I am putting a meta tag on this diary since it is about what happens on Daily Kos and my experience with it. However, my purpose is not to gripe and complain about the site or users that I don't like as is often the case with meta diaries. There have been some other diaries recently discussing the marked decline in the volume of diaries and comments posted on Daily Kos over the past few years and raising questions about what we might do to reverse that trend. I thought that sharing some of my experiences and observations might be useful to people interested in writing diaries and getting them noticed.
This is the 940th diary that I have written since I have been a user here during the past 8 years. 178 of those diaries have wound up on the rec list for varying lengths of time. I have 253 people signed up to follow me on their streams. I definitely do not feel ignored or isolated as a diarist. I do appreciate the interest that many people have taken in my writing. What I want to explore here is what happens with different types of diaries. I have a fairly broad range of interests. One of those interests is in internet marketing of content and I am exploring how people respond to different content and style.
The rec list is the basic way that a diary gets a lot of attention. If it gets enough recs in a short space of time to get on there people who don't pay much attention to the general dairy list will see it. Some of them will read it and rec it in turn. It becomes a self perpetuating process. Not everybody recs a diary for the same reason, but I have come to the conclusion that anytime a diary gets say over 100 recs it is because it pushes emotional buttons. We all have them and there are different types of them. Stories about a personal crisis or tragedy usually get a strong response. Outrages of right wing nastiness work the same way. I write some diaries that are aiming for the rec list. They are usually based on breaking news stories that have, IMO, some significance. Everybody has opinions about what should and shouldn't be on the rec list. However, as long as crowd sourcing is the way they get there emotion will continue to play a major role.
I recently conducted an experiment that I think is instructive. I posted this diary.
Janet Yellen Creates Panic On Wall St.
It was a fairly short diary about the outrage from Wall St. that Yellen mentioned the words income inequality in some pretty moderate comments on the subject. I thought the news was interesting, but I wasn't expecting a huge reaction to it. It went viral and got 478 recs, the most of any diary that I have written. I spent some time trying to analyze the reaction. I wanted to know if there were really a lot of people who wanted to discuss income inequality. From my previous efforts in writing about it, I had concluded that there weren't. So I wrote a follow up diary.
Income Inequality: We Need To Talk
It was an effort to go beyond the headlines and look a bit more closely at the issues, but I think it was written in a style that was thoroughly accessible to general readers. That diary got 13 recs and 26 comments. That doesn't qualify as being totally ignored. I mean, Meteor Blades was one of the recs. :) But there is a big different in two diaries that addressed the same topic.
The experience that I enjoy the most is doing some fairly serious research on a topic and then distilling the information into a form that is still sound and accurate but is digestible by general readers. The best experience that I have had along those lines was about a year and a half ago in doing a five part series in neoliberalism. This is the last dairy that has links leading back to the earlier diaries.
The Neoliberal Thought Collective Behind The Curtain
Four out of the five spent some time on the rec list thanks to help from the Community Spotlight. The diaries were posted in a daily sequence. They rescued all of them. What this resulted in was an active discussion with a moderate amount of comments coming mostly from people who were really interested in discussing the topic. What I think this points to is the need for ways to bring a diary to the attention of users that are somewhere between floating down the list into oblivion and being at the top of the rec list. Groups were supposed to serve a function along these lines when they were established with the conversion to DK4. They seem to be much less active than they were initially. I think that they could be revived in a way that supports the posting of more and better content. I recall that Markos has mentioned that possibility in one of his Q&As.
One of the realities on the internet for Daily Kos and other content sites is the massive shift to social media with Facebook leading the pack. The Daily Kos staff is putting a lot of their efforts in promoting the site on Facebook by posting selected articles on their page there. The volume of comments there is larger than it is here. I personally don't like Facebook and I seldom go there. The Daily Kos software was designed to promote life like online discussions. That is one of several reasons that I focus my activities here.
I don't think that anybody is going to roll the clock back and make Daily Kos the same site it was six years ago. It exist in the rapidly changing environment of the internet and digital media. That is a world that never stands still. I think that we can look for creative approaches to making the diary side of the site a more interesting and informative environment than it is at present. I don't have any magic solutions to that problem, but I hoped that in sharing some of my reflections I might help to move the conversation along.
For those of you that actually made it to the end of this rather rambling diary, thank you for reading. :)