(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Kill It Before It Grows: The Enshittification of Daily Kos [1] ['Greg Dworkin', 'Angela Marx', 'Excorpflunky', 'Zct.Life'] Date: 2026-06-12 Sheriff John Brown always hated me For what, I don’t know Every time I plant a seed He said kill it before it grow He said kill them before they grow — Bob Marley, I Shot the Sheriff, 1973 Bob Marley wrote those words over fifty years ago. He could have written them yesterday. About this place. Sheriff John Brown didn’t need to taste the crops. Didn’t need to understand them, analyze how the gardener grew them, or engage in any way with them on their merits. The growing itself was the offense. The nourishment being offered to people who wanted it — people who sought it out, who came back for it, who were fed by it — that was what he couldn’t tolerate. Not the specific vegetable. The garden. The crowd around it. The autonomy it represented. Daily Kos has its own Sheriff John Browns There is a word for what is happening here. Cory Doctorow — writer, activist, and one of the sharpest diagnosticians of how the internet goes wrong — coined it to describe how platforms die. Not from competition. Not from neglect. From within. He called it enshittification. The slow, deliberate process by which a platform built on genuine value turns on the very things that made it valuable. Hollows them out. Drives them away. Salts the ground where they grew. I am going to show you exactly what that looks like here. And what it has already cost us. But first — an agreement Some of what follows touches on things that get people riled up. That’s understandable. These aren’t abstract questions — they’re about community, and belonging, and who gets protected here. So I’m going to use an analogy. Not to soften anything. What happened doesn’t deserve softening. But because a good analogy gets us to the same place faster, and with less of the noise that prevents us from actually hearing each other. And yes the post is long– if that isn’t your thing, bail out now! For everyone else, stick with me. The Garden Imagine a garden. Not your supermarket garden — not the rows of familiar, predictable produce you can find anywhere. Something rarer. Something tended with extraordinary care, planted with things you didn’t even know you were hungry for until you tasted them. Exotic, nourishing, irreplaceable. This garden existed here. On this platform. Tended by a writer treasured by many — someone who wove together personal truth, political insight, and genuine warmth in ways that were singular. Who engaged with grace even when challenged. Who rose above the noise, consistently, to point toward something higher. Who had little patience for those who claimed progressive values while working to silence anyone who didn’t fall in line — but who expressed even that impatience with a generosity that most of us couldn’t manage. People didn’t just read in this garden. They came to Daily Kos because of it. The garden created the traffic. The community that formed around it was something this platform should have recognized as precious — a demonstration of what Daily Kos could be at its best. Even those who disagreed with specific positions did so respectfully. They took care not to harm the garden just because they didn’t like a particular vegetable. The idea of the garden earned respect. That garden is gone now. Not disagreement but targeting Here is what you need to understand about how it was systematically destroyed. Sheriff John Brown never tasted a single vegetable. In many cases the people who came to tear this garden apart had never read a word of what was planted there. Not one post. Not one comment thread. They didn’t arrive with an informed critique. They didn’t arrive with a competing vision. They arrived with a targeting decision. They could have simply walked on past. They chose to attack The crowd around the garden was the trigger. The following was the offense. Someone had built something beloved — something that drew people to this platform, that fed them things they couldn’t find elsewhere — without authorization from John Brown. And that could not be allowed to stand. This is a critical distinction. Disagreement is not what happened here. Ideological conflict is not what happened here. What happened here was targeting. Systematic, escalating, and personal. The attacks grew vile. They grew cruel. They crossed every line that a community claiming progressive values should hold. And the platform’s protections failed. Consistently. Repeatedly. The wrong people were disciplined — or rather, the right people weren’t. The gardener absorbed attack after attack, engaged with grace that most of us couldn’t sustain, and finally — when the cost became unbearable — she stopped gardening. The vandals are still here. Already scanning for the next garden with a crowd around it. First person experience I have (now) all of THREE posts, and I have already seen this happen to me. Trust me to say that if you have not been on the receiving end of this, you have no idea how it truly feels. What it does to your mental health. And what I have seen is not a series of isolated bad actors having bad days. What I have seen is a pattern. Conscious or not, it functions as a strategy. Any garden much loved becomes a target. Any voice that builds a following outside approved channels (“Say what we want or STFU”) becomes a threat. The goal is not to win an argument about any particular vegetable. The goal is territorial. It is to ensure that no unauthorized garden — no beloved, nourishing, irreplaceable space that Sheriff John Brown didn’t sanction — ever grows here again. Kill it before it grows. The comments on a recent post told me everything I needed to know about what this pattern is doing to this community. Gardeners large and small, saying the same thing in different ways. Exhaustion. The quiet recognition that building something beautiful here makes you a target. That warmth won’t protect you. That a loyal readership won’t protect you. That rising above the attacks won’t protect you. Photo by Dikaseva on Unsplash The chilling effect is real. For every garden that gets salted, there are maybe three that never get planted. Every voice that had something rare and nourishing to offer — who watched what happened and decided it wasn’t worth the risk. We will never know what those gardens would have grown. That is the true cost. Not just what was lost. It’s what will never exist. They aren’t just salting one garden. They are salting the earth. The message to every remaining gardener is clear and unambiguous — build something beautiful here and we will come for you. No garden will grow here. Not this one. Not any other. Enshittification comes calling Everything described here is textbook enshittification. Not the corporate, profit-extracting variety Doctorow originally described — but the same underlying logic. A platform that was built on genuine value, turning on the very things that made it valuable. The gardeners who created what was worth coming here for are being driven out by the people the platform will not discipline. And Daily Kos, through its repeated failure to protect what made it worth protecting, is complicit in every garden that gets salted. Doctorow mapped the decay in three stages. First — the platform builds genuine value for its users. Something real. Something that makes them come back. Second — the platform begins to fail those users. Through neglect, through misaligned incentives, through allowing the wrong forces to go unchecked. Third — the users who created the value leave. What remains is a hollowed out shell. Still running. Still posting. Still generating activity. But emptied of the thing that made it matter. Think Twitter. What this means for Daily Kos Stage one — this platform built its reputation and its traffic on genuine voices. Writers who brought something irreplaceable. Gardens that drew people here specifically. The value was real. The community was real. Stage two — when those voices needed protection, the platform failed them. Not once. Repeatedly. The moderation that should have removed the vandals didn’t. The protections that should have defended the gardeners weren’t enforced. This is not a technical failure. This is a values failure dressed up as a moderation problem. The platform is complicit in what it refuses to stop. Stage three — the gardeners leave. The exhaustion wins. The voices that made this place worth being part of go quiet or go elsewhere. What remains is the salted earth and the Sheriff John Browns, triumphant over a platform they have successfully emptied of everything that made it worth defending. This is not inevitable. It is a choice. And Daily Kos is making it every single day. Heat check There is a word that is supposed to mean something here. Progressive. It is supposed to mean — everyone gets lifted up. Every voice matters. Every garden deserves the chance to grow. Blue MAGA has inverted that. In their vision nobody gets lifted up without authorization. No garden grows that they didn’t sanction. No voice builds a following they didn’t approve. They have taken the language of progressivism and hollowed it out — kept the shell, replaced the substance with something that looks, from a distance, like conviction, but is really just control. And here is the part that should keep every person who cares about this movement up at night. We need gardens right now more desperately than we have ever needed them. We need voices that reach the exhausted and the grieving and the people who feel unseen. We need the nourishment that can’t be found at the supermarket — the rare, tended, irreplaceable offerings that make people feel that this coalition actually includes them. That their participation means something. That they are being heard, not just harvested. You do not build that by salting the earth You do not win by destroying the most nourishing parts of your own coalition at the exact moment you need them most. Blue MAGA doesn’t win a single new vote with this strategy. It loses existing ones — from exactly the communities whose turnout is the difference between winning and losing. The question this community has to answer is simple and it is urgent. Who gets disciplined here — the gardeners or the vandals? Because right now the answer is clear. And it is wrong. Making no choice is a choice. Daily Kos is making it every day. The writer whose garden was destroyed set a standard. Not just in what she wrote — though what she wrote was extraordinary. In how she wrote it. With warmth. With generosity. With the radical patience of someone who actually believed that people could be reached, that the better argument delivered with genuine care could move even the most resistant reader. She was proof that this kind of community was possible here. That Daily Kos was capable of being that kind of place. That proof is gone now. And the grief that many of us feel is real and it is legitimate. A community lost something irreplaceable. Not just a voice — a demonstration of what was possible. Grief without action is just loss The remaining gardeners have a choice. Go quiet — put down the tools, decide the soil isn’t safe, let Sheriff John Brown have his barren victory. Or plant anyway. Raise the lantern in the dark. Tend something beautiful in full knowledge of the risk, because the alternative — a Daily Kos emptied of every unauthorized garden, every beloved and nourishing voice, every seed that Sheriff John Brown couldn’t tolerate — is worse than the risk. The seeds exist. The hunger is real. The question is whether enough of us still believe this soil is worth tending. Or whether we are going to keep letting Sheriff John Brown have the last word. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/6/12/800054122/community/kill-it-before-it-grows-the-enshittification-of-daily-kos/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/