Huzzah! Annoying new-message pop-ups are gone! That one was fortunately easy to kill (at least until the whole feature can be rethought). Others will take longer. We are doing design review of various options for font and background color stuff. So we’re on it! And we’re on all the other stuff too.
Like I’ve said, give us two weeks to get the bigger stuff out of the way. Not only will we have made the easier changes, but I’ll have more insight into the timeline for the more complicated stuff.
So in today’s installment I want to address one commonly expressed sentiment: “why fix something that isn’t broke?” The idea being, of course, that any update was superfluous because everything was working swimmingly well.
In reality, that wasn’t quite true. Our code base with creaky and obsolete, preventing us from adding cool new functionality or integrating into other services or sites. There were always workarounds, but those were laborious and overly complicated. We are now on a modern platform. We’ve gone from a creaky brick foundation in earthquake country, to a modern secure one. That alone was reason to change.
I also refuse to let Daily Kos become one of those sites that are never updated, and every year look more and more dated, like relics from the past. I will never do to this site what Matt Drudge has done to his.
But there was a bigger concern we had to address, and that’s the health of the community. As much as people might think that everything was firing on all cylinders, the reality is that community has stagnated. Here’s our traffic growth over the last several years:
Daily Kos traffic trends, unique visitors, from 2010 to present.I know it’s hard to read the captions, but all you need to get from that graph is that traffic has been going up, up, up. Now compare that to commenting on the site:
Daily Kos comments (blue line) and unique commenters (green bars) from 2010 to today.Again, I don’t expect you to be able to see the captions. In short, that’s the number of unique commenters (green bars) and comments (blue line) from 2010 to the present day.
In short, comments are WAY down, even as the number of individual comments has remained somewhat steady. Given the overall growth of site traffic, the number of commenters isn’t anything to get excited about. At best, we’re seeing stagnation. Looking at the number of overall comments, we’re seeing decline. We may be attracting a ton of new visitors, but we aren’t converting them into active members of the community.
Now let’s look at diary/story creation:
Daily Kos diaries (blue line) and unique diarists (green bars) from 2010 to today.This chart shows an even more dire picture than comments. While comments are at least rebounding a bit, story/diary writing on Daily Kos is on unmistakably downward trajectory. Again, at a time when Daily Kos traffic is up five-fold, the number of people who stay and interact with the community is decreasing steadily.
So what’s going on? This time period coincides with the rise of Facebook and Twitter as dominant social media outlets, and much of the discussion that used to take place here has shifted to those platforms. For example, while Daily Kos currently gets about 13,000 comments a day, our Facebook page consistently gets over 30,000 comments per day. This is a trend that has hit other sites even harder than this one. Online engagement is simply shifting to the social media giants.
In our case, we have a huge cohort of “originals”, people who have been around for a decade or close to it. Then we have another big cohort from the Obama-2008 brigades. After that? Nothing. We’re simply not growing significantly beyond those groups, we’re not replacing the old-timers who move on from the site. It is, as I wrote above, stagnation.
And to me, stagnation equals “broken”. We are in danger of no longer being relevant to a new generation of activists. I could sit here and rest on my laurels and do nothing, riding off my legacy audience. That would be the cheap way to do things, the “make more money” way to approach the issue. Do you realize how much developers cost? It would be cynical and greedy, and I could ride it for another decade no problem.
But I don’t do this to make the easy buck, or even any buck. I have other projects for that. I do this because I want to change America for the better, and the only way to do that is to continue building and expanding our movement. And that requires building a site that can remain relevant to today’s audiences, so that we can start growing our engagement again.
That means making participation easier—from signup, to commenting, to writing stories/diaries. It means tweaking the sociology of the HR system so that it isn’t as overtly negative as it used to be. It means getting rid of UIDs, so people can no longer lord them over newer users as a cudgel to drive them from the site. It even means moving the sig files to a less obtrusive place, so that comment threads can focus on discussion, rather than be distracted by ornamentation. It also means updating the commenting system so it does a better job of highlighting the good stuff, and minimizing the nasty stuff. (That’s coming.)
Do we think everything we’re doing is on the mark and the answer to these problems? We’re hopeful that it is, but well aware that we may be off-base. We’ll be watching the data carefully to see if we need to make course adjustments. But what we certainly do know is that the status quo was no longer working, and had us on the path to irrelevancy.
The site was broken. We’re now trying to fix it. So for all the hyperbolic hysterics about me wanting to destroy the community because [insert crazy conspiracy theory here], everything we’ve done is focused on trying to bolster it. Again, it doesn’t mean we’re perfect and have gotten everything right, but that’s the intent.