I find myself reading fewer and fewer diaries on DK in recent months, and I have finally realized why.
As I scroll through the list of diaries, I find far too much duplication and it’s causing me to not even bother to scroll through everything to look further.
To wit: Today’s appellate court decision denying Trump immunity from prosecution has resulted in five diaries on the subject. I estimate that about 75% to 80% — at a minimum — of the content is duplicative across those five diaries.
I can only guess that there are people so eager to post this kind of news that they cannot be bothered to see if (1) someone already posted; (2) that someone already essentially said everything that the eager beaver was going to; and (3) if their non-duplicated content could make a decent comment on an existing diary.
It also takes less time to post a comment than to write a whole new diary.
I do not know how many other visitors to DK simply read the first diary on a subject and ignore the ones that follow, but I would guess that it’s a fairly high number … which means the duplicative diaries’ authors spent a lot of time for much less attention than they intended.
While I doubt that my little rant is going to change the behavior I have outlined, I can always hope. And if it doesn’t change anything, perhaps in addition to reading fewer diaries I can also visit DK less often.
Now I wonder how many people have been turned off by this duplication and have already started visiting less often ...