| Stirling Newbury writes in a piece titled "The Daily Kos has jumped the shark:" There has been in the last few weeks a changing of the guard at the Daily Kos, both on the front page, and on the recommended diary list. I am out of the b list of diarists that can make that list, and thus it is time for me to stop writing for the kos community. It has been a great run, and I have nothing but gratitude for the community and its support. However, the reality is that the moment of swarm collapse has happened, where the community is talking only to itself. Kos is now what DFA became in the late days of the Dean campaign - a bubble. It was waiting to be organized from the top, while it keeps itself in the dark and feeds on shit. A few people will have the ability to cut through the noise - I'm not going to be one of them.
Since the core is gone, we've reached a plateau of this wave of blogging - the point where screaming has drowned out everything else.
This is similar to my own conclusions about this site. There are interesting comments on the piece at Bopnews.com. The article continues: |
| This point was, I suppose, inevitable, the time when there can be a bubble of ideas and energy is always small, and it always gets pushed in one direction or another. Kos is now screaming. It will be better for top down organizations, since there is less substance, less there there. It will be worse for ideas that want to get out. Kos is now a road block, not a road.
The left blogsphere has a big problem - it is getting dummer. Alito was definitely the point of conversion - nothing but all screaming all the time. Now here is the kicker, the kossacks could have had a place at the fillibuster table - but they wouldn't take it. They had a chance for a meeting early, but they didn't take it. In short, they aren't marginalized because they are being kept out, they are marginalized because they are too busy screaming at each other to get anything done.
What this means is that the idea energy is going to move out - to MyDD and the agonist and other similar sites.
This moment means that the community is about to go down hill in terms of its thinking - because as people with something to say leave, so too will others who have something to say leave.
Could this be fixed? Is it terminal? It can't be fixed, because for the people who are screaming - the swarm - nirvana has been reached. There is now a screamsphere - where on any given day, any given screaming can win the screaming contest. The converse of fewer ideas, is more room for people who make noise.
This means that unless a much larger drive to link to ideas is made by the front page, the liberal sphere is about to completely fragment - where screamers scream only at each other, and head for group think non solutions, and the core gets on the wonkavator, and starts grading itself by the pound.
For campaigns this is great - more screaming consumers looking for a hero. For the creation of a movement, this is a disaster. |
