Scoop-powered Daily Kos is a beautiful thing: it truly is. The sheer amount of information and ideas communicated here is staggering. And more importantly, everybody has a voice. Unlike some rightist blogs that are really just one-person soap boxes (such as Instapundit), Daily Kos has a vibrant and interactive community. Besides the multiple front-page editors,
everybody can comment, rate, and post their own diaries like I am doing now.
But with increased volume comes a number of problems. These problems (diary speed causing near-randomness in which diaries are fortunate enough to get recommended, redundant diaries being deleted, and so forth) are well recognized by most Kossacks, but still merit further discussion. So, here we go (in the extended entry, that is).
I cannot remember where I first heard this, but there is a very pertinent quote to the situation we have here at Daily Kos: when everybody has a voice, nobody has a voice. That is, when everybody is busy talking, nobody is listening. Unfortunately, total free expression is just not a viable system for a community on the scale of Daily Kos. I am of course not proposing total restriction (a la Instapundit) either, but rather some sort of compromise solution. However, I'll go into more detail on that after I flesh out the problem a bit more.
Likely the most significant issue is that of the recommended diaries. I find that recommended diaries almost always lead to fantastic discussions, even if I think the actual diary itself is lacking. There are a few recommended diaries every now and then that aren't really strictly constructive but rather just cathartic (I'd say the various "Thank you (whoever)" diaries that often bubble up are a good example), and that's fine too. The problem is not with the diaries that are getting recommended particularly, but rather with the diaries that aren't.
Many very good diaries fly by, buried under page after page of short redundant diaries that just link to a story and say "isn't that cool" without really providing analysis or anything new. But just increasing the number of recommended diaries or decreasing the threshold to become recommended would defeat the purpose: having more recommended diaries would make each single diary have considerably less value, as they'd have less time for full discussion and exposure (truly the main and only benefit of the recommended diaries list).
Ideally, a system could be constructed that harnessed the potential in these unrecommended diaries without spoiling the existing recommended diaries system. As mentioned in the title of this diary, the problem is that of signal and noise. As the volume of posting has increased at Daily Kos, the signal to noise ratio has decreased. I remember MovableType Daily Kos, and while it certainly had its problems, signal to noise was not really one of them (though sometimes it was a bit in the open threads).
When I say "signal to noise", I am referring to the ratio between entries and comments that truly provide new and insightful information (signal) and those that are just repetition or otherwise unconstructive (noise). I don't mean to be overly critical or elitist in saying this: I consider the vast majority of everything we all do, myself included, to be noise and not signal. Finding true insight is rare. But there is at least some of it bubbling through this diary section on a regular basis, and it quite often slips between the cracks.
Now for my actual proposed solution: I believe that users (perhaps after they've been registered for a certain time and/or achieved a certain mojo level) should be able to volunteer as "Diary Spelunkers" or something like that (admittedly a ridiculous term, but you'll see what I mean in a second). It wouldn't take too many: if only 0.5% of the Daily Kos community was willing to do this job, it'd probably be more than enough. People could volunteer to do it once a week, and we'd still have hundreds of spelunkers a day.
And what this job would actually consist of is this: the "Diary Spelunkers" would dive in through the previous day of (unrecommended) diaries, the ones that just flew by the frontpage in a scant 15 minutes. If and when they see a diary that they feel is deserving of more discussion than it got, they'd flag it. If enough "spelunkers" flag a diary, it can go to some sort of special "best of the days diaries" or "most underdiscussed yet worthy diaries of the day" or some category like that. Maybe a daily thread posted to the front page could highlight each of these diaries in a sentence or two, or they could be listed on a separate page or in a box down the side.
Obviously this still needs to be fleshed out a bit, and ideally it would result in some new code at some point (though if we just go with posting a daily front page thread saying "the best diaries of the day that you probably didn't see" that'd be pretty simple). Still, I think it'd be worth it: while the recommended system works pretty well for fostering discussion and hitting the really big topics of the moment, it's not a complete quality control system. A lot of good writing falls through the cracks, and it'd be nice if a little more in-depth peer moderation could bring it to light.
Thanks for reading, and depending how this thread goes I might pull out some more of my diary suggestions (particularly regarding the deletion of redundant diaries, which while I often agree with in principle it's a shame because it also destroys comments in the thread, many of which were actually good).