Kos Gives Members the Finger

Markos has finally come clean on his utter contempt for his "community" members. As per BostonJoe, whose diary on Kos's most recent proclamation is going strong in its second day on Booman Tribune. (Also front paged at My Left Wing.)

Yeah! (2+ / 0-)

People are so fucking moronic on this site that unless you hold their hand and personally guide them to the candidate blogs, they have no chance in hell in finding them!

No thanks. They're going to have to earn their support the old fashioned way -- by working for it.

by kos on Sat Feb 03, 2007 at 08:59:16 PM PST

What led up to this dis of his membership? Why the dis of his blogroll, of course.

I have updated the blogroll. It now includes only sites I visit regularly and group blogs from states I expect to become hot battlegrounds either this year (like KY) or next. The state-specific group blogs will come and go as states become politically hot and cold. Quite frankly, I now spend most of my blog-reading time in those group blogs looking for information on the House, Senate, and governor races I think will be most competitive.

I knew Kos had no respect for all the "little people" who write the content and provide the page views for his site when he referred to his feminist members as the "sanctimonious women's studies set." But a lot of kossacks aren't feminists and I guess they won't get it until he comes for them.

Kos doesn't care about his members except in as much as they serve his own objectives. It's a totally exploitive relationship. Like Andy Warhol who gave his hangers on "15 minutes of fame" as he amassed a fortune using their personalities, tragedies, and talent in his films and self-aggrandizing personality cult. He didn't pay them for their performances; not even the lovely Holly Woodlawn who was nearly nominated for an Oscar for "Trash." He supported their drug induced lifestyles until he tired of them or they self-destructed. Well Kos has created a similar "factory" with the Daily Kos; a gallery of characters with the personality, energy, and writing talent to put his name on the map. If Kos had to rely on his own writing ability and political insight to draw readers to the Daily Kos, he would not have gotten very far. Maryscott O'Connor has articulated what I have been saying about Daily Kos and "community" sites in general for some time.

It's been a mutually beneficial relationship ONLY since I started my own blog -- which was NEVER my intent. For the first 18 months of my life as a blogger, I blogged FOR Markos. Didn't think of it that way, but that;s what it was. The Rude Pundit linked to MY PAGE at Daily Kos. You know how many hits Markos got from that one link?

Meanwhile Alexander on the Booman Tribune thread may have hit on the real reason for the blogroll purge:

I just went through the sites on his blogroll: there was only one Scoop-powered site -- Political Cortex -- but that has a radically different layout. I think that that is part of it: he is afraid of competition from other Scoop sites. And that makes sense: the more Scoop-powered political sites I learn about, the less time I spend at dKos.

Explains a lot really. A lot of the now booted blogroll members were heavy hitters on Daily Kos who went off to start their own community blogs. After the aforementioned Daily Kos Pie War, for instance, there was a mass exodus to other sites. Kos sowed the wind and reaped a whirlwind, while more feminist-friendly Booman Tribune gave harbor to the lifeboats. Booman, in turn, took a lot of heat from Armando and other Kos enforcers for so-called "Kos-bashing" among the membership. Kos has pissed a lot of people off -- and banned a lot of people -- who now populate those other blogs. Many of them don't have very nice things to say about the "big orange." Competitors, especially competitors who give bandwidth to critics, will no longer be given a seat at the table.

Not only does this spell the end of what I have long referred to as the "Daily Kos family of sites," it bodes ill for the progressive community that thinks it has a voice in the blogosphere. It's not about giving average folks a voice and a platform. It's about launching a few high profile bloggers into the punditocracy and the political machine.

I think skippy, who has been blogging about this issue a great deal on his own site, put it well in a comment over at My Left Wing.

as i said at booman, kos (and to a lesser extent, duncan, and i love saying the words "to a lesser extent, duncan") have become the very things they purported to fight against in the beginning: insular, inbred out-of-touch pundits who have little relation to ordinary citizens.

and this hypocrisy is what angers me the most. it turns out kos wasn't all about citizens participating in government at all...he was about getting into political power, only via a new, untried route...the internet. and he espoused his huey long common-man rhetoric here, and we swallowed it, hook, line and sinker.