Anyway, I'm off to troll the diaries

TGoRMG has made me agree with his punk ass (Ok, to be frank, I neither remember nor care how often I agree with his "punk ass," but that's neither here nor there). In fact, I'm actually rather pissed I feel the need to involve myself in a conversation surrounded by the dreaded "Meta" word. It generally reminds me of a cluster of bourgeois plaid-laden sailing cap wearing motherfuckers setting up an iLAN at the local Starbucks just because they can.

Irrispective of that, K5 is suffering from a serious content problem. The front page will go for days without a new post and the stories that make it in are invariably of poorer and poorer quality. It's driving off potential new blood and, more importantly, is having an adverse affect on those still here.

As for myself...I stay here for two simple reasons. One is that I keep hoping the site will make a come back (though this seems an increasingly remote possiblity). The other is that I don't particularly have anywhere else to go. There aren't many sites out there with the entertainingly eclectic user-base of Kuro5hin. Even most of the trolls are entertaining, albeit distracting.

But that second point is part of the problem. The farther into the mud K5 falls, the more people it brings with it, like some sort of bloggish black-hole. When I started here, K5 mostly consisted of quality articles and few trolls. Those that did frequent the site were nothing more than a small amount of noise to the comparatively large signal. These days, now that I see fewer and fewer articles worth discussing (and the politics has subsided), I find myself icreasingly participating in the trollish behavior of the dreaded...Diary section. I've seen the same thing happen to a number of other users too. It's not that we particularly want to behave like asses, but that there's nothing else to do. One could argue that we should simply write the stories ourselves...but I've had two stories posted here already. You've all seen my writing; let's just call it a content generation mechanism of last-resort.

So what's to be done? I've got no fscking idea. Both TGoRMG's ideas seem relatively reasonable at this point in time. They're definitely not permanent solutions, since you've got to raise the standards once content starts to flow again. Another idea would be a larger and more participatory editorship, allowing more people to help with the daily "maintenance" of this site, perhaps enabling them to anonymize users or fast-edit the queue to post stories worthy of the front page immediately.

I doubt any of these ideas will actually be implimented, but it would be nice to see K5 return to it's old dynamic self soon.