Lifting the veil, a bit

Note -- this is long and boring meta. Some people love it, others hate it. But there's one thing I want to make sure doesn't get lost in all the meta --

Users can now set up their own personal blogrolls. Go to your user page and click on the "Blogroll" tab. That blogroll shows up on your user home page and on your diaries. Now everyone can be a gatekeeper!

We'll be doing some cool stuff with those blogrolls, so stay tuned.

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Here's a secret -- I love meta. So many people hate it, and this latest bout has been particularly nasty and really quite tedious, but meta is to blogs as philosophy is to life -- it's the examination of why we do what we do, and what we should do about it.

So every couple of days I search the tag "meta" and see what meta people are digging up. It's been hugely helpful as I establish the guidelines that keep this place moving.

Now I will take a moment to give you guys some insight into how I make decisions and my take on a couple of controversial meta topics.

Can't you see your latest move pissed off a bunch of people? Why don't you do something about it?

There are over 100,000 registered users, hundreds of thousands of regular visitors, and not an insignificant number of very opinionated people on the site. If I made decisions based on what would be most popular or make me the best liked I would be a fool. Because no matter how insignificant a move I make, people will be outraged and up in arms. Back in the MovableType days of this site, I changed the color of the titles on posts from black to a dark green, and it spawned a week-long meta war over what a fucking idiot I was for doing that.

If I started caring about what a few people thought about any of my moves, I would go insane. There are just too many people to try and please them all. It's not possible to do so. So I don't even try.

So what's your motivation in making decisions?

To promote people-powered politics.

Yeah, some may think that's a buzzword or whatever, but I believe in it very strongly. That doesn't mean "empowering certain individuals", that means creating an atmosphere where innovative and entrepreneurial activists have the ability to distribute their work to the larger masses. The diaries are very effective tool for those efforts, as are the bolstered (and very expensive) new commenting software, as are my new fellowships, as is every decision that we're making in spec'ing out the next generation software that will power this site.

How did retooling your blogroll accomplish that? You just "pulled up the ladder" on small blogs!

To me, that's a slap in the face of every new blog that was added. Rather than celebrate the fact that a whole new generation of blogs gets a little recognition, some (and that doesn't include most bloggers pulled from the blogroll) apparently had a bizarre sense of entitlement. Everything in a blog is in constant motion. Nothing is static. That's the beauty of the medium. And now the blogroll will reflect that spirit -- constantly evolving as the blogosphere itself changes.

So why don't you make the blogroll larger?

The more sites a blogger ads to his or her blogroll, the less value those individual links have. If you want to get noticed, it's better to be in a small group than in a large pack. So I will keep my blogroll short. Now, lots and lots of great new blogs were being shut out of my blogroll because of the old ones hogging those slots. I basically decided that I wouldn't do that any more. It wasn't a matter of lifting up the ladder, but of passing it on to a new generation of bloggers.

And it's not as if Daily Kos doesn't have plenty of other ways (and more effective ways at that) to promote other blogs -- comment sig files being the most prominent of those. In fact, I challenge anyone to take a look at the traffic stats of blogs no longer on the bloggroll and find the so-called traffic decline.

If a blogger can't get visitors to return to their sites, the problem isn't lack of a blogroll link.

Don't you have a responsibility as a big site to help other blogs get attention?

No. I don't. Just like no one else has any responsibility to help Daily Kos. Think about it -- with tens of thousands (if not more) liberal blogs out there, there's no way I (or anyone else) could possibly do justice to the medium. Any attempt to put together a "best of the web" list would by default insult a great number of great bloggers. So rather than try the impossible, I'll focus on the sites that I'm currently focused on.

But that doesn't mean the rest of the blogs are SOL. And here's where people-power comes in -- people must take the responsibility of promoting their own sites and those of their favorite bloggers. The best tool, by far, to promote individual blogs is to include a link to your blog on your sig file. That's allowed and encouraged. Daily Kos now features individual blogrolls on every user page and their diary pages as well.

Go to your user page and click on the "blogroll" tab. You can now set up your own blogroll as well. You don't need me to be a gatekeeper. Promote the sites you like. I'll promote the ones I think are topical and relevant to what is my personal passion (winning elections). You guys promote whichever sites you like. It's a win-win, except for those who think I should be their personal marketing machines. And to those, I can only shrug my shoulders.

If people don't like it, they should just leave, right? Isn't it your blog?

I find it hilarious when people suggest that this isn't my blog. It is. And yes, the community makes this place what it is, which is why this site kicks ass. But there are a lot of individuals and even small cliques that believe they are essential to this site's continued success. They mistake themselves for the broader community. To me, that is the height of arrogance. Just like no single individual made this place what it is (not even me), no single individual is essential to the site's continued success (not even me). Yeah, I can pull the plug, but aside from that extreme, I could disappear tomorrow for a long time and as long as I paid the bills and had a team keeping the plumbing operational, this place would generally keep chugging along.

But I also don't like the notion that I or the site can't be criticized because it's "mine". I can handle the criticism, people. Trust me. I've developed teflon skin. If the criticism is stupid, I shrug it off. If it's insightful, I file it away as something to address when the opportunity arises. In either case, I generally don't think harm is done in meta critiques of the site. I and the site are much stronger for it.

But if people hate it here so much, why don't they leave?

I don't know. It's a big internet, and there are a million sites that would kill for the extra traffic. Daily Kos isn't meant to be all things to all people, and it never will be. So if this site doesn't meet someone's expectations, there is a site out there that will. That's not a bad thing. It's part of the beauty of this medium.

I'm not sure why so many people have a problem with that simple notion.

Aren't you just running this site as a business? Is the bottom line your first priority?

Sure, it's a "business". But the Daily Kos of today is the same Daily Kos of four years ago when I had no money or expectation that any blogger would ever make more than beer money. Sure, the bells and whistles are nicer, and I can now make a full-time living off this, but I'm under no "bottom line" pressure. In fact, I'm now spending money on hiring a cadre of "fellows" to do their own activism.

In other words, I'm paying people to do shit that has nothing to do with Daily Kos. Instead of worrying about the "business" of Daily Kos, I have the resources to help build a few cogs of the new Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.

Why don't you explain your decisions more often?

I like a little ambiguity in the rules. That allows for flexibility in dealing with whatever situations arise and it allows the community to establish its own norms.

And ultimately, I'm a libertarian at heart. I don't like telling people what they can do and more than I like others telling me what I can or can't do. So I'd rather people figure it out for themselves and arrive at community consensus on the various rules. Only in the most extreme of situations do I lay a heavy hand, and I'm happiest when I can avoid those situations.

Aren't you a fake liberal, and really a Reagan Republican?

Obviously.