Posted on 08/05/2007 4:54:00 AM PDT by Tree of Liberty
The netroots is reveling in Chicago, and the natural reaction is to ask, “Where’s our YearlyKos?”
It’s a good question, but ultimately a short-sighted one from an historical perspective. Go back and re-read the TNR piece on the netroots from May. Especially this part:
The Democratic leadership and the liberal intelligentsia seemed pathetic and exhausted, wedded to musty ideals of bipartisanship and decorousness. Meanwhile, what the netroots saw in the Republican Party, they largely admired. They saw a genuine mass movement built up over several decades. They saw a powerful message machine. And they saw a political elite bound together with ironclad party discipline.
This, they decided, is what the Democratic Party needed. And, when they saw that the party leadership was incapable of creating it, they decided to do it themselves. “We are at the beginning of a comprehensive reformation of the Democratic Party,” write Moulitsas and Armstrong.
Who is jealous of who here? YearlyKos, and also the Take Back America Conference, were almost certainly borne of the question “Where is our CPAC?” Some of those covering this act as though the idea of a conference with thousands of grassroots activists and Presidential candidates falling all over themselves to speak is totally unheard of on the right. Um, no. The netroots was built on Xeroxing the Goldwater-Reagan Revolution in the Republican Party. Almost always, it was conservatives who were the initial innovators.
When covering the netroots vs. the rightroots, reporters look at things through a particular frame that by definition excludes the vast majority of grassroots activity on the right. For something to be newsworthy in this space, it must be blog-based, it must have emerged in the last five years, and it must be focused on elections over legislative or policy outcomes.
The problem with this angle is that most of the conservative institutions online emerged in the late Clinton Administration or immediately after 9/11. At their peak, they were larger than Daily Kos, and arguably some still are. And they rarely receive any scrutiny because they don’t fit the frame. From a macro movement-building perspective, the left catching us to us is being covered as a need for us to catch up with something the left has invented anew.
And despite how unfair that narrative is, there’s something to it. The conservative analog to YearlyKos is 30 years old. The 800lb. gorillas of the conservative Web initially went online in the 1995-97 timeframe. And many have failed to innovate. They are still Web 1.0, where the Left jumped directly into Web 2.0 in the Bush years. Consider:
But Free Republic simply could not succeed in the world of the blogosphere, social media, and Web 2.0. The founders made the decision that they were going to hoard as much traffic on their servers as possible, by posting full-text articles (that eventually got them slapped with high-profile lawsuits from WaPo and the LAT). Early on, links to blogs were verboten. If you expressed your own opinion when starting a thread, that was a “vanity” and it was frowned upon. And fundraising for candidates was strictly forbidden, except for those pet causes approved by Jim Robinson. Their culture was very anti-blog and anti-original content.
Today, Free Republic increasingly finds itself marginalized. If you support Rudy Giuliani, who still has a decent shot at being our nominee, you’ve probably been purged. Free Republic’s walled garden approach worked in the days before blogs and broadband, but they actively resisted changing with the times. What we now have is a resource with more unique eyeballs than Kos but one that won’t work with others or push the envelope technologically. What a waste. Imagine how the history of the rightroots could have been different if Free Republic wasn’t still stuck in 1996?
What lessons did our activists learn from this? Freepers, who were our best online activists, never learned how to swarm to other sites, to take different kinds of actions, and to raise money for conservative candidates.
Unfortunately, that poses structural challenges that has starved the center-right of tech-savvy volunteers. Of all the issues to choose to make an impact on, the $400 billion-a-year defense apparatus is probably the most impenetrable. (Personally, I would hope that the Pentagon is not reading the blogs to decide their battleplan.) So on the war, we are pretty much limited to punditry, with the obvious exceptions of the milbloggers in the field.
And the media focus also fits the frame of conservative bloggers as pundits rather than activists. If we act as pseudo-journalists and commentators, it stands to reason that we’d think actually getting involved on a campaign is dirty business.
My co-blogger Hugh Hewitt refers to the “lead pipes” of the left-wing blogosphere that are slowly but surely contaminating the groundwater in the Democratic Party. But if their pipes are dirty, ours are leaky and badly in need of an overhaul. (At least if one wants to do more than just pass along positive information about the war.)
It would be one thing if we didn’t have any of these institutions, and could start from scratch just as the netroots did. My fear is that we have a bunch of institutions that still function somewhat well, but are long past their prime. With that, there is the danger we will slowly die without knowing it, as our techniques gradually lose effectiveness year after year. Just like newspaper circulation numbers. And there are a number of people on the right who are still complacent about this.
It seems to me that the numbers are there to do something great around the 2008 elections, and that all we need to do is effectively tap into the conservative blogosphere. I looked at N.Z. Bear’s traffic stats for political blogs with over 20,000 visits a day. And the visitor gap between left and right was lower than I could remember in some time: 1.2 million to 870,000 for the left (half of the left’s total was Kos).
Looking beyond the blogosphere, a place the MSM isn’t as familiar with, and you’ll see that the conservative Web is larger than the liberal Web. Sites like Townhall, WorldNetDaily, and Free Republic have monthly audiences that regularly beat Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, to say nothing of Drudge, which still reigns supreme.
So the people are there, just as they’ve always been. My concern with some of the sites I discussed above is that for ten long years, they haven’t been giving our people Web experiences that teach them how to be more than simple readers.
This is an amazing thread. There are posts from more posters with 1998 membership dates than any I’ve seen in a long time.
I think my number is in the 1100s, IIRC, and I’ll have my 10 year FR anniversary in less than 6 months.
Ten FReepin’ years!
Exactly.
I second that.
Notice the article doesn’t mention the breaking news aspect of FR.... perhaps our biggest and best trait.”
Especially when it breaks on FR before the MSM.
Breaking news is what I have always came to FR for.
I want to know what is happening in the world and FR is the premier site.
Everyone who's left FR shows up for BN, reporting or lurking.
I have wondered about the Wikipedia issue.I think the Wiki software, and even content, is more or less open source. If that's true, I'd wonder if John Robinson could grab a copy of Wikipedia, put it on a server, and allow us to edit it into a frankly conservative version of the "objective" (read, "liberal") original.
I can however envision that causing flame wars and opuses, since it would entail codifying precisely what conservatism is and is not. Conceivably it could be made to have several different flavors, so that factions could be represented in parallel universes sharing a common body of noncontroversial reference material . . .
I’ll come out and say I agree that FR has been marginalized. And that the marginalization has become publicly apparent enough that Bill O’Reilly decided to get his kicks in while FR was already down for the count.
1. Dozens if not hundreds of the most prolific and irl politically active Freepers have left FR permanently to create and build their own websites, blogs and media outlets. The brain drain is apparent. Most of those who left no longer cross post to FR. Original content is lacking because of it.
2. IN their place we’ve seen untold multitudes of keyboard kommandos and internet tough guys who post one line drivel in thread after thread, much of it openly racist and xenophobic.
3. FR has not implemented a proper search function yet.
4. Patently non-political threads abound, from sports to horses, to Lord of the Rings devotees to the inner minutae of the Anglican Church.
5. This site has lost Buchanan supporters, Keyes supporters, Forbes supporters, Guiliani supporters, McCain supporters, McClintock supporters, libertarians of most stripes, pro-choice/fiscally conservatice types, and hosts of others in purges. That is a lot of hacking, we’re down to the bone.
6. Anyone want to comment on how large numbers of original Freepers from outside the US have abandoned FR due to the xenophobic comments?
7. This FR could use
A. imbedded video,
B. better search engine
C. RSS/CSS/ATOM/etc feeds that work
D. and official function to ‘ignore user’, to make avoiding the idiots easier.
E. /. style commentary value voting system.
I thought the article was spot on. As much as all of us love FR, we ARE a “walled off garden party”. We basically just sit around and talk to each other. Kos has direct links to the DNC, and pumps cash directly into candidates/causes they support. They also have an army of unemployed/useless/college student types that they can call for political action in a heartbeat. If we have a “rally” it’s usually small because most of us have jobs and/or contribute to society. I don’t see an equivalent “right-wing” Kos anywhere, but if it existed, it would be very powerful.
If people disregard warnings, advocate abortion and infanticide, unfairly bash President Reagan, and swear at Jim, they can expect to be banned.
Tough luck.
They deserved it.
I agree with you, and also frequent those sites and others, I just wanted to point out that the owners of the 3 sites you mentioned all started their online punditry as rank and file freepers, and moved on when FR kept dragging down their enthusiasm to post.
The fact of the matter is that the blogosphere is largely responsible for the current stridency and lack of reason within those members of the Democratic party who are impressed by the passion of its members. One hears the latter screeching for a Bush and Cheney impeachment at any price and on any topic and the professionals just roll their eyes and nod their heads silently. Whatever, guys. Just keep the money rolling in.
FR is not, by design, in quite that same sort of incestuous relationship with the Republican party leadership, typified in my opinion by pundits such as Ruffini who appear to regard the whole thing as merely another form of mass marketing campaign, useful only insofar as it puts money in the coffers and feet in the street. It doesn't quite work that way, and attempts to force a discussion forum into the mold of activism are doomed to only partial success at best. Anyone who has tried to organize a FReeper protest comes to realize that. If that's your metric you're stuck with inadequacy or perhaps - just perhaps - you're using the wrong metric.
I've been here long enough to see a number of interesting turns. Anyone lamenting the current lack of civility on the site probably doesn't remember the old days before the advent of the Mods. FR isn't about boots in the street although it does that. It isn't about money funnels into any formal party. It isn't about high-profile media frenzies in Chicago that draw political candidates like a turd draws flies.
It is what it is, and I thank its members past and present for their stimulation, and especially I thank my host for his indulgence. You can opus out of FR but you can't opus out of the country. We're all in this together, like it or not.
My first glimmer of this was when I posted a thread a week or so ago, and it immediately became filled with graphics, songs, and stupid comments. It was a thread on dinosaurs & archeology. Someone posted a huge picture of Barney the Dinosaur (giant purple graphic). Someone else posted lyrics to a song, Alley Oop. Too bad the poster of a thread couldn't moderate their own thread, deleting unwanted posts. Only downside is, you might end up only talking to yourself. Which might not be so bad. Needless to say, all the garbage they posted were thread killers, and I immediately abandoned the thread after the song lyrics were posted. Why waste my time wading through all that stuff. Too bad we couldn't get the moderators on our side, to delete all the unwanted garbage.
I’ve been here for some time, myself. I originally found FR just as the Lewinsky story was breaking via the Drudge link. I rarely post, though. That’s not due to any disgruntlement, though. Rather, by the time I get to a thread, any point I wanted to make is usually already made, and more eloquently than I would have done, so why repeat it?
You didn’t join until 2000, and that’s the only public measure we have to go by - the Member Since date.
I started reading FR posts in late summer / early fall of 1997, before Lewinsky broke, but didn’t join until Jan ‘98.
Free Republic is not a blog, but we are the granddaddy of all Internet political blogs.
We've always posted the fact that we are NOT affiliated with any political party, news source or any other entity. We are a pro God, Life and Liberty grassroots conservative site and if that sometimes puts us at odds with the so-called conservative Republican party or the liberal RINOs within, then so be it.
We are the dissent, baby.
It was a thread on dinosaurs & archeology.”
What do dinosaurs & archeology have to do with a conservative
website?
As a conservative site, Free Republic is pro-God, pro-life, pro-family, pro-Constitution, pro-Bill of Rights, pro-gun, pro-limited government, pro-private property rights, pro-limited taxes, pro-capitalism, pro-national defense, pro-freedom, and-pro America. We oppose all forms of liberalism, socialism, fascism, pacifism, totalitarianism, anarchism, government enforced atheism, abortionism, feminism, homosexualism, racism, wacko environmentalism, judicial activism, etc. We also oppose the United Nations or any other world government body that may attempt to impose its will or rule over our sovereign nation and sovereign people. We believe in defending our borders, our constitution and our national sovereignty.
Here’s a Archeology forum. Go there and post consertive threads.
http://www.online-archaeology.co.uk/forum/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=1047
What do dinosaurs & archeology have to do with a conservative website?"
As a conservative site, Free Republic is also a forum for news of the day and a study of society in the U.S. and around the world (from a conservative point of view)...If we limited ourselves to the topics you mention, it would soon become a stale and unimaginative place to visit.
I have been lurking this forum since 1999 and I do understand some of the points you make concerning a brain drain. However a five or six fold increase in membership since then is sure to skew any real data concerning IQ's of members or quality of discussion.
I come here because I enjoy it...I like the topics, (from dinasaurs to Star Trek to Ron Paul) but mostly I enjoy the commaradary of my fellow Freepers... We may fight amongst ourselves from time to time, but when push comes to shove we know that we are a collective force to be reckoned with...
pandemoniumreigns
Do you have evidence that each and every of the oldtimers fell into that category?
I have yet to see one poster on FR “advocate” abortion and infanticide.
Or are you using some special definition of “advocate”? Alongside the special definition of “treasonous”?
Is there a reason you felt compelled to copy JR on your post?
I come here because I enjoy it...I like the topics, (from dinasaurs to Star Trek to Ron Paul) but mostly I enjoy the commaradary of my fellow Freepers...”
Same here. Read post 152 that I was responding to.
I’ve plowed through this entire thread looking for a historical perspective, selfanalysis, and introspection from fellow freepers. Your posts have been uniformly nasty and unenlightening. Maybe you should count to ten before posting before you embarass yourself again.
Obviously Jim Robinson can purge anyone or any discussion he so chooses. He created the FR and God bless him for it. However, it is important to tolerate intelligent dissenting viewpoints, otherwise the Freerepublic will become little more than a online echochamber.
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