I'm not quite old enough at Daily Kos to have my own plank, as they say in the Navy, but I've been around for a while. How long have I been here? I've been here so long that I remember when...
- Meteor Blades, dhinmi, and Trapper John were front-pagers. Steve Gilliard and billmon had just wrapped up their terms and moved on to their own ventures.
- Ari Moulitsas had just been born!
- Markos was best known for being a former front-pager at MyDD (no, really) and a rabble-rousing political operative.
- We had real-live, epic trolls and psychos swimming in the shark tank. Fellow old-timers can chime in with a few names if they care to.
- Users had unlimited diaries. Then Kos asked to voluntarily limit ourselves to two, then mandated it. Then it was one and right about then is when he suggested my own blog might be a good idea. Coincidence?
- There weren't recommended diaries.
- Cheers and Jeers didn't routinely make the recommended list.
- BillinPortlandME didn't walk around with his finger up his nose and wearing underwear on his head. Wait, no, I don't remember that...
- Theoria posted "What's Your Fucking Problem?"
- I posted not just "Brothers and sisters," but "The Word for the Week."
- A single user could read all the diaries posted in a single day, though it did make his eyeballs bleed.
- Carl Nyberg handed out 2's like they were Chiclets.
- Just saying "Pie!" was enough to start a foodfight.
- Politicians thought we were such filthy rabble that they refused to have anything to do with us, much less post a diary here.
- Markos was a Deaniac, Armando was for somebody else, and one of the leading debates on the site was whether Naderites deserved mere scorn or actual ball-punching.
- We were surprised to meet one another in Las Vegas and discover that the actual quotient of DFH's was rather low.
Well, that's about it. The rest is a blur of Republicans and meat. Some things never change, of course: then as now, Meteor Blades was a badass from whom you felt lucky to receive mojo, the vast majority of fellow users were idiots and active psychotics, your own contributions being well-reasoned and insightful, and first! comments were cause for major downvoting.
As we enter into the dKos v.4.0 era, I wonder what the other geezers remember, fondly or otherwise?
