You are undoubtedly familiar with a certain internet platform started by a guy we’ll call “MZ”. From small beginnings with a handful of members, MZ grew his platform to a vastly larger userbase. One of the things driving that success was giving his members what they wanted: content that reflected their interests and viewpoints and affirmed their feelings. Today, the company’s algorithms still drive user engagement by serving up content that is popular, even though at times that content might be less than fully accurate, polarizing, or trite.
And there is also Facebook.
MZ, of course, is our very own Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. I’m not ragging on Markos; I think he has done a bang-up job over the years and built an admirable project, Daily Kos.
But like the platform of the other MZ, Mark Zuckerberg, DK has relied on algorithms that dish out to its readers the most popular stories, not necessarily the most thoughtful or informative or even the most accurate. The “Trending List” is much more likely to be topped by “BREAKING: Liz Warren SLAYS Ted Cruz with this TWEET!” than by a lengthy, well-researched essay on how to fix regulatory problems of the National Labor Relations Board.
Neither Facebook nor DK uses editors to curate content and select for quality, accuracy, or societal impact. Popularity determines what is pushed into the user’s news feed and thus “Feel good” may outperform “Do good.”
We can change that. We can push a wider range of stories to readers, reward writers by providing more exposure of their work, and make DK a better venue for interesting ideas and lively debate.
But do we want to do that?
More precisely, does Markos want to do that? As far as I know, DK still runs under his benevolent dictatorship as Exalted Poobah-for-Life. So any decision about my proposals or anyone else’s will be determined by him.
What is the purpose of DK? It has been said many times that it is to elect “more and better Democrats.” A forum for serious discussions might further that goal. A larger forum for popular but shallow “zings” against the opposition might further it in other ways. Markos will have to decide how much of either approach is important and desirable.
I think my proposal has enough flexibility to accommodate both approaches. Right now, it seems as if we are moving more toward a Facebook model (more clicks, more clickbait, more algorithm-driven engagement, less depth and meaningfulness) We will see what His Poobah-ness thinks if or when any of my ideas get implemented.
How I read news
I don’t know if the way I have organized my perusal of news will suit everyone else but it can serve as a starting point. I browse content from dozens and dozens of sites. Some I visit the site periodically but many (42, to be exact) I browse via their RSS feeds using a customizable “news portal” provided by Protopage.
It lets me add feeds, or “widgets” as they call them, in various tabs that I have created, so I can organize the content by subject (like Politics or Argentina, where I currently live). Each feed is in an individual panel which I can customize in ways such as number of articles to show, whether or not to include the lead image or teaser text, and more. The feeds get automatically refreshed every 10 minutes or so, keeping my news content up to date.
This lets me quickly review a huge amount of news, selecting the items that interest me to click and visit the site to read the whole article. Once there, the site is likely to have a sidebar or some other feature to show me other items of potential interest. All in all, I think I get both breadth and depth reading the news in this manner.
Daily Kos is different. Its RSS feed shows “front page” articles, mostly written by staff writers but the community-written stories are at least equally important to me. So, throughout most days I find myself visiting the “All Stories” page — sorted newest-to-oldest — and browsing to find diaries of interest.
I need to do that because the Protopage widget doesn’t show me community-written diaries and DK’s front page doesn’t show me enough of those diaries either unless I refresh and review it frequently — diaries pop off the page and disappear into oblivion after a relatively short time.
So I have been thinking about how I have been able to manage a staggering amount of news content, select that which interests me, find some surprising nuggets rather than rely solely on what is pushed to me by one or two sources, and still have time to do everything else necessary in my life.
i have come up with some ideas that could help Daily Kos readers do all of that better on our site.
Organize the content — but not with tags
DK produces a huge amount of content. I think it is a rare day, if ever, that there are fewer than 100 stories published. Even at that low rate, the number of stories would be closing in on 40,000 per year. That is a lot for any person to sift through.
Tags were probably a good idea when proposed but went horribly astray. There may very well be more tags now than stars in the known universe. People can, and do, create tags for anything and everything and when writing a story there is no easy way to determine which tags are popular and widely used.
For example, if your story involves non-deciduous trees (that is, trees that do not have leaves that fall off in autumn), which of these do you tag it with?
- fir
- firtrees
- tree
- trees
- firs
- douglasfir
- douglasfirtree
- douglasfirtrees
- douglasfirs
- evergreen
- evergreens
- evergreentrees
- botany
- dendrology
- christmastree
- xmastree
- flora&fauna
- floraandfauna
Or would you create another term I didn’t think of? If other readers search for one of those terms but you didn’t tag your story with it, they won’t find your diary.
If you as a reader want to find stories about such trees, which of those terms would you type in? Choose incorrectly and you will get zero results on your search.
I searched the Tags database for tags that contain the letter “e”. There are 320,211 such tags (that is tags themselves, not the number of uses of the tags). Undoubtedly there are many thousands more which don’t contain an “e”. Frankly, tags are a hot mess.
Tags have become next to useless for most purposes. Yes, they’re good for the PWB (pets) folks and some other active groups who label their group’s stories with a particular tag. Also, there are a number of tags that get regular use (e.g., #MeToo or #BLM or #NameOfState). Fine, let’s keep using optional tags for those people who want to find particular diaries by topic and who know which tag to search for.
For organizing content for the wider readership of DK, let’s try something better.
Categories
I suggest using defined categories to organize content. Categories should be broad, unlike the often narrow and highly specific tags. They must be pre-programmed; neither readers nor authors can create more categories (you would need to convince the IT staff, whose default response should be a firm “No!” so we don’t end up with Tags, Part II: the Nightmare Continues).
For example, using the “fir tree” diary above, its category might be Science. That might seem too broad; you might be thinking it should be more specific, like Botany or even Dendrology.
I want to use the KISS method (“Keep it simple, stupid”). I propose creating a very short list of “supercategories”, no more than a dozen in total. Again with our fir tree, the supercategory could be something like “Sci-Tech & Nature.” Under that category, we would have a limited set of categories, such as Science, Technology, Environment, and Health. Further on, when you see how we will use this, you will understand why we don’t want to get too detailed and include Astronomy, Biology, Geology, and dozens more rather than only the broad category of Science.
Another supercategory might be “Culture & Media” with categories like Music, Visual Arts, Books & Print Media, Social Media, and Performing Arts.
My idea is that when writing a diary, you must select 1 to 2 categories for it. It would be easy to figure out which categories because the set would be limited but would be broad enough in scope to cover every topic imaginable. You won’t need to spend a lot of time scrolling through long lists or puzzling over endless absurd options like you do with tags.
For example, if you wrote a review of a biography of the physicist Stephen Hawking, you would likely select Science and Books & Print Media as the categories. That would put your diary in the supercategories of “Sci-Tech & Nature” and “Culture & Media” automatically, without any action on your part.
I won’t try to make a list of the categories or supercategories: smarter folks than I can figure that out. I would suggest looking at some of the old compact encyclopedias and thesauruses that organized human knowledge into a very short topic list of supercategories or sections — they already did the work so why struggle to reinvent the wheel? Universities are also an inspiration; they have categorized themselves into College of Humanities and Faculty of Science and School of Business and similar organizational structures. Heck, even Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral? would be a starting point.
Don’t forget to include categories for hard-to-classify interests, like CameronProf’s daily questions or comics.
Putting categories on the page
Now we can treat the supercategories the way traditional newspapers have done so cleverly and usefully for at least a century or two. We organize and present our content around those supercategories.
If you have forgotten what an actual newspaper is like by now, it is printed in sections. The main section has the all-important front page along with general news from around the world. The “Local News” or “Metropolitan” or similar section has just that, news about the local community and surrounding areas. “Sports” is self-explanatory and “Living” or “Lifestyle” will inform you about fashion and movies and gardening and other interests that enrich or entertain us.
So let’s put some “news sections” on the front page in the form of panels, mixed with featured stories by staff writers.
In this mockup (I have no graphics talent so use your imagination! The IT staff could create an attractive design), the “featured story” is in the upper left, larger than surrounding sections in order to highlight it. DK staff might manually select it or automatically fill it with the most recent staff story.
Next to it are two list panels (similar to our existing Trending List or my Protopage feed panels). The first panel might be Top Stories (i.e., staff-written articles) and the second — reflecting DK’s purpose for being — could be a supercategory like Politics, Government & Elections.
Moving further down the front page, we see a mix of story panels and list/supercategory panels. The stories would be rotated per whatever algorithm the IT staff choose to write, thus changing as the day goes on.
The list panels could be in a pre-set order for casual visitors but logged in members could have a custom order to reflect their interests. On each member’s profile page could be a standard set of controls to reposition their order of interest in the various supercategories and select which ones to display in their own panels. Any supercategories that were not selected for display could have their content go into a list panel named something like “Everything Else” or “Other Stories.” That means every diary would have opportunities to be seen, in its designated list panel or in the catch-all panel.
The profile page options should also include a setting to show/hide the title image in list panels and show/hide the preview snippet of the first few lines of text.
The lists should have a toggle button, to switch the list between “Most recent stories” and “Most recommended/Trending stories” of the relevant supercategory. That means there would be “rec lists” for every supercategory; no more seeing the single Rec List fill up with multiple stories on the latest outrage or zinger and more opportunity for authors to get their stories seen.
Organizing the content this way, by supercategory, also means new ways to promote much more content. Emails could be sent out highlighting what is new in a supercategory. RSS feeds could be set to automatically supply content feeds from supercategories. Subscribe to an email campaign or an RSS feed and get the daily DK stories in the supercategory that interests you, not a bunch of stories you don’t care about.
In fact, DK staff could even set up “pushes” (email and RSS) for categories. So, rather than receiving a daily “push” of all stories in the Arts & Media supercategory, you could get just the Film & TV stories.
Remember that DK currently produces, on average, 110-150 stories per day. Certain supercategories, like Politics, would likely have more than other supercategories but it would nevertheless give authors a much better shot at being seen if their story was in a list panel where it was competing with just 6-12 other stories for notice.
With smaller chunks for stories in each panel or “rec list”/”recent list”, you can see why we don’t need to get too granular, as I mentioned above. The Sci-Tech panel might have just a dozen new stories today so you easily scan them and pick out the one on your preferred science topic, botany.
Clicking the title of a list panel should open a page in a new browser tab, a list view/blog view (toggle) of the relevant supercategory’s content.
Make use of tabs
The number of list panels on the front page could be reduced if we used tabs to group several supercategories together in one panel. I recall someone on the IT staff saying they avoided using tabs but I don’t remember why. Tabs are widely used in desktop applications and I know they’re also standard on mobile as well; Android itself uses them in its Settings app and in the Google Play Store app.
Tabs could go a long way to reducing clutter while putting more useful info on pages. We could have one panel on the front page with tabs for Top Stories (staff), Prism, and Community Spotlight. Another four panels, of 3 tabs each, could offer lists for 12 supercategories, leaving the rest of the page available for featured stories or whatever else DK staff wants to display prominently. If each tab showed just 8 stories in its list, that would mean up to 120 stories could be listed on the front page, readable with a single click.
Showcase related content on story pages
In online newspapers and magazines, it is very common to have a sidebar panel showing similar content and titled something like “Related stories.” DK should do the same thing.
If each story is associated with up to two categories, show the relevant one or two list panels that match those categories or that match their supercategories. If a reader is looking at a story about Technology, it’s reasonable to assume a list panel (toggle between Most Recs and Most Recent) of other Technology stories, or Sci-Tech-Nature, would keep that reader engaged further.
The sidebar could also contain the “super list panel” I mentioned above which has tabs for Top Stories (staff), Prism, and Community Spotlight. Those are key features of DK so show them off on every story page.
Support your authors
I imagine staff writers are pretty happy with their work environment so I am talking about the community writers.
I’ve heard many times from staff that the community authors are truly esteemed and cherished and yadda yadda, I ain’t feelin’ the love, baby.
Put a spotlight back on Community Spotlight
Poor Community Spotlight, how you have fallen. I scanned the CS roster recently and found 6 diaries that had recs in the teens. It used to be that if your story was selected for CS, it was almost a guarantee of readership sufficient to generate 40, 50, or more recs. If recs equal readership, the current rec stats are so pathetic that one would be better off photocopying one’s story and snail-mailing it to uninterested relatives.
It’s not hard to figure out why: if visitors don’t see it, they won’t read it.
CS used to be very visible in a sidebar box below the Rec List. Now, people have to actively search for it on the top menu bar and if they don’t know about it, why would they search for it? Even if they spot it in the menu, the name doesn’t tell them much so they might never click it (Editors’ picks would be a term people understand).
“But, but, but ...” I hear. Yes, CS does now indeed get a weekly front page story. On Saturday night. You know, the time of the week when you can hear a mournful whistling of the wind and see a lonely tumbleweed rolling down Front Page street.
I applaud Besame for trying to drum up enthusiasm with the weekly CS roundup. But in that time slot, most readers are likely to be regular readers of CS anyway. New readers — if any show up on Saturday nights — are unlikely to be enthused about what they view as — by then — material that is somewhat stale, up to a week old.
Put CS back on the sidebars as I have suggested above. If DK really sees it as a showcase for some of the better written content, then showcase it, don’t hide it.
Show us the page stats
Staff writers receive a paycheck; it is an important way to let them know that their work is appreciated.
Community writers receive recs. Sometimes a lot, more often some, many times very, very few. As a way of knowing whether or not their work is appreciated, it is usually pretty meaningless.
Why? Let’s try an analogy. Say you are running for prom queen/king at high school and you receive 5 votes. Whoa, that sucks! But if your high school class has just 6 students, you really are popular; on the other hand, if it is a class of 500, then, yeah, hardly anyone likes you.
As a community author, we have no idea how many people actually read our stories. If we get 5 recs out of 6 readers, we can assume our story was good but failed to attract attention; maybe a better title next time? Or don’t publish it at 3 AM?
On the other hand, if we get 5 recs out of 6,000 readers, we can learn that we did something wrong; it wasn’t just poor timing of publication or lack of notice. People read it and didn’t like it. So we can ponder if our writing was lousy, if our position on the topic was disagreeable, if we failed to back up our assertions with sources, or something else.
Even better would be showing total views and total views by members (logged in): if we get few recs out of many member views (people who are able to rec it), that is different than few recs out of many non-member views (who cannot rec stories).
Letting us know how many people viewed our story is the single most empowering thing DK could do for us as authors. If you don’t want the page stats to be public knowledge, fine: let only the story’s author see the number of views for her/his own story.
Respect all writers
You know what a professional writer is? It is someone who is paid as an author. That could be a millionaire author of best-selling books or someone who published a poem in an obscure poetry journal and earned two dollars.
A non-professional writer — or “community writer”, to coin a phrase — is someone who writes stories without receiving compensation.
On Daily Kos? Nobody appears to understand that difference.
Your “Community Contributors” team is some sort of hybrid and, quite frankly, it does not work. It’s like being pregnant: you are a professional writer or you’re not. They are professionals but not really?
They are paid for their work. I don’t know if it is one dollar per year or a million bucks and, to be honest, it doesn’t matter. You value their stories sufficiently to compensate them and guide their work yet you designate them as “community” writers, theoretically alike to the volunteers who do not receive compensation, promotion, or professional guidance as writers.
Don’t be another Uber, Kos. Don’t pretend “I barely know them!” on one hand while saying “Love your stuff, give us more, we’ll pay!” on the other.
Call them Adjunct Staff or Featured Writers or Guest Columnists or Professional Pundits or something, at least for any stories they publish that seem “official” (as in, on the Front Page or similarly highlighted). You take credit for what they do on the site; give them status to match.
It’s not respectful to them as writers nor is it fair to regular community writers, who do not get their work pushed on Facebook or in DK communiqués, and yet compete for the same few slots on the Rec/Trending List. It has that Orwellian quality of “some writers are more equal than others.”
This also applies to cartoonists, if they are compensated in some way. They are prominently featured and their work is quite popular. If they get front page exposure, it seems like they are more officially linked to DK than regular “community” members.
And take the “Community” and “Daily Kos Staff” labels off the front page. It’s endlessly repetitive, using a huge amount of real estate, including where it is absurdly superfluous: in the section labeled “Community Stories” what the heck else would you expect to see?
Endlessly repeating and emphasizing it seems insulting in a way, like “Community writer? Ewww! Don’t read this!” compared to “Oh, this one is by a real writer, a professional, you should read it!” It’s like marking a box of chocolates so you know which ones are icky and to be avoided.
Each story already has the label shown at right so you’re legally protected from being sued over what we volunteers write. That should be enough.
The space saved could be put to better use. Even if you dislike my other ideas, consider implementing categories and replace these superfluous labels with each story’s categories where they are listed on the front page. That would help readers decide about opening a story whose theme can’t be readily deduced from the title.
Support your readers
Stop the bait-and-switch headlines
This thing of republishing stories with new titles is annoying and it makes DK look cheap and underhanded: “Click me again, sucker, and generate some more ad revenue.” It is disrespectful of the readership to trick them into viewing content they already viewed — and quite possibly even engaged with in the form of comment discussions.
Readers are going to catch on and their opinion of DK will sink. It’s easy to ruin a reputation but hard to build one.
Just stop.
Give readers more time to engage
If you do adopt some of these changes, many more stories are likely to not only get more attention but they are like to get attention longer. If they stay up more time on one of a dozen Rec Lists for the sundry supercategories, people might see them later, not just during their “15 minutes of fame” before they are pushed off the Front Page.
So, change the period for reccing comments to 48 hours. Give people time to read and engage with stories that may have greater endurance than what we are now used to.
More and better promotion of community groups
Groups are a great way to create a sense of community and are a boon to authors because groups often republish good stories. But why are they so darned hard to find?
Currently, you see Community on the top menu bar, then you see the word “Groups” as a menu separator, followed by several popular groups, and finally the word “More...” Clicking that takes you to the “Groups” page.
There you see a list of the most popular groups, which is fine if you’re looking for popular groups. But if you’re looking for specific interests, that list is pretty useless. You will end up scrolling and scrolling then clicking “Next page” so you can scroll more and still not find any groups on the subjects that interest you.
Let’s do better. How about we replace that Community menu entirely? The other choices on it, like Recommended and Community Spotlight, will be on sidebar items anyway so no need to put them up there.
Instead let’s make a menu that is topic-centric, making it easy to find groups of interest and content of interest. Like this:
Show each supercategory and then pop out:
- A clickable link to stories of that supercategory
- A submenu of the categories within the supercategory, each of which will have popout links for their stories and related groups (groups, like stories, should choose 1-2 categories for themselves)
Obviously the Stories link will take the user to a list/blog view (toggle) of relevant stories and the Community Groups should show a page with a list of the related groups, sorted so that the most recently active ones are first (who wants to join a group that has had no activity for five years?).
That makes it really easy and fast to find what one wants, content or groups. It also visually communicates to new visitors the breadth of content and interests one can find on Daily Kos.
Grab bag of miscellany
Split the interface baby, says Solomon
I can already hear the cries of anguish that all this may be possible on desktops but will never work on cell phones. Boo-hoo.
In theory, yes, it is easier to maintain the site if both the desktop and mobile platforms are the same. In practice, it is like trying to design a fish that is also a bicycle and keep that unnatural monster swimming while rolling on land.
I have no idea how to “translate” all of this into a mobile design. It will be hard because a 3.4” wide display is not intended to show huge amounts of information. In which case, why do programmers (disclosure: I am a programmer) insist on trying to make the hybrid system work in a way it was never meant to?
A simple website is fine on mobile and desktop; anything as complex and content-rich as Daily Kos is not going to work smoothly in a hybrid manner. Bite the bullet. Figure out how to present as much information as possible — adapting my suggestions above, if they will help — and maintain two excellent interfaces, not one miserable one that makes everyone on both platforms unhappy.
A quick and simple graphics fix
All too often, authors include some excellent images which become frustrating and useless blurs because the resolution is too low for detailed graphics. DK’s system automatically inserts a reduced-size copy, not the original, so opening the image in a new tab means looking at a low quality copy.
There is a fix which involves creating a link and editing the link to point to the original size image and I have explained it many times in comments … and it still is rarely used because people don’t know it is possible nor how to do it.
So, staff, add it by default whenever an author inserts an image into a story. Make the image clickable, by default, and have it open a new tab in the browser with the larger image (the one that has “original” in the link, you know what I mean). Make every image one that people can click to embiggen.
No, I won’t accept that it is a difficult change. The system already automatically does other things, like including the attribution and description in the generated code for the image; this is just one more similar task.
Bring the past up to the present
These gosh-darn newfangled categories will be assigned to new stories but what about the vast number of old stories that relied on tags?
Well, volunteers could help categorize old stories. Or, if DK has some spare change, it could be great part-time distance work for DK members who might be in need of some financial help. Once someone got used to the categories, I would guess it would take literally just a minute to quickly scan a story and figure out one or two categories to assign to it.
Perhaps we could help others and update the DK content archives at the same time.
Also, it might be handy to give Rescue Rangers — who read every new story on DK each day — the ability to re-categorize stories, with due care. i would give benefit of the doubt to the author but people can make clear mistakes — say, a story about economics and China but it somehow is categorized as Music and Geology.
Let the Rangers fix the obvious mistakes, perhaps with an automatic notice to the author who can edit the change. After all, the story I mentioned way back up in this diary — a biography of Stephen Hawking — could fit into categories of Disability or Technology or Medicine as well as Science and Books, depending on the angle of the story. The author should be able to choose the best fit.
Con te partirò
Pat yourself on the back. You made it through a long and complicated slog. I hope you found some things of interest and I hope you will share your own ideas in the comments. I am certain there are other solutions to these issues, so please pitch in!
Now, as a bit of a break and a reward, enjoy Nana Mouskouri — one of the greatest singers of the past century but little known in the US — singing a gorgeous song. Not only is she talented, she is an inspiration: 86 years old and she still performs!