Previously:
Part I — Weaponizing "Fake News": What It Means, How To Avoid Writing It, And How To Respond to it. (If you haven’t read this, I recommend you do; there’s a lot of background information there that is not repeated here.)
The Problem
We build our reputations one person, one transaction, at a time. It’s a testament to human nature that, while a good reputation can be destroyed in a moment, negative rumors persist forever — or so it seems. A political website always has had multiple reputations; Ideological, eccentric, user-friendly, economically sound, stable, etc., depending on the people doing the looking.
And now there’s a new one: friendly or unfriendly to Fake News. Likely to contain it, or promote it, or generate it — or not. There’s a new set of filters online in the last couple of years that can make or break a site by cutting its traffic, and it has nothing to do with our old bugaboos of language and content, but only with how well we deal with Fake News, or how we are perceived as dealing with it.
Which brings me to a long term irritation that has finally become a real problem in this context. In My Not So Humble Opinion.
“Daily Kos used to be a really great site when I first joined.”
Followed by a long list of perceived negative changes, caused by, well, stuff.
The really, really interesting part of this is that it doesn’t matter when the user joined; 2003, 2008, 2012, 2015 — It was a great site, and it’s now become someplace that is a travesty of a working political site, because kos, because moderation, because the best writers have left, because it’s not where it used to be ideologically, because they’re bought by elitist neo-liberal corporatists, because reasons.
And if you strip off all the “reasons,” you get the picture of someone who walked into the site and was dazzled by the writers, the subjects, the freedom to argue — and a dozen or a hundred other things that this site has in profusion — and who got used to being here, even comfortable with it, and just little bored. Where, they say, are the Giants who used to walk the Earth when Humankind was Younger.
They do not want to leave, one understands, they simply want their Glory Days back. The possibility that the site is pretty much where it was, and they’ve gotten used to it, is never considered. Because if it were the changes in themselves which caused the problem, it would be up to them to work out a solution.
(I note that the vast majority of those users who stick around without deciding everything has gone to hell have figured that out and set new objectives for themselves.)
And so we have perhaps one or two percent of the regularly posting members of Daily Kos who regularly insult the site, moderation, community, administration, staff, kos and who or whatever else they can come up with, because the site no longer satisfies their needs. They don’t want to leave, they just want the original high back.
Because kos has a strange sense of humor, and enjoys gathering up insults and putting them in frames and hanging them on the walls…
… this pattern of insults has not been a major problem up to now. Now, however, we have the situation that each of these insults can be a knock on the reputation and integrity of the site and its handling of political news, and, unless very carefully worded, can be taken as an accusation of support, by the site, for fake news; both for generating it and for publishing it from other sources. It also generally comes under the heading of CT about the site, and thus is likely to be judged as fake news itself.
;-)
So, for all you wonderful people who’ve been putting down kos and the site without consequence for months or years now, you’d probably better decide whether you want to stop or amend the practice, or quit the site. Because it seems as though those are going to be your options.
/end mini-rant
Note: This is my personal interpretation of how the changes in the Rules of the Road will need to be handled. I’ve had no input from administration, and am putting the whole thing together from a) the written changes in the Rules, and b) the modifications admin has done to three or four diaries in the past few days. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong and suggest a better interpretation. (Politely, if you would.)
More to come:
“Fake News” — Part III: Site Credibility; What difference it makes; Techniques for building and sustaining it
This is from a suggestion in the comments in Part I, and I am still putting the concept together; again, discussion will be open for suggesting ways to make it easier to accomplish. If you have input as to what additional topics I might want to look at either for this next diary or for more in the series, the comments are open.
1. Change to the Rules of the Road:
DO NOT Post “Fake News”: An especially dangerous type of CT, “Fake News” presents a threat not only to the site’s reputation but to political discourse in general. If a claim seems especially exciting or surprising, take a moment to verify it before posting it, even if it fits a left-wing narrative. Fake news of any persuasion is prohibited on Daily Kos. Posting stories judged to be Fake News can not only lead to the removal of the story from the site, but also to banning of the poster’s account.
2. Kos original diary on the new filters: Meta: Community content disclaimer explanation