We are now less than 500 away from user number 200,000 here on Daily Kos. That's more than three times what there were when I signed up a little over three years ago. It surprises me to see how my username pops up kind of towards the beginning of Recommenders lists sometimes.
Though you shouldn't think you can sign up for #200,000 yourself. At least not if #100,000 is any guide. That one was "held", as was 100,001 - at the time the username was the same as the number. Since then, it got a username (auctioned) but that user "docrobert" has no comments, diaries or even ratings on file - nor does the user with palindromic UID# 10001. So now, more than 2 years have passed, and the odometer's gonna roll over again soon. Time for a little reminiscing.
I do tend to think of myself as a late arrival, even though I've been here longer than most of the current users. I suppose it's time to get over that notion. Anyhow, here's some meta site memories that pop to mind, and there's plenty more I've forgotten so add some in the comments:
- I can't help it: I still crack up thinking of the goofy phenomenon known as ErrinF - complete with Scout Finch in Chicago with that on her name tag. The mother of all GBCW diaries, Delete my fucking account, Kos was especially silly since it was posted when Kos was on vacation. And it inspired a slew of copycat diaries. To this day, whenever you see something in the format of Verb my f***ing noun, Kos, it harkens back to that ground zero.
- The Great Pie Fight was before my time, although I have read some descriptions of it. It involved an ad (for something related to Gilligan's Island) which raised some objections over sexism. To this day, when "pie" appears as a poll option, it refers back to that time.
- There are what I call the Ancient Ones, once prominent users who moved on (with or without the benefit of spectacular flameouts). Armando was one of the most visible ones - a fierce debater, discussions with him often pushed way over to the right hand side of the column. Armando had a really hard time letting anybody else get the last word. He often commented by saying "Heh", and it still appears today as an artifact of him. For quite some time, "Armando" was often included as a poll option - a kind of alternative to "pie"
- High Impact Diaries, posted every day by jotter (twice on Sundays) is a little noticed corner of Daily Kos. He invented a unit of "impact" and named it after Bill in Portland Maine, creator of the wildly popular Cheers & Jeers series. One of the best ways for anything to get wide attention is if BiPM features it in C&J. But BiPM didn't exactly arrive full blown, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. The first C&J only had two comments. Yeah, two! That first one was posted 12/10/03, which means the series is just about old enough for kindergarten now. It took most of a year of 5-day-a-week postings for one from the series to garner 100 comments - that was on 10/5/04. So, new diarists, keep that in mind - even some of the best of the best here have taken awhile to catch on.
- We've had dogs who posted diaries over the years, too - from pastordan, Bob Johnson (who posted one of the comments in that first C&J). Though I haven't noticed too many lately: Did they fall out of fashion when the daily diary allotment dropped from two to one?
- Another of the Ancient Ones: MSOC (aka MaryScott O'Connor) was the queen of rants, weaving about the highest proportion of swear words into her posts of anyone ever. And it was artful to boot. She had a rather unpleasant demise which I shall not delve into now.
- In the old days, there were ratings from 1-4 for comments, plus zero for trusted users. There were 4=excellent, 3=good, 2=marginal and 1=I forget; 0=troll rating, more recently changed to "hide rating". Ya know how people get bent out of shape over HRs sometimes? Back in those days, there were people who'd get upset at getting a "3" rating. I once asked someone outraged by a "3": What's so bad about "good"?
- Pooties. Those originated with PhillyGal, who had a cat by that name. At one point someone posted a diary complaining about too many pooties (this was long before the days of the cheezburger site), and there was a vigorous reaction, I think in C&J. Many of the animated gifs of kittens with automatic weapons date from that time.
- Ajax. Once upon a time, you had to type all your own HTML. Only later did we get these fancy editing windows with buttons for various common bits of HTML code. A lot of other blogs still require typing that HTML out, so those days are easy to revisit. Maybe that's part of why people cross-post - format here, then cut and paste elsewhere.
There's lots more, of course. But I've prattled on long enough. Just a bit of retrospective nostalgia on the occasion of the the imminent odometer flip in the user numbers.