Now that's interesting
I posted this before in a comment.
Great Orange Satan Web Traffic
The "falling off a cliff after the election" chart is unmistakable.
But that doesn't make this worthy of an essay.
Then I happened to stumble across this.
Daily Kos has been on a steady decline this year (an election year, no less -- notice the significant drop in US rank after the election), with only a temporary boost around early-mid March (i.e., around the time of the Berner soft purge).Amusingly, Indian traffic also dropped significantly after the election. Any guesses why? Spammers? Outsourced shills?
EARLIER METRICS THIS YEAR
We can use the Internet Archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dailykos.com
Jan 8
Global traffic rank: 1,407
United States rank: 392
Indian traffic %: #2 spot, 2.3%Mar 4
Global traffic rank: 1,336
United States rank: 276
Indian traffic %: #2 spot, 2.1%Jun 7
Global traffic rank: 1,500
United States rank: 378
Indian traffic %: #2 spot, 1.2%Nov 10
Global traffic rank: 1,820
United States rank: 389
Indian traffic %: #4 spot, 1.0%Dec 9
Global traffic rank: 1,985
United States rank: 426
Indian traffic %: not in the top 5, so <= 0.6%Dec 30
Global traffic rank: 2,058
United States rank: 596
The Indian traffic number is VEERRRRY suspicious.
Can anyone give me reasonable answer for the Indian traffic that doesn't involve paid shills?
Comments
I think those that were longer than my 10 months would
have fun guessing which regular posters were paid for their efforts.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
I can't prove it
but I wouldn't be surprised if the site received funds from the State Dept's Global Engagement Center, their mission statement as much as says that they'll fund blogs. If not them, I'm sure they're clients of Brock, CAP, CTR or all of the above. How else could they tolerate all the fact-free narratives and CT?
The cream is getting tossed, and the dregs rule. Their trend line will continue downward for as long as this continues.
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
I saw this a while ago...
CTR press release
(©Fake News - Late Edition)
Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.
It's quite possible
but also possible that this dropoff in traffic from India corresponds to the election being over, no? My entirely unscientific opinion is that the majority of the obnoxious Hillary supporters there were either self-motivated and emotionally invested partisans or people with direct or indirect career ties to Washington or the corporate sector. Maybe it was all of the above.
Probably all of the above. David Brock did run a trolling group
The million dollars of organized trolling was real.
http://www.salon.com/2016//10/the_democrats_party_derailed_bernie_how_th...
I did not know about Brock until after the election. One thing I am wondering is if some of the most obnoxious supposedly pro-Bernie posters were also Brock trolls.
My opinion of Hillary has been getting steadily worse since Nov 9. The Russia BS is outrageous and the saber-rattling is frightening. I was willing to give Obama his share of the blame for the hawkishness when she was SoS, but the current situation goes way beyond being a poor loser.
I am coming to the conclusion that Hillary and some of her supporters are totally ethically challenged. Ironically it is not the negative views people here have about Hillary and her pals that have convinced me. It is the ongoing, if somewhat rudderless, toxic atmosphere at TOP.
People there were systematically taught to hate and abuse each other. Anyone who does not agree 100% with everything Hillary supporters say is viciously attacked. Expressing concern about poor children in Appalachia is attacked as 'supporting Trump' and is even attacked as racism.
Most people who post there are sincere, essentially decent human beings who have suffered very real emotional harm. The ones who have been harmed the most are the ones who have been taught to hate and abuse anyone who does not vote the 'right' way.
TOP jumped the shark when they went after Greenpeace
Greenpeace, for crying out loud. At that point I said 'Is nothing sacred? Is there nothing or no one they aren't willing to bludgeon?'
F the F'n D's
I'd say it was the 2008 election
that's when the tone changed dramatically IMO. Before then, it was a contentious place, but intellectually rigorous. One was required to support every claim with evidence. The commenters were bright, informed, relentless, and oftentimes witty. But with the 2008 election, the mindless reiteration of talking points infiltrated the discussion (mostly on the pro-Obama side). Arguments that would have been received with withering scorn previously (such as the ridiculous claim that Obama had foreign policy experience because he lived in Indonesia as a child; he understood the rest of the world!) were repeated and defended with nothing but noise (how could one rationally defend a comment such as the one above?).
From there, it devolved into a propaganda wing of the Democratic party. From the Leni Reifenstahl wannabe with her Obama idolatry (really creepy stuff IMO) to the fact that any criticism of Obama was received as racist, with the vehemence of the accusation correlating to the effectiveness of the critique.
The image that always sits in my mind when I read many of the members of DKOS is of a slovenly, lazy, shut-in with poor social skills and no real life. The sadness of this lot always strikes me when one of the them goes on about their stature at GOS or shares the minutiae of their lives, as if it would be of interest to the general public (that teacher guy and denise whatshername are particularly sad in this regard). Of course, this pathos is embraced and rewarded by others- because they have the same need to fill the emptiness in their lives. It's harsh, I know. But that is what runs through my mind. They're not interesting in exchanging ideas, but in finding some reason to lazily roll over in bed and check their comments.
The lowest point to me at GOS (although I admit it is hard to choose one) was the diary claiming that concern about NSA spying was an expression of white privilege by a particularly smug and pathetic poster who fits the descriptive above.
I recall some posters saying Sanders could never be an
effective president and didn't deserve the nomination because he was from Vermont which has a small % of African-Americans.
Twerpville was indentity politics central.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
Sanders has done more to help AA than Black Kos'
combined contributions, and the combined contributions of some of his other critics, or close to it. Hell, he did that with his amendment for community health centers in the ACA disaster. Note this doesn't mean I'm saying Sanders is some racial justice warrior, or that he has done more than anybody else who has an interest in helping overcome our race issues. I'm very selectively and pointedly criticizing one slice of one segment of one blog by pointing out that they're criticizing a guy who's done more than they have, without even making their issues a central point to his agenda.
So whenever I see folks over there criticizing him for issues on race I just roll my eyes. The man is way focused on economic issues and may have a blind spot on issues of race, but even his economic-issues-driven policies have done more for marginalized communities (not just black folks, but folks of all races) than the efforts of most if not all his detractors over there.
What a joke.
Wow. Harsh, but true
Looking back I'd have to agree on 2008 as a turning point, though I wasn't really paying attention to the inside baseball of the place since I was mostly disinterested in the primary that year. I did notice, however, that beginning in 2009-2010 the purity police came out in force and demanded that I delete something I wrote. Their intimidation worked, and then about 2 weeks later Jennifer Preston of the NYT broke the exact same story and I realized I'd probably been punked by the subjects of my investigation. (re: Veronica and Betty)
Those personal diaries are way too much. I was hoping they'd cordon them off to a separate list or something. I've always hated them because they are too easy to make fiction; most probably are. But they have a strong attraction to the readers there. (Is it "the readers" or a cult of 200?)
Also, too, you'd think a guy with "teacher" in his name would take greater care to make his writing grammatically correct, but that's fairly representative of the self-awareness you'd find there.
F the F'n D's
Clinton said that she'd confront both Iran and Russia.
Her hawkishness is her true nature, she represents the neo-liberal wing of the MIC, and supports her neo-con friends when it comes to foreign conflict and conquest. What she and the others desperately want is conflict with Russia, not wholesale war, but conflict. There are budgets and weapons systems at stake, as well as weapons clients to serve and geographic objectives to conquer.
Imagine if they could pull Kazakhstan into NATO! The contracts, the money, the resources, etc.
Typically these types are convinced that Russia will back down if confronted. These are the same actors that were convinced that the Iraq War would be a "cake-walk" that would pay for itself with oil revenue. Keeping them away from the levers of power was a major upset, and just might have kept us out of some serious disasters.
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
kos aspires to breitbart
always way short. Envy driven losses are a bummer, is why he lashes out all the time I think. Psych 101 for rich people lol ~shrug~. Breitbart dipped post-election too. similarweb says so anyway.
https://www.similarweb.com/website/breitbart.com?competitors=dailykos.com
whoa alexa opposite direction charts
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/breitbart.com hockey stick up
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dailykos.com downer trend
SomeoneScott Crowder said "her numbers never go up"after the D convention debacle. Must be contagious.Edit to add Scott's insight:
Quoting Lawrence O'Donell: http://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/the-last-word/2016-05-18
what is interesting
just might be proof of paid shills.
Just sayin'
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Orange State will never recover from $hilling $Hillary
And that conserva-dem Kos deserves to lose as much money as possible on that site too!
When I was a kid, Republicans used to red scare people, now it's the Democrats. I am getting too damn old for this crap!
India?
That would be foreign interference in our election! When Trump takes office he should get the seventeen intelligence agencies working on this!
"Please clap." -- Jeb Bush
India becaue they're cheap ass
Would anyone expect the Clinton Democrats to actually pay US minimum wages to real Americans? Not these cheap ass clowns - they won't even do that! Hell, no! Instead, they prove their globalist neo-liberal bent by hiring Indian trolls at just-above-slavery wages. Makes perfect sense to me and it's exactly what they would do.
Paid Trolls need a union.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
Ha!
Under-Bridge Lurker's Local 2018...
I want my two dollars!
Buy Backlinks for a website? Spam E-mails to send?
$30 US will get you a month worth of link or e-mail spamming by an Indian...
I'm the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House."
~John F. Kennedy~
Economic: -9.13, Social: -7.28,
Notice that the stats are inversely proportional to C99?
Maybe because the really interesting posters moved here?
Obama called Clinton the senator from Punjab
The Sanders campaign had a video of her as SoS speaking to an audience of Indians. Audience was basically worried about the flow of outsourced jobs from the US to India because election year rhetoric. She told them not to worry, the spigot will remain on. It was disgusting. I had sense that Indians are acutely aware what it means if American companies stopped outsourcing to India--job losses would be big. Maybe Indians saw TOP as pro-Hillary so generated some traffic??
I have been reading "Indian-English" for about 15 years, and I never noticed it any diaries or responses with it. One of the most telling characteristics is the lack of articles and forcing nouns to decline as going from "update" to "updation"
However, it would be interesting as to when the traffic from India occurred. If the traffic was the heaviest during America's daytime, then I would say trolls as there is basically a 12 hour difference--which means postings from India in the wee hours of the morning. If paid trolls, could be that they went to TOP to pick up talking points--maybe specifically written for them.
I didn't notice this kind of lexicon, either.
But traffic would have value on its own in terms of ad revenue. Maybe that was the impetus. Probably cheaper to pay for site visits rather than actual posts, too.
That makes sense.
Inflate the numbers during the heaviest parts of the election cycle. Just brainstorming here and maybe really off. But I wonder if the website was being probed so as to be hacked to get financial information from whatever databases kept up by the site. But more inclined toward your explanation.
My take
[video:https://youtu.be/lhckuhUxcgA]
So long, and thanks for all the fish
This meme was made based on the Nov. 30th stats
It was around the same time as Kos wrote his epic "Things I'm Angry About" rant.
And now - as of today - the global ranking is 2,200 (down 621 positions from 3 months ago) and the US rank is 603.
Ha Ha!
:)
Maybe too much truth for the McCarthyists? You have to be
gentle and slow with them. Otherwise their heads may explode due to cognitive dissonance. Also, never, ever, link to RT. They get scared shitless and will immediately crawl under their furniture and assume the fetal position. It can take hours to convince them it is safe to come out.
Here's a sufi story
that seems apt.
The Watermelon Hunter
"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."
I"ll have to go follow you...
I've got so many banned users in my follows i might as wee get them all... LOL
I'm the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House."
~John F. Kennedy~
Economic: -9.13, Social: -7.28,
Yup, you're good, all right,
Yup, you're good, all right, or they wouldn't have blocked you off.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Bwahahahahah! Crash and burn Kos!
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK | "The more I see of the moneyed peoples, the more I understand the guillotine." - G. B. Shaw Bernie/Tulsi 2020
Maybe we should start calling the place...
The Great Saffron Kali
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
I call it TOPlague/Pox. Rec'd!!
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
Fake News Readers?
I got out while the getting was good.
'What we are left with is an agency mandated to ensure transparency and disclosure that is actually working to keep the public in the dark' - Ann M. Ravel, former FEC member