I must admit, i am somewhat exasperated about the sad state of this site. I come here since 2003 and MyDD was a hotbed of progressive voices, with a clear message and mission: To elect more good democrats around the country. It was a partisan site with good and insightful commentary, with good tips how to improve our electoral chances etc.
Today, everything has changed. And not for the better.
But dont despair, there are things that can be done about it.
I make no secret out of the fact, that I think Jerome bears some responsibility for setting the tone on this (his) site too. So my main point would be that he should somewhat tone down his Anti-Obama-rhetoric. Shrillness inspires shrillness after all!
Secondly, and this is obviously being picked up by him: Make it harder for new users to register and aquire the right to post diaries and comments. This comes too late, to be sure, since this site has been infected by republican trolls and vicious Hillary and Obama supporters, who are inciting flame war after flame war. But its better than nothing. I would propose to install a 3 month waiting period for diaries and a one month waiting period, as soon as a presidential primary begins.
Thirdly: Since we are stuck now with the users we have here and since I am hesitant about banning lots of them giving MyDD potentially even more bad press, how about an option in user settings, to only show me diaries of users that are registered longer than either 1 month, 6 months, 1 year. Its harder obviously to do this with comments. But with ajaxified comments you could show only those comments already expanded which fit my criteria. All others would have to be manually clicked on to read. This would actually make diary comments more redable, cause you have to scroll less and can concentrate on higher quality comments by longtime users. Another option could be to. only expand comments of users who have a certain mojo. But I am afraid its already too late for this too, since ratings abuse has really demeaned this instrument on MyDD.
At the minimum I would recommend putting the registraion date at the very top of a users profile page and at the top of each comment. That shouldnt be too hard. Its probbaly just one more template tag to include in the comments output template.
And most importantly: Have VERY long waiting period before users are allowed to rate other users comments!!!!!!!!!!!! Like 6 months or so...
More specific, but also more difficult too sustain and administer would be the ability to block viewing of comments and diaries of certain users, like a ban list on community sites. IMO thats not very practical due to the sheer volume of trolls here. But its one more possible approach.
Let me finish by saying, that I really dont want to demean the many wonderful diaries and comments by longtime posters. Lets take back MyDD!
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