Modes of Control and Hierarchy

The Daily Kos structure is a mixture of autocracy and democratic collectivism, with an emphasis on the latter. A brief run-down of its hierarchy:

• Markos Moulitsas, who owns the servers; has ultimate say and direct control over site.
• Contributing staff (about a dozen) plus three to four diarists chosen each year who can post on the main page and moderate conversations, promote diaries to the main page.
  
• Longtime "trusted" users with enough positive ratings who can vote to hide, or "troll-rate," comments they deem offensive or inflammatory.
  
• Regular users who can post one diary every day, comment on and recommend diaries or other users' comments.
  

An outline of Daily Kos' modes of control:

• Participation: Users can read and comment on other members' diaries, choose to recommend or hide comments. Enough recommendations gets a diary bumped up to greater exposure on the "recommended" list; enough hide ratings gets user banned.
  
• Filtering: Contributing staff can elevate diaries and assemble a section of "rescued" diaries each night that they feel have been overlooked. Automated algorithms determine when a user becomes "trusted," as well as when to ban a "troll."
  
• Pressure: Users can threaten to boycott the site or desert en masse, a la Clinton supporters who felt belittled, but this generally doesn't change much if it involves a minority group in the community. However, users did pressure the site to change its ratings policy after members got into a kerfuffle, with factions throwing troll-ratings at one another. This led to the rule that a user can only troll-rate three times a day; simplified ratings to a recommend/hide option; and gave only trusted users the latter ability.
• Community norms: This is where the whole democratic/collaborative notion comes into play. Informal norms influence what the community deems acceptable for posting (diaries are in theory supposed to take 2 hours to write, as one has only one shot a day; in the age of Twitter, this is clearly not always the case); what the collective values are and where it stands on issues (this is often debated).
• Administrative sanction: Moulitsas rarely deletes a diary and is quite forgiving, but users are banned more frequently (autoban feature). He did take the unusual step of purging the site of all 9/11 conspiracists in 2005, when they were still a vocal and active group on the site. Moulitsas said that the community is one based "in reality" and there were other places in the blogosphere for them.