This is just my two cents, and I totally appreciate and respect that your coins may look very different. My spiel isn’t directed at anyone in particular and isn’t a result of any posting in particular.
Daily Kos (sometimes oddly referred to by outsiders as The Daily Kos) has been around for quite a long time. Politics, pooties, pie fights, petitions, poblanos…..
Since 1735, or whenever it was I joined, the nature of shared things on the internet has changed a lot. There was no Twitter or Instagram then. I’m not even sure whether there was YouTube. But our diary structure has remained one-size-fits-all, and I think it might be appropriate to amend that somewhat, to make the site experience better.
Daily Kos has a strong community aspect. It’s not just a cesspool of anonymous bozo commenters, which far too many places are, and I am very thankful for that. There are a number of commenters here whose opinions matter to me, for many reasons. In communities like this, we want to share things we find. Sometimes that is a news article, sometimes a tweet, sometimes a meme, sometimes an image, whatever it is. I think it would be great if there were a mechanism that allowed us to do that, but separate from the diaries lists.
I like to read funny or thought-provoking tweets as much as anyone, but I wish there were a way to post things like that without taking up space on the diaries list. You may differ from me, but I think it’s unfortunate to see a diary with a single tweet pasted into it with no commentary, and then even more so to see that get hundreds of recommends and eat up a space on the rec list. I don’t blame people at all for posting them or recommending them; they do that because there’s really no other good mechanism to do it. It means there’s clearly a need for this function, but I think it could be made much better.
What I would like to see is a separate list (or even lists) of, say, the Top 20 tweets and the Top 20 news articles. (And you could also imagine perhaps Top 20 videos, Top 20 memes/images, etc.) Each would look like a rec list, you know, with TITLE, submitted by USER. I think that would open up some really fun and informative reading and viewing. If I felt like checking out some catchy bits, I might go to the top tweets list. If I wanted more substantive reading, then I’d go to the top articles. All of that filtered through the DK sensibility. And of course there’d still be the usual diaries. All these types of entries would still have a button to recommend, and each would still have a space for comments, so you don’t lose any discussion, which is often an important part of these things. Live blogs and other things that invite discussion would just stay as diaries. Those can be tremendously fun.
I totally get the allure of seeing a breaking news article and wanting to be the first to get it up there because hey, somebody has to. Shouldn’t people see this?? But I’ve always felt that diaries ought to have some original content, because I don’t think we want to turn into just another Twitter mirror or be Google News. If I find a funny or informative clip that I think is worthy of sharing, I find myself either not doing it or waiting for a late-night open thread or perhaps a diary it would fit into as a comment because I feel bad for taking up space on the diaries list. Diaries can whizz by pretty quickly, especially during the day (even front-page ones).
One odd side note is that if I try to submit more than one diary in a day (which I think I have actually attempted only once in the last 5 years), I get a “Whoa there, cowboy!” warning that says I’m not allowed to, even though I’ve seen instances where someone literally posts 4 diaries over a span of 2 minutes, and that puzzles me.
While I’m here, I think it would be good for front-page diaries to be collected in some way so that they don’t just fly off the page. I end up missing a lot that way. I don’t have single staff members I necessarily want to follow, but it’s not easy to get a survey of content (unless I didn’t get the memo on something). It would be cool if Daily Kos had a newspaperish front page format as an option, so that you could see a number of recent front-page diaries in one place. You could even have staff members’ recent diaries summarized something like this:
One other quick thing — could we allow diary images to be wider?? Couldn’t we choose an image width like we used to be able to do? Why are images restricted to being even narrower than the text? Couldn’t they at least be the same width as the text, as a maximum?
Before I devolve completely into Ulysses meets The Sound and the Fury, that’s enough out of me already. I’d like to hear your meta-thoughts, too. We don’t seem to do the meta thing as much as we used to (oh crikey, now it’s meta-meta). I’m sure there must be some things you’d like to see (or not see) here, too…...