Deb's SM Survey:

I’ve been reading Daily Kos for years, and though I rarely comment or post anything of my own, the site is a favorite of mine because of the quantity – and often quality – of content relevant to me both about politics and about the world. There have been some excellent user-created diaries about the floods in Iowa this week, for example, providing a compelling mix of personal stories, coverage of the extent of the problem and links to donate for help.

But any site with Daily Kos’ size and with the ability for anyone to post comes the occasional excuse for those tasteless or cruel to show themselves. The death of Meet the Press host Tim Russert on Friday became one of those occasions. I avoided, and am not going to rehash, the offenses of some and the responses of those who took offense. But it did make me think about community.

There’s the common perception that people will say things via cover of internet anonymity that they’d never say in person, and I’m sure that’s true, but it’s an overstated excuse. When any community reaches a certain size, there are going to be people who stir up trouble or say things they shouldn’t.

I’ve never lived in a small town, but I’m definitely been involved in my share of communities of various types and sizes. And there are always the contrarians, the people with bad social skills, the people who don’t believe in tact, and the people who make an unthinking insensitive remark once in a while. In a face-to-face community where everyone is known, you learn to expect and work around (or chastise) these personal quirks. In a larger physical community, these people may find their reputation precedes them – or they may get into trouble with others who don’t know them.

Daily Kos gets over 900,000 visits a day. Between 200 and 400 of the site’s members post their own diaries every day. Between 2600 and 4000 members comment on these diaries; even more people recommended user diaries. (Statistics from http://jotter.dailykos.com/) The site has over 167,000 registered members. How many 4,000 member communities have you been in without some drama and in-fighting going on? Didn’t it get nasty there, too?

Daily Kos has a variety of self-policing mechanisms, and overall they work reasonably well. But the presence of “village idiots” isn’t a function of the internet per se: it’s a function of the size of the village.

For more on Daily Kos and how it functions, see The Media Doesn’t Understand Daily Kos. Do You?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under Politics, Culture, Social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.