andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2010-06-03 03:21 pm
andrewducker) wrote2010-06-03 03:21 pm
The tragedy of Facebook is the tragedy of Livejournal
The tragedy of Faceook is that it's too easy. Too simple. Too trivially effortless to both read and write entries. You can dash off 10 seconds of update and then forget about it. You can skim your way down a list of updates, safe in the knowledge that there'll be very little there that actually engages you, and tht if you miss something it isn't important.
It doesn't take energy, it doesn't take thought, it doesn't take very much at all. And it interrupts the build-up of emotion which might have led to a longer post on somewhere like Livejournal. If you've burnt off your frustration at your fellow passengers on the bus this morning by posting a one sentence burst of anger then why would you bother writing it up in any more detail? And it's always going to be easier to drop off on sentence about how much you love your current TV favourite than it is to write a whole review.
Better (and worse) yet - nobody is going to pick apart your argument, because you aren't making one. Nobody is going to try and dissect your take on your favourite novel, offering you new insights, because Facebook comments don't support that level of interaction. Livejournal offers you a massive area for text input, Facebook gives you a couple of lines. Sure, you _can_ type in as much as you like, but the psychological difference is immense.
And this means that many, many people have moved away from Livejournal. Possibly still reading (I still get a fair few hits per day), but not updating their own journals, not joining in the conversations, not interacting, not being part of a community. And, in its own dysfunctional manner, LJ is a community. But it feels, nowadays, like a dwindling one. One that feels, to me, like it's dropping towards a critical point where the feedack isn't enough to keep people updating at all.
Of course, I've been reading "Livejournal is dead! Any minute now!" posts since 2001, and it's still here (140th most popular site on the internet, according to something Google posted recently). Maybe it's not livejournal, maybe it's the natural turnover as people change, the churn of busy lives pushing people away to do real things in real places, while new people arrive that I have less of a connection to.
But it's something I find myself intermittently missing, that's for sure.
It doesn't take energy, it doesn't take thought, it doesn't take very much at all. And it interrupts the build-up of emotion which might have led to a longer post on somewhere like Livejournal. If you've burnt off your frustration at your fellow passengers on the bus this morning by posting a one sentence burst of anger then why would you bother writing it up in any more detail? And it's always going to be easier to drop off on sentence about how much you love your current TV favourite than it is to write a whole review.
Better (and worse) yet - nobody is going to pick apart your argument, because you aren't making one. Nobody is going to try and dissect your take on your favourite novel, offering you new insights, because Facebook comments don't support that level of interaction. Livejournal offers you a massive area for text input, Facebook gives you a couple of lines. Sure, you _can_ type in as much as you like, but the psychological difference is immense.
And this means that many, many people have moved away from Livejournal. Possibly still reading (I still get a fair few hits per day), but not updating their own journals, not joining in the conversations, not interacting, not being part of a community. And, in its own dysfunctional manner, LJ is a community. But it feels, nowadays, like a dwindling one. One that feels, to me, like it's dropping towards a critical point where the feedack isn't enough to keep people updating at all.
Of course, I've been reading "Livejournal is dead! Any minute now!" posts since 2001, and it's still here (140th most popular site on the internet, according to something Google posted recently). Maybe it's not livejournal, maybe it's the natural turnover as people change, the churn of busy lives pushing people away to do real things in real places, while new people arrive that I have less of a connection to.
But it's something I find myself intermittently missing, that's for sure.
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Seriously, that stats stuff is pretty cool. The major problem with the themes is that there are tens of thousands of the things for Wordpress, and as far as I can tell about six pre-made ones for LJ. Certainly I've never seen anything as fancy as some of the WP themes.
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I may be doing it wrong, but photo uploading and positioning is far easier on Wordpress. The dashboard is lovely and there are lots of widgets to use. I stay on LJ for the friendslist, but I might get tempted to try Posterous or Tumblr for that quality.
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The clients I use on Windows and Android will both automatically upload a photo (or many) as part of the posting process.
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LJ has a lot of reasonable features, but they're mostly hidden. On balance, I think LJ is as good as WP, but in different ways.
However, WP is a lot easier to use, the UI is substantially better, and thus wins on points. If I'm setting someone up, I give them WP, until DW gets the UI up to scratch, and forces LJ to follow (Which it probably will), I wouldn't consider promoting an LJ/DW to someone vaguely new.
People drift away, always have. But LJ is no longer replacing them with new users.
It used to be most of my friends were on here, now it's a tiny number.
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What's better about the UI?
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Comment notification is for all comments on a post, not just your comments, but that's fine by me as I tend to prefer it.
Hard to explain why the UI is better, it's simply a lot easier to teach people, and most people tend to be able to get on with it fairly quickly, including non-techies.
For example, the Govt depts that've started using it are finding it much better than any commercial software they'[ve previously used, and it's going to be rolled out further for other sites.
This is good.
If you're used to the LJ UI, you know how to use it. Except, how many people have said, on this post, they didn't know about certain LJ features?
Most users not knowing about most features (including the several hundred LJ themes) is a sign the UI stinks. Wordpress.com actually has far fewer themes available than LJ has. But ask a typical user of both, they'll say the opposite.
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I definitely agree that LJ is terrible at letting people know about features. The statistics thing, for instance, was hidden in a news post that also contained utter rubbish that nobody I know would care about. And the current ones contain fic about the site mascot, which puts pretty much everyone off I know them.
Oh, and you can't have LJ being served direct from your domain in any useful manner. A massive limitation for people who would otherwise probably use it as their own blog.
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And yes, the current News posts led me, finally, to remove it from my friends page completely, I still get the email notifications, but read each weekly post in utter bemusement; the previous team had a strict policy of ensuring that only important site-wide stuff (like new features) got onto news, now the exact opposite is true and I have no interest in most of it.
The domain mapping thing is actually one of my bigger bugbears; they've got the code to fix it so it works properly, it's integrated for all the Indepependent Minds accounts, but the guy who was sorting it out to work everywhere (at my request although he knew it was a good idea) was one of those that got fired in the mess that caused them to relaunch DW.
DW is going to make sure domain mapping works properly, it's one of the "blocking launch" bugs. At which point I'll get together enough cash to buy a domain and map it properly, and see how well I can do at using an LJ fork as a proper blog.
I suspect "very well indeed" if they can sort the OpenID login process out. Less well if comment logging in remains clunky.
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http://denise.dreamwidth.org/tag/bug+counts
When that "blocking launch" goes from 31 to 0, then launch happens.
I tried to find where the actual numbers come from in buzilla, but my brain fried.
http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/
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http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&target_milestone=L%20-%20Launch
So it seems likely that it's a subset of that.
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Maybe they've made/found some more actual real major bugs and it's gone up?
Sometimes they do create new bugs when fixing other things, which I'm fine with as long as they don't try to hide/ignore it, unlike, say, LJ.
MEh, at least there's a target objective, and it's an ongoing project, I don't think they've decided yet what not being in Beta will actually mean.
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It is a subset. It's down. It was 31. It's now three.
So what I said above as being one of the "blocking launch" bugs isn't, but when Mark's got the interoperability stuff down, we're good to go.
From here.
(you need to be logged in, and there's a list of the saved reports in the preferences area)