General Discussion

DU didn't exist in the run-up to the 2000 election, so I'm not really familiar with a lot of the people who were leading the charge online at that time -- really, just the people who were operating in the same space that we were post-inauguration, like Bartcop, Buzzflash, MediaWhoresOnline, etc. In 2000, Skinner was running a one-man website design firm, and he hired me in the summer of that year because he had too much work. We were both political junkies and followed the 2000 election closely, but we didn't participate in online politics before then. Once the election was over we were pissed off like everyone else, and we decided that since we were web designers, maybe it was up to us to try to do something. The original DU was cobbled together in just a few weeks. The funny thing is that magazine-style websites like Salon were in vogue at that time, and we intended DU to be a mostly satirical magazine-style site. The discussion forum, which obviously became DU's lifeblood later on, was a complete afterthought and was added just a few days before DU was launched. We had exactly zero experience running such a thing at the time.