Where we want to take Democratic Underground

[Skinner]

This post is long, we know. If you're not interested in this stuff, you aren't required to read it. This post is being provided for those DU members who are curious about how the administrators feel about DU, and where we hope to take the website in the future. --Skinner

It's been a while since the Admins have talked about Democratic Underground with all of you, so we felt it was time to give you all some idea of how we feel about the website, and where we want to go with it.

Overall, we're feeling really good about the website and about the community as a whole. Our August fund drive was the most successful in a while. Our membership is continuing to grow. We've opened up a new revenue stream by running advertisements on selected pages. The vast majority of people here seem basically pleased with the website. And the problems we deal with on a day-to-day basis are no worse than they have ever been, and are basically the same issues we've always had to deal with.

Still, we do recognize that we face a number of important challenges. We have a lot of ideas, and there are a number things that we believe we can improve about the site.


WHAT IS THE POINT OF ALL THIS, ANYWAY?

Why is there a Democratic Underground at all? Why do we, the admins, spend all day running this website, other than to collect a paycheck each month? What purpose does DU serve?

Bottom line: We believe it is vitally important that progressives have the means to bypass the mainstream media filter, to share news and information directly with each other.

In a way, blogs on the political left serve a purpose that is similar to talk radio on the political right. We don't have to wait for the mainstream media to cover a story; we can get it out to our members ourselves. Or if the mainstream media buries a story on page C75, we can put it on our page 1. And if there is enough buzz created here on DU and on other blogs, then there is a chance that the story will get picked up by the mainstream media, and might even run on page 1. We are the incubators of the progressive message. But we also understand that in order to be effective, we have to strike a balance between openness and censorship, between throwing open the floodgates and trying to maintain some standards of credibility. We are a partisan website, we are not the mainstream media by any stretch of the imagination, but we don't want to be so far out of the mainstream that we are like kryptonite.

Democratic Underground works in a much more chaotic way than other blogs, because our medium is different. Since we're a discussion forum, we don't have one person setting the tone or agenda for everything that gets posted here. Sure, the admins and moderators can nudge things in one way or the other. But for the most part DU reflects the interests and attitudes of the membership that come here and participate. The potential of DU is this: If 20,000 messages are posted here every day, inevitably a number of them are going to be important. Our challenge is to do what we can to help the best stuff rise to the top.

For people who come to DU for many hours every day, DU lives up to it's potential. And in fact, many "heavy users" are the life-blood of DU, because you are the ones who are throwing up the most stuff. But for people who stop by for a few minutes each day, Democratic Underground does not live up to it's full potential. The overwhelming number of threads (some good, some not-so-good), and the wide range of personalities (some good, some not-so-good), can make it very difficult to find the good stuff.

Our goal is to build a community where progressives can come together to share ideas and participate in discussions in an atmosphere of mutual respect. We want this to be a place where together members can support progressive values and Democratic candidates. We want this to be a place that is fun and friendly, but we also want it to serve a serious purpose. This community does not always live up to the goals we have for it, but overall we think we do a pretty good job. Still there is plenty that could be done to make this community even better.


OUR BIGGEST CHALLENGES

Of all the issues that we face, we believe the two most important are the following: 1) Managing growth, and 2) Fostering quality content.

Managing growth is pretty straightforward, and it's something that we have been doing since this website began. The most obvious part of managing growth is making sure that we have enough computer hardware in place to deal with the massive amount of traffic to the site. We've seen a large increase in traffic to our site since Katrina, and we've been working with our ISP to beef-up our hardware. Our goal is to put in place a system that (hopefully) is powerful enough to take us all the way through election day 2006. Our ISP gave us a proposal last week which would more than double our power and our monthly costs. (Yikes!) We are hoping that the new ads on DU will cover the increased costs, so we don't have to pass them over to all of you.

The other part of managing growth is figuring out ways to modify our software so more and more people can enjoy the site. This is much more complicated, and requires that we come up with a number of creative ideas, some of which work and some which ultimately don't. Software changes or rule changes are not always welcomed by all the members, particularly if they include trade-offs that limit or change the way members participate here. We understand that many people are resistant to change, but we are committed to making sure our members have the best, most up-to-date website we can provide. Even though it can be upsetting to some members, the admins know that we can't afford *not* to change. As DU changes, the software must also change.

Fostering quality content is a much more complicated issue, but it is one that becomes more important as more people participate on the website. Obviously, the large number of participants is a good thing, and greatly increases the potential that interesting, insightful, or useful information gets published here. However, the downside is that if something particularly good gets posted, it can easily get drowned out by everything else. We feel that this is a particularly serious issue in the General Discussion forum, where the large number of people is both a blessing and a curse. To a certain extent, it is also an issue in the Lounge, but in that forum it is not so much of a threat to our core mission (sharing and discussing news and information relating to politics).

Whatever changes we propose to deal with these issues, our most important guiding principle is this: First, do no harm. We are mindful of the fact that many people like coming to DU exactly the way it is right now. In our efforts to "improve" we have to strike a balance between making DU "better", and still letting people use it in much the same way you always have. We know that part of what makes Democratic Underground interesting is the chaotic nature of the place. But we do wish that there were greater incentives and rewards in place for those individuals who want to write serious, insightful, long-format topics rather than just chat. The problem with the discussion forum format is that it does tend to reward those behaviors that aren't always best for the community as a whole.


POSSIBLE CHANGES

We have a number of ideas for changing and improving Democratic Underground. We haven't made a final decision on any of them at this point, and we expect this blueprint will change quite a bit over the next few months. But in the end, it is our hope that by DU's 5th birthday on January 20, 2006, we will have instituted a number of changes to get Democratic Underground to the place where we think it should be, to better realize the immense potential we have here. Here are some of our ideas:

DU Journals. This is a big upgrade, and it is something we are almost certain we want to do. The idea is to give each of you your own dedicated "Journal" where you can showcase your best postings. We see it as basically a blending of the discussion forum format and the blog format. At your discretion, messages could be cross-posted on the discussion forum and your journal. If there is a member whose postings you find particularly interesting, you can easily keep track of what they post by going to that person's journal. Our hope is that the best journals would collect recommendations and build a reliable following of readers, which would give that "journalist" an incentive to continue to create quality content. We see this as a win-win for the individual and the community. The community gets a new way to experience DU and interesting content to read, the individual has the chance to attract readers from Democratic Underground's ready-made audience of tens of thousands of daily visitors.

Improving the General Discussion forum. As we mentioned above, we feel that the General Discussion forum has reached the point where the large number of visitors is limiting its usefulness. The speed and chaos of the GD forum are part of what make it fun, but they also make it very difficult to find the good stuff. We are working on a significant upgrade to the GD forum, which (hopefully) will not change the way most people use it, but will make it easier for members to find the stuff that interests you (or hide the stuff that doesn't).

The idea is to classify each thread in the GD forum into a particular topic area, and then cross-list that thread in GD and in an appropriate topic forum. To the average user in the GD forum, there will not appear to be any difference in the way the forum works. However, this new set-up will have a number of advantages, and will pave the way for a number of cool future upgrades. Among them: Giving members the ability to customize GD to exclude or include topic areas you choose; Significantly increasing the life of individual threads, which will remain open for discussion in their assigned topic forum, even after they are no longer active in the GD forum; Giving members the ability to easily hide threads about hot topics which occasionally flood the forum (Pope, Terri Schiavo, Katrina/Rita, etc.); and Driving more traffic and content to the less-used topic forums. It would also have the positive side-effect of spreading around server resources and thereby improving site performance.

Improving the Latest Page to create a single "Discussion Forum homepage" We have come a long way since we first created the Latest Page many years ago, and we think it's time for the Latest Page to change, too. The idea is to create a one-stop "homepage" for the entire discussion forum, which brings together content from other pages. The New Latest page will include Latest Threads, along with the most-recommended threads from our Greatest Page, and recent news stories from the Latest Breaking News forum. The "My Forums" area would be improved to give you even greater control over what forums you see or don't see.

Reorganization and consolidation of forums & groups. It's been nearly a year since we created the "My forums" function and created a whole bunch of narrowly-targeted forums and groups. Overall, we think it's been a huge success. But there are a number of underutilized forums and groups, and we feel it's probably time to shut a few of them down or combine some similar topics. We will probably re-organize where some of the forums are kept. The "Politics & Issues Forums" folder would become "Topic Forums." The 11 forums in the under-utilized "Non-political forums" folder would probably be split between the "Topic Forums" folder and the DU Groups. Also, we want to simplify or broaden some of the names of some forums, which would then represent the different topic areas for the new General Discussion forum.

Integrating articles with the discussion forum. Currently there is a pretty strict separation between our articles and our discussion forum. In the context of the DU Journals idea and the GD upgrade, we are thinking that we may also change the manner which we publish articles to our homepage. Our regular features would still be guaranteed their spot on the homepage. But our idea is to have all of our articles posted on the discussion forum first, and based on the response of the members of the discussion forum, the most popular stuff would make it to the homepage.

Greater customization. Rather than try to force Democratic Underground to meet the various expectations of a diverse group of people, we want to continue to give you greater customization options so you can experience DU in the way that you like. We are considering upgrading the ignore feature so it works more like a "personal tombstone" almost entirely wiping out any trace of anyone you chose to ignore. We are also considering the possibility of a member-initiated mutual ignore, so two members can agree between themselves to ignore each other. The proposed change to the GD forum would eventually give members the ability to customize that forum to include or exclude topics of your choosing.

Rule simplification & enforcement simplification. Overall, we're pretty happy with the rules as they stand right now, and we think DU is in a pretty good place because of them. Still, we believe that if we put into place greater tools for members to customize DU on their own, and if we make an effort to better separate the quality topics from everything else, then there might be some room for us to get rid of some rules and/or simplify the rules. And there also might be some room for us to ease up just a little on certain types of enforcement. We can't make any promises at the moment. But if other things go well, it is something we hope to do.

As a first step, we are asking the moderators to lock threads less often during the next moderator term. We're going to continue to shut down threads where the first post is problematic. But we really hope that it will be possible to keep good thread topics open, even if a small number of people try to disrupt them in their responses. Elad has programmed a few nifty functions that (we hope) will make it easier for us to do this. We now have the ability to remove a single sub-thread from a thread that is otherwise perfectly fine and should remain open. And we may implement a function that automatically blocks an individual from posting in a thread if they get a post removed from that thread.

Mission statement. We think it may be worthwhile for us to finally write a public mission statement. It seems like everyone else has their own ideas of what DU is for, and perhaps its time for us to make it a little more obvious what we would like for our website.

Views counter. We think Elad may have figured out a way to bring the "views" counter back without killing our servers. We're still testing it out, but hopefully we can unveil that upgrade soon.

Focusing on what we do well. It is obvious that the most popular feature of Democratic Underground is the discussion forum, and our greatest strength is our large, diverse community of people. We believe that we can best serve our visitors if we focus on what we do well. With this in mind, we may decide to shut down or give away some currently existing features of our website which are not utilized as much as we had hoped.

Administrator priorities. Many of you may be aware that the admins spend a large proportion of our time dealing with a lot of day-to-day minutiae, and focusing on the personal problems of individual members. We try very hard to be sensitive to the needs of our members, and we want you all to be happy. But we can't help thinking that this is not the best use of our time, and by focusing so much on individuals' problems we may not be doing what is best for the website as a whole. We're not sure what changes (if any) we are going to make, but we do believe it is time for us to re-evaluate some of our priorities.


Anyway, that should give you some idea of where the admins are right now. Overall, we're feeling extremely positive about Democratic Underground, even if we do feel a little burned out sometimes. Please feel free to post polite questions or comments in this thread. We're pretty busy today, so we can't promise that we'll be able to respond to all of your posts, but we promise that we will read them all.

Skinner, EarlG, & Elad
DU Administrators