The beta site is here.
My original post on the philosophical underpinnings of DK4 is here.
Sardonyx used his Top Comments diary to put together a series on changes at DK4.
PDNC gives everyone a great overview of the new tag system.
mdsmile notes that on DK4, you have a broader content options to choose from.
Nurse Kelley thinks we're not doing enough for community.
Community
What is community? It's the ability of like-minded people to gather to discuss or participate in group activities. That's what Daily Kos allows, for (mostly) American progressive. The point I realized this was more than just a political site and a true community was when non-political sub-communities began to organize on the site -- like the gardening folks, the quilt makers, the book groups, meatless Mondays, the Haiti shelter boxes, the pooty crowd, and so on. Sure, their progressive ideals permeate their work, but broadly speaking, their topics aren't political.
Daily Kos was never a good place to organize those communities, but they organized anyway. And I've long pined to offer the tools that will allow this community to continue flourishing.
DK4 is the culmination of those desires. The Groups functionality will allow our cherished sub-communities to create their own group blogs, modelled after the Daily Kos front page. Everything the Daily Kos editors can do to manage content on the front page of this site, so can group admins. In fact, the front page of DK4 is just a group blog (but one that happens to live on the front page of the site).
We expect all our existing sub-communities to make the jump (many are already testing the functionality over at DK4, like OND, Top Comments, and SF Kossacks). We expect even more new ones to emerge given the cool tools.
Furthermore, if community is fueled by finding like-minded folks to connect with (and it is), then the tags will provide ample kindling. You interested in finding the best writers focusing on your interests? Follow those tags. You will soon find new writers and new sub-topics that you might've missed in a less robust site (like this one).
If there's something that DK4 WON'T lack, it's community.
The new site will do X! No it'll do Y!
One of the problems of the unknown is that everyone thinks they know what'll happen. For example, the CW among DK4's fiercest critics is that unlimited diaries will encourage people to write shorter, less thoughtful diaries. But others, like thereisnospoon, disagrees, arguing that it'll lead to longer, more thoughtful and well-researched posts.
I don't bring this up to discuss the merits of those specific criticism (we'll find out who's right after DK4 has been running for a few months), but to echo a point I made in spoon's diary:
You think diarists will not write "serious" stuff, spoon thinks people will ONLY write serious diaries. And I'm supposed to create a structure that makes both of you happy, when you can't even agree on what the new structure does?
I'm confident in my ability to build and support community. Few people have done as well as me. I've got two big successful communities under my belt -- which is two more than most people have, and have done so with no real money. (SB Nation got funded AFTER we proved my ability to build community with zero cash.)
I know everyone thinks they know best, but you guys don't have access to the data I have. You guys are the players in the field, I'm the coach. You're the musicians in the pit, I'm the conductor. Your vantage point is limited by the fact that you're in the middle of the action. I can view it from the sidelines, with the help of more data than you could imagine. And I have a good intuitive sense of what'll work and what won't work.
And I'm also good at pulling the plug on an idea if it fails to get traction, so if something isn't working properly in support of my Four Goals of DK4, then I'll adjust quickly.
With hundreds of thousands of regular opinionated users, it's literally impossible for me to craft something that would make everyone happy. Like I say above, people can't even agree on what the new features will do, much less what they should look like. That's why I'd be incapable of doing my job unless I could trust my instincts and experience doing this kind of thing.
We've featured an extended open beta for a reason -- to see my theories under some user load. Already, user feedback has led to numerous tweaks to the platform, and more are on the to-do list. I'm happy to modify based on good-faith feedback that makes actual sense. And we've received a ton of that. But the broader structure of the new site is pretty solidly in place -- the tags, the groups, the story stream, etc. At this point, we're tweaking his grand new vision of mine, not redefining it.
The new site is like Facebook! No, it's like Twitter!
First of all, Facebook and Twitter are two VERY different types of sites. That people think DK4 is like one or the other is pretty much evidence that it's not like either.
No one who uses Facebook (or Twitter), and then spends any appreciable time at DK4, would think to compare them to each other. Not even close. Unless the comparison stays at "they are websites".
Accessibility
There's been some concern about accessibility issues and the new site. In a KosAbility diary discussing the issue, Elfling, who is project managing DK4, explained the challenges:
Accessibility means different things to many people. To some people, it is the ability to have reader software understand the page. To some people, it is usability over a modem. To some people, it is red-green issues. To some, it is captioning on video and audio content. To some, it is compatibility with alternate style sheets. To some, it is the ability to connect with 15 year old software and hardware. To some, it is the need for large buttons and links to allow them a large enough target area to click. To some, it is the ability to read everything enlarged on a large screen. To some, it is the ability to read everything tiny on a small screen.
And meanwhile, the whole of the web expects every site to feel like a 3-D adventure in Wonderland. Web technology as a whole is terrible about accessibility considerations.
We have done our best to follow standard guidelines and we have also been soliciting feedback from a wide range of people. We have made changes when people have given persuasive feedback. We're well aware that we have a substantial 50+ demographic.
I appreciate your purpose in this diary, and of course I am here collecting suggestions. I also appreciate the many suggestions people make for third party tools that can allow people with special needs to customize their style sheets or otherwise adapt their browser to help them have a better experience.
We can't possibly make the layout perfect for everyone. What we can do is to put in the pieces to be as compatible as possible so that people can get the experience they need when they want to use the add-on tools. Most of us will never experience the site via reader software, but it still needs to work for those users who do.
In addition, I would point out that RSS feeds are available in the simplest possible layout, which can be helpful for those who need an experience that is as light on formatting as possible.
We'll do what we can, of course, but we can't account for every single accessibility issue that everyone may have. But after hearing some of these issues, I decided to try and run this site and DK4 through a couple of online accessibility evaluators. Now this isn't particularly my area of greatest expertise, so if there are better online evaluators or tools we can use to check our code and whatnot, please share them in the comments.
The first I used was the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. According to this tool, DK4 is more accessible than DK3. So that's good. I also found a tool that checks on colors, given some complaints about the color palette at DK4: AccessColor:
AccessColor tests the color contrast and color brightness between the foreground and background of all elements in the DOM to make sure that the contrast is high enough for people with visual impairments.
I ran both sites through the tool, and it turns out that while DK3 failed, DK4 passed with flying colors:
The AccessColor results show that for this page, both color difference and color brightness meet the recommended standard.
(Bolding in the original text.)
None of this should be surprising. The firm that designed DK4 is Happy Cog, likely the best design shop in the country. It's certainly among the most decorated, and it has literally written the book on various web design technologies while driving the establishment of web standards (what allows us to see the same thing on differently branded browsers). And key in their design work is meeting all accessibility web standards. Their online magazine also features a great deal of material on accessibility issues. Turns out, accessibility issues have been at the forefront of the development of DK4.
The transition
We're going to have to be down for nearly a day to transition to the new site. That includes dumping the entire existing database and then slapping it on the new site. Given we host about a half million comments per month (in addition to diaries, recommends, hotlists, etc), and have been around in Scoop format since 2003, well, that's a whole lot of stuff that's being moved over.
So rather than do that mid-week, which is what we'd need if we were going for a February 1 transition date, we'll do it the weekend after. So probably start on Friday February 4, and hopefully being officially transitioned by the end of Saturday, February 5.