crossposted at MLW.
UPDATE, Sunday, 10:31 AM EST: I have seen a clarification by Hunter over at DKos:
Markos never said everyone would get a warning even in administrative bans. Warnings are what happens when we think someone is just having a bad day, but is almost certainly redeemable.
If people are going to complain about the rules, it’d be great if they at least not freak out over imaginary ones.
by Hunter on Sat Feb 10, 2007 at 10:14:51 PM PST
Thank you for clarifying, Hunter, I understand now – the “new system” as set forth by Kos on Dec 6 really only applies to SOME people. The rules are different depending on who you are. If you’re not a crony of Kos, these new rules don’t apply, except at on alternate Thursdays between 2 and 6 pm.
I apologize for not reading the fine invisible print.
***********
It has come to my attention that some people are unaware of the stated site policy at DKos regarding warnings and bannings.
Now, we have a warning system in place. If someone steps out of bounds (being an asshole in the comments, copyright violation, etc.), an admin can lock down the user’s account. A warning shows up at the top of the page explaining the transgression. The user has to click a button acknowledging he or she has read the warning before being given access to the site.
On our side, we have a record of the warning. There is no set number of warnings before we’d ban an account. That depends on the severity of the transgressions and other such factors. But now we have a much more efficient way to warn people of bad behavior without it being a choice between “do nothing” and “ban”.
I never received any such warning before being banned. Neither have any of the banned people I’ve talked to, and they were all banned after the new policy was supposedly implemented.
The reason I post this here is that I know some commenters here participate over at DKos too, and they should be aware that the DKos administration does not follow their own rules.
For Booman and the readers here: since you are now in the process of retooling your site rules, I would like to suggest that you bear this in mind: rules and procedures that are applied haphazardly or with favoritism have a deleterious effect on the community.
there was no warning.
I am consistently amused by sites where 1) the owner is trying to live by the site and 2) he dumps people who contribute traffic.
Yep, I’m a little ascerbic, and make no excuses for that. And, yes, my opinions are not standard 100 % vanilla liberal. But I thought us commie-lib types were more tolerant? Well, no, I guess that there are some limits.
Well, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke, is my motto.
I left DKos voluntarily not too long ago. I don’t like how the atmosphere has changed there. Too much meta. Too many bannings. And I’m sure you’ve all heard about how Kos thinks most of the people on the site are moronic.
Anyway, my taste for the site turned decidedly sour after Kos invited Warner to YearlyKos. Blech and more blech.
Booman, I love this site. PLEASE don’t start boo-hooing some of the more solid alternative 9.11 conspiracies–I sincerely hope that this site remains a bastion for free thought and expression.
And I’m sure you’ve all heard about how Kos thinks most of the people on the site are moronic.
For once I am inclined to agree with him. this is particularly true of the operative ‘leadership’ including Markos himself. As another poster recently said about the DK business model:
That’s kind of amusing. But I wonder whether it is true, and if it is true, when it will become evident?
There’s an interesting dichotomy in running these sites.
For example, ad rates are based on page views and not visits. BT is once of the stickiest sites around with a very high page view per visit ration. I think that is largely because it is usually a civil and pleasant place to be.
Daily Kos has one of the lowest pvpv ratios largely because it has toom many bullying pricks and inarticulate morons (in the comments). But nothing drives up page views more than a flame war. Flame wars at the site last weekend drove page views up here dramatically. But they also led to several members leaving.
The orange place deliberately allows flamewars, it’s part of their model. I deliberately discourage flamewars and it is part of my model and also just my preference. But both strategies work to drive up ad rates.
And his model seems to be the most successful one out there right now. I wonder if it can remain that way.
Well, you may be right about the flame wars. However, troll ratings are a part of flame wars, and they have the consequence of eliminating customers after a while.
There are disorganized mobs at DKos, and these enforce standards using troll ratings. Although troll ratings are not always given for content, there are times that they are, and this is very problematic.
The gangs enforce standards on 1) immigration 2) gay marriage and 3) impeachment.
And election fraud.
and anything deemed to a conspiracy theory especially 9/11 contrary views, and the view that Michael Schiavo is a saint who may not be criticized, and many other issues.
But I wonder whether it is true, and if it is true, when it will become evident?
It depends what criteria y’all use for success. I think it’s becoming evident already.
Daily Kos has one of the lowest pvpv ratios largely because it has toom many bullying pricks and inarticulate morons (in the comments).
I don’t know what a ‘pvpv ratio is’. I do know that the average visit length there is something like 2 seconds which isn’t adequate for most folks to read the headlines on the FP, much less discover that the ‘leadership’ team are sociopaths. I think that advertisers should be kicking the DK tires a bit more.
pvpv is page view per visit. BT is currently at 3.0. It’s been as high as 4.8.
Daily Kos currently has a pvpv of 1.2.
And yes, average visit length for Daily Kos is two seconds. Average visit length at BT is 3 minutes and 37 seconds.
In other words, a lot of people are going to Kos through google seaches and realizing that it isn’t what they are looking for.
In other words, a lot of people are going to Kos through google seaches and realizing that it isn’t what they are looking for.
That’s certainly one possible explaination; it does not pass my smell test as a plausible explaination for a 2 second average but, then, I don’t buy ads there or advise anyone else to.
.
From memory, I believe it’s a software attribute used by the site to handle the large volume of readers. In fact you are ‘disconnected’ from the website while reading a lengthy diary and ‘reconnected’ when opening another article.
I could stand corrected, but that’s what I recall when the dKos site went ‘down’ due to huge traffic volume. It’s a simple way to have excellent statistics on the number of ‘visits’.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."From memory, I believe it’s a software attribute used by the site to handle the large volume of readers. In fact you are ‘disconnected’ from the website while reading a lengthy diary and ‘reconnected’ when opening another article.
a million thanks, Oui. I’ve been wondering about this for months now and this explaination makes logical sense. Thank you so much.
It’s a simple way to have excellent statistics on the number of ‘visits’.
Indeed. I’ve not discovered another political site with such a short average visit length.
One of the nice things about this site (or also FDL or Digby or Glenn Greenwald….) is that there are well-informed and interesting writers.
There used to be a lot of interesting writers at DKos (one I really enjoyed was Georgia10) but despite the big volume there don’t seem to be many really good diaries there these days (at least that’s my superficial impression). What do other BT members think about this?
Honestly, there are still a lot of good diaries there. It is just that many of them scroll off the screen barely commented on because the new diaries post so fast.
I don’t think it’s so much the flamewars or lack of flamewars that makes the difference, it’s who enforces the rules. I have disagreed with you on a number of things in the past, but you’re unarguably a nice guy who bends over backwards to be fair to everyone. Whereas on DKos, the people enforcing the rules (presumably with Kos’ permission) are the biggest bullying pricks on the site. I think it comes down to the environments thus created, which is why I still read here every day even when I don’t post anything and don’t have DKos bookmarked anymore.
I don’t know whether you saw this diary, but IMO it says it nicely. The thugs may increase the number of views, but they primarily keep the site sufficiently simple and mainstream to be tolerable to Kos’s constituency, those who pay the bills.
As I understand it, pageviews are just that – pageviews, and not individual viewers. So someone who compulsively refreshes the page every second so he can get the jump in a flamewar is boosting the pageview-count considerably, all by himself. If this is true (and those who are better netheads than I, feel free to correct me) then those who are posting nonstop for days and nights on end – and there are more than a few of those on DKos – must therefore be responsible for an astronomical number of pageview-counts.
My taste for the site turned decidedly sour after Kos refused to take seriously the theft of Ohio in 2004. He’s a guy who claims he wants to get Dems elected, but he didn’t come through in the clutch. (I still post there once in a while and I haven’t even been banned though….)
Same here. That, and this diary:
In this diary, Kos said that Bush has no leverage over Israel to get it to stop bombing Lebanon. It was at this point that I realized that Kos is either a coward, an amoral opportunist, an idiot, or some combination of the three.
Agree. But there are other possibilities. How can you run the largest political blog in the world and refuse to talk about the largest political issue in the world?
The more I think about it, I think you did an excellent job with your three descriptors. My thoughts keep converging on variations of “amoral opportunist.”
Gosh this country is dying for lack of leadership.
Thank you. I was pleased with those three descriptors, too. At the time the assault on Lebanon was going on, I was thinking only in terms of two, coward (i.e., afraid of the Lobby) and idiot. The third possibility occurred to me as a result of the resent posts at BT about Kos’s business model.
That can be said for every country I try to keep track of: Britain, Germany, Japan. Why do you think this is?
I watched Chris Hedge’s appearance on the Colbert Report tonight. I also listened to the start of his interview with thruthdig. Hedges is obviously very passionate. He impresses me because he worked for the New York Times, but is now adopting very principled stances, and writing very politically relevant books he deeply believes in. He went to Harvard Divinity School.
Why are there not more like him? Why, as you say, is there such a lack of leadership? That Hedge attended a divinity school, and that he does take a moral stand, suggests to me that a possible explanation is the turning for liberals of religion into a purely private matter. Perhaps the West has not been as successful at making morality a working concern, once morality had been separated from its religious underpinnings, as we had thought.
That is a beautiful thought. I hope you can share it with many.
[just wrote a lot and deleted it–time for me to go to bed!]
Kos is either full of shit or an incredibly naive man. Full of shit is probably closer to the truth.
Daily Kos has been infiltrated by hasbara (propaganda) trolls from the GIYUS and Israel Project propaganda efforts, and are clearly seen daily on Daily Kos attempting to hijack diaries and slam anyone who does not toe the right wing proIsrael government line, the Likudniks, who lie to coverup the screwing of the Palestinians. They have the upper hand.
Kos knows it but chooses to pretend otherwise. He is afraid to deal with it.
If you read what he writes it is obvious he doesn’t understand politics anywhere near as well as he thinks he does.
I think the ban on 9/11 conspiracy talk at Kos is eminently sensible and mature. Crooks and Liars also imposes this ban as well. Those who want to have 9/11 con-discussions have millions of places to do this. So go to those places and discuss it all you want. That’s the beauty of the web.
Not all conversation topics are appropriate for all venues — and the site owner has the last say on what is discussed and what isn’t. Pretty simple, fair and direct, I think.
Cheers.
.
Censorship is THE weapon of dictatorship. How about letting the dKos community judge on diaries by comments and recommendations. Last say of ‘site owner’ is such bull, Kos has the mighty weapon of the PEN by writing opeds. But he has his roving agents running loose on the site te make judgments, troll rate and ban writers.
Not all conversation topics are appropriate for all venues — and the site owner has the last say on what is discussed and what isn’t. Pretty simple, fair and direct, I think.
A pretty right wing statement for a liberal blog!
Looking back with 20/20 vision: proud to have been banned thrice from dKos.
Banned as creve coeur – oui – new creve coeur – … (anonymous), thus 4 times in all.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Being banned under 3 IDs means Kos gets to count you 3 times when he brags about how many members he has. 🙂 One of the things that pisses me off is that they count userIDs to cite how many members of the community they have even though they have banned hundreds of those and driven off tens of thousands more with their heavy handedness.
I really don’t think dKos will survive at it’s present size and importance through the 2008 elections. An implosion is coming during the primaries if they continue their current practices. I know I was stunned at the way I was treated the first time I disagreed with the groupthink (Armando has a do-absolutely-anything-to-win philosophy on elections that I think is disgusting and immoral). That type of conflict is going to explode as people push their different candidates.
Except I was banned under different names…
But I ain’t tellin’….
Three times, once for my opinion on illegal immigration, once due to gay marriage, once due to impeachment…
In all three cases, due to content…
How do you know why though? my understanding was they just lock you out of your account with no explanation.
Well, as I said over on MLW, I never had any problem with the “conspiracy theory” bannings. In theory (!) the rule made sense. And it’s Kos’s site, so if he decides he doesn’t want anyone to ever mention certain topics, say, Anna Nicole Smith, then fine, that’s the rule.
But if you’re going to have rules, then they MUST be applied to everyone in the same way. This is where Kos, and by extension DKos, falls down. The rules are used selectively, as a tool to punish and get rid of people they don’t like. Note the contrast in these two cases:
This comment by MissLaura, directed at Booman, received 9 recommends and no trollratings:
Whereas this comment of mine, in response to a nutty accusation that I claimed stay-at-home moms weren’t feminist enough, was heavily trollrated:
And of course Armando, DHinMI, and others go merrily around launching personal attacks and hijacking diaries whenever they feel like it.
It’s a classic example of a double standard. And Kos likes it that way – as he said in his frontpage post today:
That’s code for “I like to let my friends do whatever the fuck they want to people. My Goon Squad keeps the riffraff – like the dirty hippies and loudmouthed feminists – in line, and derails any discussion that might be too threatening.”
This arrogant practice gives Kos and his lieutenants the illusion of power, but in reality, they’re shooting themselves in the foot. Driving off contributors and creating an echo chamber isn’t going to do them any good in the long run.
Arbitrary and meaningless.
Kos knows that, he’s just fucking with those he has tossed out without justification and those (according to Kos’s own words) morons who stay.
There is a reasons laws are void if they are too vague.
Driving off contributors and creating an echo chamber isn’t going to do them any good in the long run.
That’s why I rejoined as a sock puppet once, hoping to influence the opinions of the community. However, this was not a sensible idea, so I’ve decided not to re-sock puppet up.
FEITCTAJ, I sez, sez I.
If I’m reading you correctly, you feel that alternative theories to 9.11 are unsensible and immature. I respect that Doug. But part of the reason I came there was to discuss current events as well as 9.11 theories with people outside of the standard “9.11 echo chambers” of which you claim there are “millions.” I came to DKos thinking that it was a venue for free speech and for a time, it was. But things changed as Kos & Co’s heads ballooned. And frighteningly enough, DKos became an echo chamber unto itself. Not only did the site become annoying, it became very dull.
If you’re going to advertise your site as progressive, you damn well better act it. Write editorials about topics you may disagree with, as someone commented below. But banning and flaming people who happen to have a different view of the world is sad and self-destructing.
If Booman is cool with 9-11condiscussions on this site, then fine. Have at it. Kos is not and he has politely asked people to go elsewhere than his site to have those discussions. Also fine. That’s the only point I was trying to raise.
You misunderstand free speech. Free speech is what you do on your website or blog. If someone else owns the blog, they get to decide what they want or do not want on it. If you disagree, start your own or go to another blog. Kos or Booman doesn’t owe you dime one if you are on their site. You play by the rules or you leave. Just as if you were at their house.
Cheers.
Kos: Uppitty or just smug?
Reading this diary and comments, it suddenly occurred to me tonight that DKos’s rabid mobs and high-volume bannings ARE A FUNDAMENTAL PART OF THE BUSINESS PLAN! It is a straight-up scam. The more bannings, the more sock puppets, the more controversy, the more UIDs. Simple. They constantly claim over 100,000 members. Obvious nonsense. I’ll bet the actual number of regular participants is no more than a few thousand.
You’re on the right track. Then think about the pageviews.
I’m tired from the war on the adjacent H-1B diary.
Could I buy a vowel?
As I understand it, advertising revenue is based on pageviews – the number of people looking at the site. If you have, say, 100 pageviews, it’s hard to tell if those are 100 individual people looking at the site, or one person refreshing the page 100 times.
So an intense flamewar, like for example in those diaries that get 1000+ comments, might only consist of a handful of loudmouths, but would result in hundreds of pageviews.
See what I’m saying? Flamewars = $$$ for Kosco.
Having worked in this industry, I can tell you that there is a detectable difference between 100 pageviews by 100 different people and 100 pageviews by the same person.
Whether pageviews matter at all depends upon the terms of the advertising contract. A lot of advertisers have switched to paying for clickthroughs instead of less-valuable pageviews. Increasingly, there is a movement toward paying only for clickthroughs that result in sales, though that’s relatively new.
Thanks for the info and clarification. I’ve heard from someone who works in the industry that it’s actually a thorny question – what is considered a “unique page view”, and how they’re counted. But I’m not a tech person so I really don’t know, and anyway this was last year, so maybe things have changed since then.
I’m curious as to how the site hits counted on SiteMeter are compiled.
Well yes, it does depend a lot on how you define “unique visitors”. In general, the tracking site passes a cookie back to the client which is used for identification. Where it gets fuzzy is how long that cookie lives. If you visit the site on two separate days, I think most people would agree that that constitutes two visits. But how close together do visits have to be before they constitute a single visit? People selling ads like a smaller time interval than the ones buying ads. And if you’re big enough, the value you get may be individually negotiated while small ad buys get a less favorable value.
The bottom line, really, is that HTTP is a “connectionless protocol”. Each pageload is a separate connection. (On older browsers, all of the graphics are separate connections as well.) You don’t just connect to a site and remain connected. Ergo, any attempt to relate a bunch of separate connections to a single user, especially if they don’t have some kind of login account, is an approximation, and one which both buyer and seller have a strong incentive to fudge in their favor.
As someone once said, in America, sooner or later, everything becomes a racket. The War on Drugs, together with the DEA, is a racket. The prison system is a racket. The War on Terror[ism] is a racket. Microsoft is a racket. And at least one Dem blog is a racket.
rules and procedures that are applied haphazardly or with favoritism have a deleterious effect on the community.
DailyKos isn’t a community. It’s a business with two fundamental purposes: to make money and to feed the owner’s ego. It is above all not a political movement or a revolution. At best, it is an attempt at a changing of the guard in the punditocracy.
DK is the center-left web parallel to the Rush Limbaugh Show. Kos usually (but not always) rises above the level of Limbaugh, but at the end of the day, the Rush Limbaugh Show is about Rush Limbaugh, and DailyKos is about Markos Moulitsas. That’s why the put their names front and center on their respective venues.
People shouldn’t let themselves be too disappointed when a cult of personality turns out to be exactly what it always said it was.
To the best of my knowledge, Kos is still keeping to his position that Dems shouldn’t pursue impeachment of Bush/Cheney. That is center at best—certainly lagging behind the American public.
Dkos has been plainly “what it is” since the Pie Fight. As has Moulitsos.
That is what? Two years ago?
Long time, folks.
LONG time.
That ANY of you should be in any way surprised or horrified (or even “hurt”) says a great deal more about you than it does about the site.
My repeated attempts to invoke a “Wake the fuck up” theme over the past two years regarding what was about there met with anger and resistance every time I tried to get through to y’all.
You asked not for whom the ratings trolled.
Now they troll for thee.
Get over it.
In the future, choose your allies more wisely.
This is a GOOD thing.
The center always lives right on the edge of rot, and it is the avant garde…the left in political terms, the REAL left…that drives progress in all matters.
Always outnumbered, always outgunned, but always the foreteller of what will be.
Be happy that your essential honesty has forced you out of the vast, somnolent middle no matter what that middle may claim to be, that circumstances have conspired to wake you the fuck up.
My last post on dKos was July 4th, 2005.
Welcome to the future.
Like a fine surfer, you have to stay on the edge of what is going to be in order to do anything real.
RIDE that wave!!!
VAYA!!!
AG
Thank you, Arthur for reminding us of the difference between progressives and disaffected Republicans who are beginning to feel the pinch of the uber-rich takeover.
Instead of arguing endlessly over which Republican-lite “centrist” Democrat we should support, progressives would be concerned with economic and social justice.
I await with baited breath serious orange discussions of poverty, comparable worth, reparations, universal childcare, low cost housing, hunger, incest, rape and child abuse, a living wage, public transportation, infrastructure, equal funding for all school children, free higher education, defacto segregation, prison reform, homelessness, fully funded shelter and relocation programs, nuclear disarmament, and predatory business practices. Single payer health insurance (with Viagra included and abortion excluded, of course)have only hit the radar because the middle and upper middle class are being squeezed. If it doesn’t affect privilegded, entitled white guys, it is invisible.
By the way, all 911condiscussioners invariably show the lack of even a 7th grade understanding of science. It’s pretty embarrassing.
Oh no they don’t.
EVERYONE who starts ranting about what ALL the people in a particular group do invariably embarrass themselves badly in the most public of ways. That’s called prejudice.
The Twin Towers failed to meet design specs in the most spectacular of ways. Without going into detail, I have VERY close family member with a PhD in Metallurgical Engineering from a Big-10 school that I checked in with on 9/11 (the same way lots of families checked in with each other that day) who has never voted for anyone other than Republicans his whole life that said two minutes into that conversation the collapse did not add up. This is a guy that created special alloys for reactor containment facilities, pipelines, the auto industry, etc.
He had questions he wants to ask. He can’t. They aren’t questions about political conspiracies. His questions are all about more mundane questions that are asked when there are catastrophic engineering failures. Was the building design as sound as it was claimed? Were the materials the designs called for really used, or was there cost-cutting in the material acquisition process? Was welding/riveting done as the designs called for? Etc. Almost all the evidence (the building debris) was dumped in a deep sea trench as quickly as it could be removed from the site.
In actuality, the atmosphere surrounding anyone who wants to ask questions about 9/11 has been profoundly ANTI-science. The “official version” of the 9/11 story has more holes than a raft made of mosquito netting. Those peddling the “official version” want people to believe the only people asking questions are people ranting bizarre world political conspiracies.
Wrong.
There’s LOTS of questions about 9/11 by the mainstream scientific community. Reasonable questions about engineering specs, why the buildings failed, who is lying about why the buildings failed, and did those lying about why the buildings failed have reason to profit from lying.
Counterpunch published a set of pieces, with a fair amount of physics, debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. They should have been laid to rest at that point.
The Physics of 9/11
I took the theories seriously for years. But they are no longer part of the zeitgeist.
This writer, Garcia, claims the NIST report answered any/all questions scientists had about the catastrophic failures in the Twin Towers. He is wrong. The NIST report is exactly the report I was told was so full of holes it doesn’t merit consideration as a work of science. The NIST Report is a work of political propaganda wrapped in enough scientific mumbo-jumbo to make it look like legitimate science to non-scientists.
The NIST Report is not science. It’s political propaganda produced by Bush-appointed cronies. The entire study of the failures of the Twin Towers has to be started again and done from square one by legitimate scientists with no political interests in the the findings of the final report.
STOP REFERRING to people who want proper scientific studies on the 9/11 collapses as conspiracy theorists. Everyone knows Bush is the most anti-science President in US History. It should be a no-brainer that people who believe in the scientific method should want any and every scientific study produced by the Bush Administration re-done after Bush is gone.