Today's Daily Kos is not the same as last fall's. People come and go, issues come and go, and the community wanes (some) but mostly waxes, and grows in less easily measured ways.
Although the most accessible and most meaningful descriptions of the current situation come from thoughtful essays such as provided recently by mentaldebris in her OverKos series, I continue to believe in the power of numbers to illuminate the process, and constrain our thinking to match the real situation. To that end, here are some changes I've noted.
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There are more people now who are both writing and recommending diaries than there are only writing. Most of the people who left and didn't come back had never made a single diary recommendation. Almost all those who recommended diaries stayed on.
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For a more detailed explanation see the full diary.
I counted up all the Daily Kos handles that appeared as either a diary author or a recommending reader from the day before the election last November to the end of the year, and did the same thing for the period from the beginning of 2005 to April 5. I kept track of whether each Kosmopolitan posted a diary (writers), recommended a diary (readers), or both. Some people specialize, and some don't. As is turns out, this specialization is one of the main differences over the two periods I looked at.
The graph shows 5 bars, and each bar has three parts. The first bar on the left is the summary of all Kosmopolitans in the last part of 2004. The users who read and recommend but post no diaries are shown on the bottom of each bar, those who do both in the middle, and those who only write diaries on top. In 2004 writers outnumbered readers.
The second bar shows those who stayed, that is I found their name in 2004 and in 2005. The relative size of the reader, reader/writer, and writer contingent seems unchanged, though the numbers in the table below show that it is the readers who were the least likely to depart. This is shown even more clearly in the third bar, which shows that none of the readers or reader/writers from 2004 was lost in 2005, while over 1000 writer only users quit.
The final two bars represent those who joined in 2005, and finally the current (2005) group of users. These two seem quite a bit different from 2004. There is a great increase in Reader/writers, and a very substantial increase in the number of exclusive readers. The exclusive writers is the smallest rather than the largest group, as was the case in 2004.
The graph shows that the growth of dKos in raw numbers of active users was achieved through both substantial retention as well as robust recruitment. It also shows that today's Daily Kos is more interactive. The people who write diaries also read and recommend to a greater degree than in 2004.
Surely these are changes for the better at Daily Kos, representing growth of interaction.
NB: I did my best to ensure these numbers are accurate, but they have not been reviewed independently.