You always hurt the ones you love.

I'm von, I'm the third poster on the site, and I'm currently consumed by the following question:

What the hell has going on at Daily Kos?

I used to read Daily Kos. He was an insightful commentator on the Iraq war, and it didn't hurt that his politics and mine have certain similarities. But what most impressed me was that his commentators ran the gamut from liberal to conservative, and the resulting debates on his comment boards were sometimes excellent.

Of late, however, Daily Kos has become yet another organ of the Democratic Party. It is now a place where the like-minded gather to chat about like-minded things, or to analyze exactly how stupid the unlike-minded are. Consequently, the unlike-minded seldom go there, and the quality of debate has declined. There's also been an unfortunate political "cleansing" of the blogroll (goodbye, Tacitus).

There's nothing wrong with this, of course. It's Kos's blog, and he can do with it what he wants. Most of his posts are still quite good (this bit of holier-than-thou-ism notwithstanding), and his guest posters can be excellent (Meteor Blades in particular). But I do lament the loss of something special in DKos. It used to contain that rarest of blogosphere attributes: actual, honest, fair-sided debate among all members of the political spectrum. No longer.

I mean not to launch a blog war here.* I write to encourage DKos and other bloggers to do their best to keep their comment boards open to all reasonable people who are willing to reasonably discuss the issues of the day. Particularly with the presidential campaigns heating up, it's good to remember that these are interesting times, and they require interesting debate.

Blogs are our coffee houses, people. Let's keep them open.

von

*But, if you are inclined to respond with tae kwan LGF, please direct it at me (von) and not the other posters.

Comments

[Katherine]

I don't know. Personally I have no problem with left on left and right on right sites as long as there's real discussion instead of just kvetching about the moral bankruptcy of the other side. You can have a better debate with someone who's not too far away from you--my husband, who is closer to my politics than anyone else I know, has done more to change my positions than anyone on the right (usually for the more moderate, he's an economist). I have resolved more than once to never darken the doors of Tacitus again, and that's easily the best of right of center sites IMO. And Kos focuses a lot on Democratic politics; when you're discussing the relative merits of the candidates it doesn't add much to have people come in attacking all of them. The bigger danger for that comments section was turning into a screech fest between Dean and Clark's supporters, and that's abated.

But I never knew the site as anything other than 90% Democratic.

Also, his kid is so damn cute.

(Hey Moe, are we not supposed to curse here?)

[angua]

www.tacitus.org, dude

[von]

www.tacitus.org, dude

Silly, silly me. It's been corrected.

[Ken White]

Von: Go forth and do great things. Do NOT come in fifth but if you find one send it to me.

Good post.

Good luck!

[Court]

It's been like that for a long time now. Unless you count a few posts from Tacitus that were shouted down in seconds flat as open discussion.

dKos is nothing but echo chamber. And every echo gets worse to the point of rooting for terrorism in Iraq.

I have found very few lefty sites out there that have good dialouge. CalPundit's writings are good, but his commentors are getting worse. That's why I like Tacitus' site so much. It has that dialgoue.

[carpeicthus]

Just erased a longer post. Grr. It seems to me to be hard to maintain a balanced board when you get REALLY popular, as Kos's site has. Lefites know they can go there and not see too many opinions that will piss them off on the mane page, so they swarm. It doesn't take many bad apples to scream out the dissenters. Markos used to regulate this and it apparently took a LOT of his time, so he's turned to community self-policing, which may in some ways compound the problem

[carpeicthus]

And a good comment board can make a site much better, but the worst value a comment board can add is none, since it's easy to not read them. If I thought that LGF's main posts were valuable, I'd read it and ignore the teeming mobs.

[James Casey]

Surely it's the same for most [prominent] politblogs, left or right? I can think of ones on both sides where the comments are rabid in the extreme if you disagree.

There are far too many blogs where one only reads the post, and purposely avoids the comments... Tacitus isn't one of those. Nor this, so far.

[Jesurgislac]

We're in an election year. Expect the left-wingers to get more Democrat and the right-wingers to get more Republican in the run-up to the election where we turn out George W. Bush and get someone better.

[spc67]

It really is too bad at Kos. But it's his choice to invoke the thought police and let the inmates run the asylum (sorry, can't think of a third cliche) so I've stopped frequenting his joint. Kevin Drum and Michael Totten are now my places for liberal thought.

[pontificator]

For awhile, the comment boards were quite good as a debate board but, unfortunately, they got taken over by trolls who hurled personal insults, impersonated other posters, and engaged in other anti-social behavior. Kos really had no choice but to change the way things are done there (policxing 400-comment threads is a full-time jpb). It's still anoutstanding site, IMO, but there is less debate.

[Seth]

The disappointment is not so much "Kos is an echo chamber," but "Kos has changed from the way I used to like it." However, I think that the new-style Kos is an interesting new model for the way a weblog can work, and valuable for intra-party debate. It's just that I find intra-party debate a little less interesting than finding out how the other half lives.

[JakeV]

Although I'm not positive, I think Kos may have dropped Tacitus from the blogroll after Tacitus claimed that Kos was anti-American. If that's the case, I can certainly understand why he'd do so.

Anyway, the posts there do tend to be much better than the comments. I think I think blogs with interesting and lively debates in their comments sections (e.g. Tacitus) are pretty few and far between.

Further, the more prominent blogs tend to be the ones with the less interesting comments sections. Perhaps when you reach a certain critical mass of posters (especially if the majority of posters are ideologically similar) debate becomes impractical.

Personally I now go to Kos looking for posts on political strategy, posts by Meteor Blades and baby pictures. I mostly skip the comments section.

[von]

Although I'm not positive, I think Kos may have dropped Tacitus from the blogroll after Tacitus claimed that Kos was anti-American.

Far as I know, Tacitus never called Kos anti-American.