Daily Kos: Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude means deriving satisfaction from the misfortune of others.  And that is what I am going to do here in regard to Daily Kos.

Background: The Betrayal

I was a participant at Daily Kos for 6 years, blogging about all sorts of topics ranging from science to Scotland to, of course, Israel.  Near the end of my time there, there was a dramatic shift in the site, as it started to tolerate blatant antisemitism, ridiculous conspiracy theories, and silly bullying.

It was around then that founder Markos Moulitsas started unfairly banning Jewish members, including, eventually, myself.  Even though it was time for me to leave anyway, the banning stung like the betrayal of an old friend.

I avoided viewing Daily Kos on principle for a long time after that.  However, today curiosity got the better of me and I just had to see what was going on there.  I am happy to report that Daily Kos is a complete shell of its former self.

What I saw today vs. back in the day

Numbers

First of all, it seems that the number of participants has declined dramatically.  I want to emphasize that I visited Daily Kos today at around noon Pacific time (3 pm Eastern), in the middle of the day on a Sunday less than a month before a Presidential election.  This should be an optimal time for Daily Kos traffic.

In the past, diaries on the Daily Kos "Rec List" would always have hundreds - and sometimes approaching two thousand - comments.  This would be the case on weekends and weekdays, early morning and late at night, any time of year.  Today when I looked, every diary on the Rec List save one had well under 100 comments, in some cases under 50, and the one that had more had only around 250.  This alone speaks of a precipitous drop in participation.

For the diaries in the "Recent Diaries" list, in the past almost all diaries would have comments in the double digits and many would have 100 or even more.  Today most diaries had less than 10 comments, with some, even near the bottom of the list, only having one or two, and many under five.  The decline in participation is simply stunning to me.

Campaign Participation

One major metric of success or failure is the participation of Democratic politicians.

Now that it is less than a month from a major election, I get, no exaggeration, around 20 e-mails, 5 phone calls, and several mailings per day asking for contributions.  So if ever there was a time when political campaigns would be posting at Daily Kos, it would be now.

However, today I saw ZERO diaries from political campaigns.  None.  Contrast this with 2008 when there was a constant stream of diaries from Democratic campaigns, often under the name of the politician him or her self.  It is very telling that while campaigns think it is worthwhile to invest in several e-mails and phone calls per day, none of them think it is worth the bother of posting a single Daily Kos diary.

I assume that campaigns have decided that Daily Kos' readership is now too small to be worth the effort.  They may also be wisely avoiding any controversy associated with Daily Kos.  In any case the reversal from several years ago is stunning.

Israel Nonsense

One of the major reasons Daily Kos went off the rails was the fawning approval bestowed on transparent fraud David Harris Gershon, who blogs under the handle "The Troubadour".   In the past, his diaries would always make the Rec List and have hundreds of fawning comments (and some dissenting ones).  Today, a search for his recent diaries revealed that of the 6 that turned up on the first page, only one had over 100 comments, and two had only four and two comments, respectively.  Ouch!

Ironically, the amount of activity surrounding the Israeli-Arab conflict, which Daily Kos calls "I/P" seems to have also declined.  The latest diary from Palestinian activist Sandra Tamari, aka "soysauce", appears to be from several months ago, and she has an NR rating.  Recent diaries from the group Adalah that I looked for have very few comments, often in the single digits.  User Friendlystranger is still there with his half-literate repostings of Al Jazeera youtube videos, always generating less than five comments.

Career Trajectories

Another very interesting metric is whether any Daily Kos bloggers are gaining wider exposure.  I did Google searches for Joan McCarter and Kaili Joy Gray, the two most prominent Daily Kos "front pagers" who use their real names (They also happen to be enamored of ridiculous conspiracy theories in the case of the former, and the person who told me I should be "ashamed" of objecting to such conspiracy theories in the case of the later).  After looking through pages and pages of Google results, I could not find one thing on the internet for either of these two people that was not either somehow related to Daily Kos, their own Twitter feeds, or other small niche blogs.  Not a single newspaper, magazine, or broadcast has picked up their work!  This has to be incredibly frustrating for aspiring political writers.  Several years on the Daily Kos front page now gets you zero exposure.

Conclusion

There was a time in the mid 00s when Markos Moulitsas was something of a player in American politics.  He was a guest on cable news shows, Democratic Senators and Presidential candidates posted on his blog, and he and his site were even a boogeyman for the right wing media.

My how times have changed!  Today seemingly no mainstream Democratic politicians post on Daily Kos.  Its number of participants has declined dramatically.  Markos himself is nowhere to be found in the news and not mentioned, and neither is Daily Kos.  It has even fallen off the radar of right wing media and sites, who do not even consider it worth mentioning - and they'll make a boogeyman out of anything.

Not that Markos is a passive victim of the vicissitudes of fame and the internet.  He absolutely brought all of this decline on himself, by favoring frauds like Gershon and McCarter over real intellects, and by refusing, whether because of agreement or incredible stubbornness, to do anything about hate speech and bullying.

I am reminded of Markos' desperate seeming bid for people to purchase "lifetime memberships" right around the time that I left.  It seems that he saw the writing on the wall, and was trying to cash out as much as he could.  Well, this reversal of fortune could not have happened to a more deserving person!  Daily Kos has become the Myspace of blogs, the thing that used to be big but that is now just a living relic.