I have hesitated to write this for a long time, but things are reaching the point where I can no longer contain myself.
(She kicks dirt. Shuffles feet. Looks down.)
As the site grows some of our newest community members are treating diaries as comments, or BB throwaways. They seem to interpret the Diary as a place to stick in their opinion on any old thing that crosses their mind.
As a result, the list of diaries that repeat the same citations, the same comments, and the exact same theme as the previous 100 published during any 12 hour period, is becoming silly.
OK. So, you read the New York Times this morning. You cruised Yahoo News. You even popped the Washington Post.
So did we all.
The thing you did not do was read the FAQ on posting diaries!
Breathless links, and a block quoted paragraph, followed by, "I just thought you would want to see this", is a tremendous waste of bandwidth. If you have nothing to add by way of analysis, no dissection of the intent, language, or theme of the article that would expand our understanding, stop doing this.
Others see the topic of the day and publish a diary that says, in effect, Me Too. Those who have been on the net for awhile, know that this is an incredibly irritating thing to do. But, as a result this uncontrollable impulse to join the conversation you pour chaff into the mix, burying the kernels of wheat that make this site so spectacular. Me Too goes in the comments section of an existing diary. It never deserves a diary of its own.
Many fail to read the titles of the first 20 or 30 diaries on the scroll before deciding to write a Hot New Diary about a topic that has 2 similar diaries on the Rec List, and 3 or 8, already published that very day. Redundancy is a waste of your time, and ours. Nobody is going to read yet another laundry list of reasons why Sarah Palin is a troglodyte.
But the real problem is that when these diaries appear, they push good, thoughtful, well reasoned and researched work, into oblivion before the whole community has a chance to read and comment.
Now, before anyone gets into an uproar, I realize that I post a lot of diaries. Some make the Rec List, and some are deemed "not worthy". <g> This is as it should be. Not every effort is brilliant. Not every effort touches a chord. Not every effort receives wide support.
But I can state, without hesitation, if I have something that I want to say, I can always find a diary that will support my comment. And if I see 6 other diaries, with the same topic, I know that adding to the traffic will not accomplish anything. I control myself.
There is an old joke.
A visitor to the House Chamber asked his Representative why debates go on for so long since it seems everybody is just repeating the same talking points.
"Well, Son," said the Representative, "Everything has been said, but not everybody has said it, yet."
Please make sure that the diary you just can't wait to write has not already been written several times. When you fail to do this, you push new, and novel material down the scroll too fast to be read.
(The link I have provided was "up" for less than 20 minutes, yesterday!! I am using this example because it is mine, and I have no authority to complain on behalf of anyone else.)
There is another issue (grab your tin foil hat, Folks) that has occurred to me. Whipping together a "Me Too", grabbing a random quote, or just reworking a theme that has already appeared several times in a given day, could be viewed as a denial of service attack. It clogs the list with dreck, and prevents serious topics from being seen and discussed. We know we have Trolls of various stripe. Do we also have people who are making a deliberate effort to jam the list and prevent the community from seeing things that might affect their thinking?
No one has the time to sit at their computer and read every diary. No one can evaluate the quality, or worth, of everything published. We have always relied on self-policing to insure quality. Perhaps it's time to institute that self-policing, again?