Choose Your Own Goliath

Matthew Sheffield and Noel Sheppard respond to my explanation for Daily Kos's success and right-wing blogs' inability to clone it.

Daily Kos got its start virtually at the same time America was discussing going to war with Iraq in 2002. Irrespective of the poll numbers at the time favoring an invasion, the anti-war crowd is always active, vocal, and easily incited… On the web, Kos filled the gap.

That helps explain why dKos got so popular, but I'd argue again that Moulitsas' willingness to open up the blog and let the readers run it was crucial. He was far more interested in horse race stuff and outsourced the war writing to Steve Gilliard (R.I.P.) and to a lesser extent Billmon. And dKos's insane popularity spike came in and after 2004, by the time critical war coverage was everywhere.

[A]s presidential candidate Howard Dean's anti-war cry began to get noticed, he hired Moulitsas as a technical advisor, and started an Internet fund-raising campaign that was not only far beyond what other candidates were doing, but rather revolutionary for its time. The ancillary benefit for Kos was that it drove traffic to his website comprised largely of Dean supporters opposed to the war.

But that doesn't explain how dKos took over the world. Patrick Ruffini was a Bush '04 consultant and grabbed new and faithful readers once Bush won and he re-launched his blog. But his was an owner-driven and -written blog where the most involvement a reader could have was taking a poll. I doubt Dean fans who went to Kos would have stuck around if his site wasn't so democratized.

Sheffield and Sheppard argue that Kos grew quickly because elected Democrats, being losers for the first four years of the site's existence, also participated in the forums. That's true, but it doesn't seem like it was a huge factor. And then they argue that this is all about focus:

When you compare the main victories achieved by rightish bloggers—the ouster of Dan Rather, the exposure and resignation of CNN's Eason Jordan, the various fauxtography-related firings, the Scott Thomas Beauchamp affair—with those of liberal blogs—booting Trent Lott from his Senate GOP perch, the George Allen macaca "scandal," greater online fund-raising prowess—the pattern becomes clear: liberal bloggers attack Republicans while conservative and libertarian blogs attack the media establishment.

Kos readers are actually convinced that the media is biased towards Republicans and war, but this is right, they're more focused on electoral politics. The most successful election-focused conservative blog, Daschle v. Thune, was launched on the premise that South Dakota media was biased against Republican candidate John Thune. Most Democratic blogs are launched as a way of coordinating and stoking grassroots support, not attacking the media. This might have more to do with psychology than with the reality of media political alignment. Liberals believe they can bypass the press to elect their candidates; conservatives believe that they need to "fix" the press before their candidates will get a fair shot.

I don't think I've made this point before: the dKos style forums, which are much like the Slashdot or Plastic.com forums, are more fun than old-style threads. Anonymous commenters get to rate each other's work, get into side debates that don't derail the main thread, and if they want to they can become stars. The blog has "fellows" whose work gets to go at to the front of the main page, and they got their start just posting comments on the site. The fun factor and the possibility of fame (and internet fame is increasingly similar to real fame) are huge assets, more important to dKos's success than any external political factors.