Hello everyone, we are entering our third day of beta for the new Daily Kos. See the list of work we are aware of (as of yesterday) here.
I did want to address the general feedback of, there's a lot of things we used to be able to do and can't, or can't do as well, with the new site. Markos has addressed this previously, but I'm sharing my perspective now because I hear your frustration.
DK5 is a complex piece of custom-built software that was created specifically for this community and evolved over a very long time (ten years? fifteen?). That's years of your requests -- and years of you, the community, becoming familiar with the software's quirks and assumptions. The tech team that created DK5 loved this community and did a great job. As someone who has only been here for two years, I'm still learning about how the site is used by the people who know it best.
The problem with software -- not just DK5, all software -- is entropy. Each new feature, each customization, each decision adds complexity to the code that keeps the site up. And then the people who wrote that piece of code, or who made that decision, find new jobs, and someone new has to come onboard and learn how it all works. Meanwhile, the language the code was written in might become less popular and harder to hire for, or the version it was written in might be deprecated; there might be security holes or performance issues. It degrades over time. Then, adding new features becomes increasingly difficult; you need more (expensive) engineers to keep the whole thing going -- and the complexity problem that you started with becomes more acute with every new feature that's added.
This is the situation Daily Kos was in when I started two years ago.
Doing a full site migration is not a minor undertaking. It's incredibly risky and expensive. We tried to find off-the-shelf software products that could basically do what DK5 could do, but Daily Kos is not a standard media site -- it's a community. There's no other site on the internet that's exactly like it that I know of. So the solutions that were commercially available were a Venn diagram of features -- there was some overlap, but the overlap was not perfect. We had to look at them all in context and ask: which software solution is the closest? Which can we modify? Which are written in languages we can hire for? Which can we afford? Which will allow us to grow in the future?
My hope is that, if we can't deliver every feature that you care about on Day One of the new site, we can deliver the most important ones, and that over the next few months we can build out most of the rest. And that, meanwhile, the members of the community that stick around will learn how the new software works, and its assumptions and workflows, and together we can get to a new, more sustainable community state.
I so appreciate the 300+ of you who have signed up for the beta site and given your feedback. I hope you continue to share what does and doesn't work for you, so that together we can create a new community experience that you love the way you loved DK5 -- or maybe something even better.
Thank you so much for your help and your trust.
