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Top Comments: Solidarity Edition [1]

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Date: 2023-02-27  

I was really excited yesterday to ALREADY know what my diary topic tonight was going to be. After penning over 900 Top Comments diaries (as I write this one, I show 937 of my diaries bearing the #TopComments tag) since 2007, the ideas for a novel topic come a wee bit less frequently.

BUT

That’s not what you’re reading tonight. I expect to give you my original diary tomorrow, as I fill in once again for cohenzee. I went to check in on Brandi Buchman's Proud Boys Liveblog and didn’t find it. Huh. That’s weird. So I head over to the bird site, which… even though my participation there has dropped to nearly zero, I do sometimes peek in order to find breaking news (despite the increasing piles of dreck there, some people I follow there haven’t decamped elsewhere yet) and discovered she’d been laid off. There’s lots of info on that in DRo’s Rec List diary.

I suspect that many if not most Top Comments readers consider themselves community members here at the site and not just ‘readers’ or ‘visitor clicks’ , and have been following the information provided by site management and the Daily Kos Guild regarding necessary layoffs. I don’t want to rehash all of that in the body of this diary. I’m absolutely not questioning that layoffs were necessary given the site’s bottom-line financials. I get it, it’s a tough business and there are reasons why.

What DOES bother me are two aspects of this sad necessary event:

First, the way in which folks found out they’d been laid off: via a 6am Eastern email, with a separation date of tomorrow. However… in Brandi’s case, she was quite literally at the courthouse liveblogging the trial today when she discovered her access to her account was gone and her liveblog diary was pulled. That’s just bullshit, and IMHO there’s no other way to paint it.

Second, that this looks suspiciously like unionbusting.

x Some of our teams have been decimated. The @DailyKosGuild, more than two years later and still without a contract, has officially lost every founding member. The @dailykos Equity Council is now one-third the size of last year. — Daily Kos Guild (@DailyKosGuild) February 27, 2023

Every founding member of the union is now gone? That smells like really bad fish to me. And I just can’t put my heart into a fun, lighthearted diary tonight. However, just like DKG members have been doing and continue to do, I have a job tonight… to bring you the Top Comments, Mojo and Pictures. And so I will do just that, sad that we’ve lost good voices under really disheartening circumstances and in solidarity with the Daily Kos Guild.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/27/2155368/-Top-Comments-Solidarity-Edition

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