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MyDD: “Death by Meta” Online?
By Lowell | March 26, 2007
Over at MyDD, Chris Bowers has a thought-provoking post on whether a key “danger of online political communities” is what he calls “death by meta.” Bowers argues that what used to be called “meta” - discussion of “the role of the progressive, political blogosphere within the broader political ecosytem” - now has “come to refer to something much more specific: discussions centering on the internal dynamics of a small number of prominent personalities within the Dailykos-centric community and blogosphere.” And Bowers obviously doesn’t like it:
“Meta” discussions have become utterly destructive to the broader goal of coalition building, as they increasing become based on cults of personality, divisive factionalization, violations of privacy, accusations of conspiracy, charges of prejudice, and petty name-calling.
[…]
…Now, it means flame wars, rather than theory. It means accusations of conspiracy, prejudice and “selling out,” rather than discussion. It means holding up personalities on a pedestal and factionalizing into groups around those pedestals, rather than building coalitions. It also means that some people just can’t get over problems the have on Dailykos.
Interestingly, in what might be a “meta” moment of its own, Markos himself comes and comments on the MyDD “meta” diary about why Daily Kos has gotten more “meta” since its traffic surged to half a million visits per day. Kos writes about MyDD:
This site clearly fills a niche, and it’s a more professional one. That definitely has something to do with the dynamics Bowers described. But, I doubt the same feel would exist if traffic hit 500k.
And when MyDD grows to that level, you will see those dynamics change. In this world, size definitely matters.
So here’s a “meta” question for a “meta” diary: Does larger size lead to more “meta,” or does more “meta” lead to larger size? Does the tone simply flow down from the top dog on a given blog? Or is there something else going on? I’m not totally sure what makes one blog more “meta” than another, or whether it is a potentially bad thing as Chris Bowers (”Death by Meta”) argues, but I think it’s a topic - “meta” or otherwise” - worth discussing.
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