get 150 views out of something, then I probably shouldn't complain, no matter what the number of comments or recs. For 150 people to look at one's writing -- well, that's pretty amazing, for free. I don't think that that many have read my dissertation.
So I guess I should include some words of apology here. I know that I made the process of leading up to DK4 less pleasant, but it was out of a deep love for this site and a deep respect for what Markos has created (with a little help from the rest of us.) A year after DK4 debuted -- partially because he and Susan G were right and partially because where he was wrong, he pretty much fixed it -- it's still an unparalleled place to be on the internet; it's still the worthy subject of numerous other dissertations by future historians in the years of Bush 2, Obama, and Santorum. (Just kidding about that last one -- wanted to see if you were still reading.) One shot Markos took at me in one comment around the time of the transition was that despite his being a complete misanthropic jerk -- wait, no, I think that that was something I said, not him --the one thing he was truly great at was building communities.
All right, you rotten jerk, you are. Happy birthday to your youngest child. And thanks.