Nobody has to read you.

[andrewducker]

I'm a chatty bastard.

Before I had a Livejournal I ran a small mailing list for a bunch of university friends so that we could keep in touch and chat while we were stuck at our desks. We all had IT jobs, so it wasn't a hassle getting email (this was in 97-ish, before email was pervasive), and we used to chat back and forth about what we were up to, what was in the news, etc.

I was introduced to Livejournal by broin in 2001*, and pounced on it like a crazy pouncy thing, immediately stealing half of his friends list**. It solved the only problem I had with mailing lists, which was "What if people weren't interested in the contents of my breakfast this morning?" With Livejournal people had the opportunity to just not read the bloody thing in the first place, and if they did, they could just hit page-down in the hope that someone else had had a more interesting breakfast.

As LJ was the solution to this problem for me, I'm sometimes bemused that it hasn't solved this problem for everyone - with some of my friends sending me fascinating emails from time to time, but utterly neglecting their livejournals, as their friends "probably wouldn't be interested in that kind of thing."

To which I can only say that your friends will mostly be interested in anything you write, particularly if it's something you care about. If they aren't interested then they, too, will learn the secret of the page-down button, and they certainly won't think any less of you for having posted.

And if they do complain about you for talking about your interest in 18th century steam engines then, franky, fuck them, because they aren't actually your friends.

*Before LJ I had played around with Dave Winer's Radio Userland, a combined RSS reader and blog-posting tool. But frankly it was a lot of hassle to use, and lacked pretty-much all of the things that I love about Livejournal. Pretty neat for last millenium though.

**I think I still have a few of them on here. And lovely people they are too, putting up with me for nearly 9 years so far.

Comments

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

My experience is that people will read anything.

I mean, shit, for the most part they just want something that isn't the work they are supposed to be doing at that moment.

[zz]

*cough* oops.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes. Isn't it.

There was a remarkably busy mostly-London-mostly-ex-g*ths list that expired in about a fortnight when someone discovered LJ and started handing out invite codes. I think I sometimes miss mail-lists because they're asynchronous and worked well as an inter-compile thing.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I may be an exception. I think most diary material is kind of boring. I want essays! opinions! links! and there's a limit to how much paging down I'll do if I'm not getting something I want to read.

There are people I like whose ljs I don't read because it's all diary material.

[andrewducker]

And that's fine - nobody forces you to read it. It's that choice which makes lj a good home for me, because I know you can skip the posts you don't like, or not read me at all if you don't want to.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I like to mix up my LJ with an assortment of diary stuff, pictures of pretty people, rants, essays and sexytimes.

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

well said. And hello I'm random.

[andrewducker]

Thank you!

And your journal is a trove of interesting things. Added!

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

The problem I have is that whilst a number of my friends use livejournal, a far larger number don't, and have no interest in it or any other blog. Slightly more of my friends use Facebook, but again many do not. A few of my friends are on Twitter, but that's not really a great medium for lengthy communication. The one thing all of my friends have in common is they use Email.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I understand one reason people might not publish on their LJ sites, because I have it. Fifty-plus years ago I started publishing stuff like that, on paper, for friends & acquaintences in science-fiction fandom, and the people mostly seemed to enjoy it, at least to the extent of spending postage money to respond from time to time.

But writing reasonably-entertaining mini-essays is (if you'll excuse the four-letter word) _work_, and a decade or so back I found myself so decrepit that I gave over doing it. LJ & a few Yahoo!Groups Lists have been lifesavers for retaining some level of Communication, but... yeah, I'm now limiting it to doing a lot of reading, and to writing an occasional paragraph or two (or maybe three or four, still being verbose) in response to what someone else has published.

Mind you, the growing feeling that whatever I might have to say is not really Of Cosmic Importance, and that many other people are much better thinkers & writers than I am, are probably not unrelated to this.

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

Erik and I joined Live Journal when it first started because a number of our East Coast friends chose it to keep in touch.

Since then more friends have joined, and I've made many new friends here.

I wondered if LJ could function as a true "community," and to my pleasant surprise, it does.

[andrewducker]

http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2136824.html?thread=14852600#t14852600

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

To which I can only say that your friends will mostly be interested in anything you write, particularly if it's something you care about.

Actually, very very few of them are in my case for plenty of things that I care about.

[andrewducker]

In my experience people don't always know what will know what will interest them. And will frequently get interested in things they didn't expect to because their friends expose them to it.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I got pretty much zero comments when I posted about things that interested me the most. I got responses and discussion when I emailed similar kinds of links or thoughts to people who I knew would be interested.

The only common exception was one of the (very few) LJ friends that I didn't know rl.

[andrewducker]

One of the possible differences there is that when I get an email I feel more of a social duty to reply to it*, whereas I don't feel that LJ entries necessary need a response.

*Except when I arrive home to find 15 link emails from you.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

That's one of the handful things I like about facebook. It has a simple "like" button to express your liking for something without passing comment. Unless I mess around with an overly complex style of posting and LJ toys, there's no real way to tell whether I'm shouting into an empty void/not even on people's default view or if people just aren't interested.

And, if you did want to just comment and say "I like this" on livejournal, it feels a little inadequate given the size of the comment text box, which I guess would put people off if they were going to just say that. Of course, the kind of LJ friends I have are not, in the main, the kind who would just post "yay!", "lol!" and so forth, which would count as some kind of self-induced confirmation bias.

To be honest, I entirely expect you to post the links to LJ without even clicking them on occasion.

[andrewducker]

I agree. The last few times someone's suggest it for LJ it's been shouted down, but I really think that it helps keep people motivated. Dreamwidth is looking into putting a Like button on, maybe LJ will pick it up from there.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

phillipalden (lj isn't sufficiently compatable with the antique fall-back browser/system I'm currently using to t respond directly to you with the proper indentation):

It seems to me that LJ does not actually function as "a true 'community'" for the vast bulk of its users -- it serves merely as a tool with which people like you, Andrew, and me can build (& have built) personalized communities. That's Good, and perfectly adequate for those who have acquired such a skill. For those who haven't... I rather doubt that FaceBook's automation of this (IIUC) is likely to result in a genuine community. And I'm shuddering at Yahoo!Groups' /t/h/r/e/a/t/ promise to re-decorate in that direction.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I felt like part of a community on a couple of newsgroups and a mailing list, back in the day. I've never really felt that on LJ or on Facebook. Facebook "communities" or fan pages or whatever just seem to be people posting about themselves and not really interested in all the other people there except in the most minimal and superficial ways. LJ communities seem mostly the same to me, but maybe I've never seen the right ones.

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

I guess my experience with Live Journal has been different. For example, I'm part of a "chronic pain" group that is very supportive and tries to be helpful to its members.

I also have a lot of close friends, (both local and far away) who are on LJ. So maybe that's why I feel LJ is a viable community.

It's no replacement for real human contact, though.