There have been many rumblings of late about DKos. Part of it, to me, is that more people are here and tuned into the election right now. Whenever more people enter a community, there's a bit of an adjustment period. Also, we're all reaching fever pitch before the first biggie -- Iowa.
But, be that as it may, there might be some room for improvement around here -- things that will facilitate the dialogue and help people find what it is they want to find.
So, see the below posting and comment on it if you will.
Ideas for Improvements
Categories
The categories feature is already around somewhere. I notice that many of the main page postings are categorized. Allowing users to categorize their diaries would help us find things we're interested in more quickly. Also, it might help keep discussions together. For instance, there could be layers within ratings that would allow for something like "Dean/Articles". This would put all of the Dean newspaper references into one place so people could find them easily and not post the same thing twice.
Plus this would help to resolve the problem that the different time zones read things at different times (duh!). But, what I've noticed (being a late nighter and not working, either) is that folks on the Left Coast might post something late at night. Then, on the East Coast, several people will post the same news the next morning. The discussion gets fragmented and doesn't serve the whole community.
Diary ratings
Someone suggested rating diaries. I think that would be a good idea combined with allowing diary entries to go up or down based on their collective ratings. This would allow the most popular ones to stay at the top so folks could see them and gain from them.
Good post vs. Preferences
It seems to me that we're trying to do two different things with the ratings system. We're trying to root out the trolls or conversely say that this comment really added a lot to a discussion. That's a good thing. But, we're also trying to say: "Me, too. I agree with that statement" or "I think that statement is really lame." I think people are using the ratings for this in order to not pile on with a bunch of "Me,too" postings (which would be tedious, at best).
So, what about two different rating systems. One would be about style/substance and the other would be about agreement/disagreement.
These ideas are not all mine. They are culled from a few diary entries of the past couple of days. For further edification, please go here and here.
The Ask
I have no idea how hard any of this would be to implement (when I directed a Web site, my staff commonly accused me of not knowing diddly about the difficulty of improvements I saw as fairly simple). But, I know Kos is pretty busy these days with the baby and all. So, I thought that if folks were interested in this issue, we might want to, rather than simply complain, offer some help to the Cause (as it were). So, I've put a little poll below to see if folks would like to help out -- something that might help Kos see these improvements as doable (as long as he has no philosophical difference with them).
Thanks. And comment away.