I was reading ImpeachKingBushII's diary about how sick he is today, and read through the couple hundred comments extant at the time.
What a nice experience! I recommend y'all do the same, those of you who give a damn about this place and aren't just here to stir things up.
My diary is entitled "why here?" and what I'm asking and maybe trying to answer, is how did we all get here, why here? Why does this work?
Because it does work; I romp around here for hours on end many days, and I get more fascinated all the time by how it does work. Sure, it's not a democracy - nobody every suggested it was one - but it surely is a community.
I've never been involved with a community before that comprised so many people who were so willing, and even happy, to just jump up out of the woodwork and get to work, when it was clear what needed to be done. Poor ImpeachBushII, with all of his internal bleeding, got a sendout of high-end comments like I've rarely seen here (and we all of course hope his guts heal up soon and that he will be with us for some more years!)
I think a lot of why this works is that there are so many of us. I have fished around in smaller blogs modeled on this one, and not been happy. They have all been nice blogs, but they are sort of like little dinner parties where you have to be tight with everyone there, to have a good time. Daily Kos is more like some huge garden party thrown at a mansion with huge grounds and lots of rooms, where you can drift off when you don't like the conversation, and even get all giggly up in one of the bedrooms - if you're willing to take the risk that somebody might cruise up the stairs and open the door.
That's really attractive. Most people just love a party. But what about all those small blogs? What's up with them?
Partly they are spinoffs from here; people who decided they needed to do their own thing for one reason or another, or who got thrown out. We hear about them here now and then, on the comment threads of meta diaries (which often run to Daily Kos history). They are like expatriates of Daily Kos, these people.
But, they have been banned, and the latest blog rule notification is that they don't get to come back. Meteor Blades put that in his latest Listening Post diary. He noted that this rule was likely to garner some conversation.
This diary was about trolls, and how to deal with trolls, and about "what is a troll?" Hell of a thing to take on, this discussion. What I liked about it was all the stuff about how trolls are people who are fishing, just fishing. Sending out their lines. Looking to confuse people; looking to disrupt conversations.
I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that not every banned Kossack was a troll. I've seen trolls..I've gotten into it with them at times. The ones who work up arguments leading to bigotry, especially push my buttons. And then there's the science deniers.
Oh, and CT; yeah.
This is a pretty complicated set of circumstances to arise on a blog. Okay; we are a Democratic blog. Are we a liberal blog? A leftist blog? An environmentalist blog?
We know where we are, and lots of us know each other to some extent - but do we know what we are?
What are we?