For the majority of newcomers, Daily Kos has a vast repertoire of helpful tips and tricks to make your experience here more rewarding. You can start with this diary, or you can check out this group, both for written help and for the opportunity to partner with an established user while you get your feet wet.
This diary, however, is for the new user who believes they are not a newbie, no matter that they've signed up within the last week, or month. Newbie is only for people just getting their feet wet on the internet, not you, right?
You've had success writing, or cartooning, or running a blog elsewhere, and you know all you need to know about writing an opinion piece (i.e, diary).
Wrong. This site is, among other things, an experiment in Community Moderation. This means that
a) If you haven't taken the time to learn something about the site esoterica, there are a whole lot of irritating people who will come into your diaries and (more or less respectfully) suggest that perhaps what you have just written, or how you have written it, is not entirely up to Community standards. Blow them off, and the next round is much less respectful.
b) We have some really strange standards for polite conversation. Not that they don't get ignored a good part of the time, but we strongly suggest that you establish yourself here and build up some MOJO before you try doing it. These include the following:
1. An outrageous dislike of terms, especially vulgar ones, that are gender-biased. (That's why there's an apology in my sigline.)
2. An over-the-top attitude about racist terms in some contexts. See http://www.dailykos.com/... for an explanation. Warning: This diary is slightly comment heavy and will take quite a while to load. It's one of the few things that a majority of the regular users on Daily Kos have ever signed on to - vehemently.
3. Lots and lots of little niggly rules about what's legitimate and what's not, mostly embodied here.
c) The main tool of Community Moderation, after soft reason fails (or sometimes before), is the Hide Rate, HR, or donut. Assuming that your first comment or so passes muster as not obvious spam or blatant trolling, which will bounce you out of here almost immediately, most new diarists have to work at it to earn multiple pastries on one comment.
Should your diary Tip Jar, or one of your subsequent comments, manage to accumulate two or more HR's without any recommends, two things will happen more or less simultaneously: The pertinent comment will "disappear" from your view (though not from the view of Trusted Users), and you will get a computer generated warning message which needs to be acknowledged before you can post again. Accumulate three or more such comments within a 24 hour period, and an automatic Time Out program kicks in, barring you from interacting onsite for a couple of days. This is supposed to give you time to reflect on what you might have done to cause the HR's to accumulate in the first place. Repeat the mistake, and the next TimeOut is much, much longer.
Let me repeat - this site, aside from having the goal of electing more and better Democrats, is an ongoing experiment in Community Moderation. That means that the rules will not always be up to date, or neatly packaged in a FAQ. Administration, via the Help Desk (link at the top right of the page), can be applied to on an ambiguous point, but in the main they defer to the Community unless it gets overly rambunctious about something. And yes, that happens too.
Just remember, if you're feeling unfairly picked upon, oh previously successful blogger, the likely reason you decided to post here in the first place: 8,882,434 unique visitors per month (as of 12/16). It's one hell of a platform to blog from, if you can manage to get the community to accept you. And that's not that hard, once you accept that you're stuck with having the community peering over your shoulder pretty much all the time.
Additional links for new diarists: http://www.dailykos.com/... and check out nomandates comment here.