Me

[andrewducker]

purelyskindeep has asked me for the umpteenth time to not pollute his friends lists with long screeds, excerpts, links and whatnot.  Personally, I despise LJ-Cuts (except for spoilers) and refuse to use them to shorten things.  I am not a member of the Cult of Brevity.  However, I can see his point that there are LJ posts about me, and LJ posts containing things I'm interested in.

The ones about me take up, at best, 1 in 50 of my posts.  I don't consider my day-to-day goings on terribly interesting.  But I can, I guess, separate that out into a new journal "AndrewDuckerPersonal" or somesuch, so that those people who care just about _me_ can read it, and not my odds, ends, thoughts and interesting links posts.

[Poll #370518]

Comments

[guyinahat.livejournal.com]

I don't think a cut will make a huge difference to the number of people who read a long article. Those with an interest will read it either way, those without won't. The difference is how annoying you make the journey to the destination to those who don't have an interest in that particular subject.

I guess I like to think of an intro+cut as being given the option to delve further.

Somebody please flame me now...

[akicif.livejournal.com]

I guess I like to think of an intro+cut as being given the option to delve further.

Yeah, and a good intro will attract me to something I mightn't have otherwise read.

Somebody please flame me now...

Naw.... I think you've the right of it.

[richardf8]

Personally, I am more likely to read something long if I've clicked on a cut tag, whereas if I see a big huge thing in a frieds list, I tend to scroll past it.

That cut tag lends a certain . . . mystique, a closed door that must be opened.

[kellibunny.livejournal.com]

Yep, this is me too.

[sneaks.livejournal.com]

*nods*
me too.

but i usually end up reading everything anyway.

[kellibunny.livejournal.com]

i guess it depends who wrote the long post... if they're generally interesting/funny/intelligent, it gets read no matter what. Which makes me wonder why i have the others on my list, actually. Hmm. :)

[aberbotimue.livejournal.com]

dito

[cruft.livejournal.com]

WTF, mate? If that fellow's annoyed by the content of your journal, why can't he defriend you or filter you out? I don't understand.

[guyinahat.livejournal.com]

The problem is that Andy is a very good friend. I don't want to defriend him, I just thought it was a bit unsympathetic to his lj-friends to put 1600 words up in a day without a cut. This is all going to blow out of proportion, but oh well...

[cruft.livejournal.com]

Pffffft. I don't have Andy on my friends list so he can be quiet and not deluge me with stuff. If I wanted him to be quiet, I'd filter him out. He could post nothing but pictures of his feet and it wouldn't be "unsympathetic," it'd just be interesting or uninteresting, and I'd filter accordingly.

Sorry, I should probably be writing more tactfully or persuasively, but I'm having trouble understanding your point of view.

[rainstorm.livejournal.com]

I am interested in Andrew as a friend, as a person. I am not interested in a lot of what he writes huge entries about - especially geek stuff. I skip them. But I'm on pay as you go dial up connexion, and I don't like having to read the first paragraph of something that might be interesting, only to find I don't really care about it..

I like Andy, I think he's very interesting, but that doesn't mean I'm interested in reading everything he writes.

[cruft.livejournal.com]

Forgive my brusqueness, but I think that's your problem, not Andy's. You're in charge of deciding what to read; Andy's not in charge of accommodating every tiny wish of the people who happen to be reading his journal. He's not coming around your house at 3 a.m. to shout geek stuff at your window, you're coming to get it, and if you don't actually like it, you can stop, eh?

[guyinahat.livejournal.com]

It's not a problem, it's a matter of courtesy. There's no obligation on Andy to cut huge newspaper articles, but it demonstrates a disregard of the readability of other people's friends pages.

I find a lot of what Andy says interesting, but I have to wade through large amounts that isn't to get to it. I wouldn't want Andy to edit his content because I enjoy a lot of it - I just wish that the format with which he presents it wouldn't hog my friends page.

Yes, it is his journal, so he can do what he wants. But is he posting this for his personal benefit, or for those who read it? If he posts for the 'Andy consumer', then he might want to make his posts more consumer-friendly.

[cruft.livejournal.com]

I don't see what reason you have to say that Andy's somehow being discourteous to you or hogging your friends list when the decision to read his journal, to syndicate his journal on your friends page, is entirely yours.

I find this argument so annoying that I would like to encourage Andy to make 1000 entries in a row containing nothing but goatse and tubgirl, so as to chase off those friends of his who don't have Page Down buttons on their keyboards. Andy, do you hear me? Do it!

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

If you create a Custom Friends List called "Default View" (spacing and capitalization are important, though quotation marks aren't) then that will be your (surprise!) default view of your Friends Page, and you can stop in this journal any time you'd like to catch up with your very good friend. :)

[odheirre.livejournal.com]

Contrary to how I believe this post is going to read, I am a part of the Cult of Brevity. But I am more part of the Cult of Single Sourcing, so having multiple journals seems silly. Alien, even. Have a filter marked "Long Personal Stuff", and put people who don't want to read it off that filter.

LJ Cut tags cannot mean "this is unimportant", because it's the tag and the text around the tag and the people that determine its importance. I mean, if slipjig writes something behind a tag, it's important, because we've been friends forever.

LJ cut tags give me the option to right-click and choose "Open in New Tab".

[pisica.livejournal.com]

I can see the point; a friend of mine sliced someone from their friends list because this person writes long whiny rambling self-aggrandizing entries and never, ever uses a cut.

I do read cuts if there is some indication of what's behind it and if I'm then interested. Otherwise I'll skip it, but that's no different than skimming a long entry and saying 'eh'.

[simmah.livejournal.com]

Hey ummm...

Who's journal is this anyway?

Why do you write in this journal?

As far as I know this journal is for your own purposes just like any other journal! The only reason why it is readable by your friend is by choice.

Your friend should deal with their issue, not you. It may be nice to address their concerns but hey, be you. Do what you want to do in the end.

I know it sounds insensitive but so does this friend of yours. For pete's sake use the scroll bar! It's not going to kill you!

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Regardless of whether he'll admit it or not, Andy presents a large chunk of his journal as a public service. So it's not just a personal journal, it is a forum for public debate, and often a "news" feed, in many ways. And if I went to the BBC website and every story was presented in full text on the opening page, I would probably skip a lot of them.

Also, LiveJournal can be slow in loading sometimes on a -broadband- connection due to the vast size of a friends page... on dial-up the issue is compounded, and short of unfriending people who post a lot, it -is- awkward to get around.

[kimberly-a.livejournal.com]

I guess that's a decision Andy is going to have to make, then. Does he want this journal to exist for the readers, or for himself? If he doesn't care whether people read this or not, then he can do whatever he likes.

[aberbotimue.livejournal.com]

i sence since the poll was posted at all, andy does care, and lets face it, he is not gona do anything aginst his will..

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

I'm slightly more likely to read something uncut, particularly if I see the cut entry uses the default.

I also use that code for one of my more boring "worked, worked, worked, did stuff" entries.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

I'm being a hypocrite, of course. Seeing as I have derumi, derumi_food, derumi_poetics, & suggestion.

[paddie-gal.livejournal.com]

Well, I have very few people on my friends list, cos I don't know that many people, and sometimes, particularly after Andy's had a *busy* day, the whole screen can be filled with Andy's brain excretions! But even though I might not be interested in some of the things he talks about, I still like to see what he's written, cos he's an interesting bloke, by and large. sometimes, though, I have missed a post from someone else, because it looks like everything on the page is from Andy, and right in the middle is a tiny, one line post from someone else, and I miss it, but then that's just me.

I think a cut with an intro is good - and like someone else said, people who are interested in Andy, and what Andy has to say, will click into the cut regardless - I tend to look at cuts if the title/intro is good.

[tigrrgrr.livejournal.com]

Friend or no its your journal. He can scroll can't he? Cuts annoy me unless its a picture. I know you have SO been waiting for my reply so there it is.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

I think this proves almost conclusively that yuou are needlesly self-concerned :-)

[andrewducker]

Naah, Guy grabbed me online for 5 minutes and tried to persuade me to use lj-cuts, for reasons that still escape me.

[aberbotimue.livejournal.com]

i recall you asked for one question, and one steatment a few weeks ago, IIR i said somthing similar...

however, I refuse to remove you from my freinds list, but movie reviews for instnce don't do it for me, and other stuff, but you get the point...

However, lets face it, your a verbose guy, and also, some of your stuff is fantstic, and compaired to sana, i go for the geek stuff, and not the dodgy philosiphy stuff.. what a mixed message, whats a boy to do..

Your poll didn't work for me.. its not the spliting of you and what you write about that will do the trick, cos i'll still need both... thre was a time you were posting movie reviews alot, that i wanted to turn into a new journal..

so my gut said 30 ducker journals.. even you ain't loving us that much...

me, i don't care about the large posts , I scan the top para, decide if i am gona read it, and go on, but I recon it will be a more uncomfortable thing for dial up people???

is an lj cut the answear.. probably, but asking you to alter the way you do your journal for us, seems a bit un fair.. and if you do go that way, a good description of what is behind the cut?? or maybe do the fiorst para, and if we love it, as I'm sure most of us will, we'll follow the link...

damn, thats started a whole new thought.. some of the issues with following LJ cuts are the hastle, the speed, the useability of browsing in general... I will normally open it in a new browser, and continue to read the rest of the page,m then go back and read all the new pages I have opened on the way.. me tech, and lazy tho.. so maybe education, and jlj cut is the answear????

while i am typing too much, what is the meaning of life??

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I like lj-cuts.

My journal isn't a personal diary. If it was, no one else would be able to read it.

As it is, when I am posting something lengthy, or something that might be heavy on the connection (ie images) or simply something of rather limited appeal (a rave review of a new noise CD, for example) I would use a cut... in the same way that if I wanted to talk to someone for half an hour solidly about a subject, I would give them the option of not enduring it first... they simply might not be interested...

Yes, you -can- leave it all up to the reader to scroll past, but it could be seen as good manners to cut it as a form of politeness.

[green-amber.livejournal.com]

Unless there's something I can't see - I'd cut a lot more
slack for a long original post than a long quote. No?

[guyinahat.livejournal.com]

Yes. simonchapman has written an entire short story before in chapters of a thousand or so words that he posted over a week. He didn't cut any of it, but I thought on that occasion it was fair enough because he had put a lot of effort and himself into the piece.

Andy posting huge chunks of newspapers however....

He could at least pick a newspaper that I haven't read.

[shannon_a]

An lj-cut says to me, "You're going to have to load another page to read this entry, which might take 1-2 minutes given LJ's current load. Best just move on unless it looks really interesting."

Overall, my general feeling about lj-cuts is that they should be use to hide spoilers, or to hide graphics which could add a lot to someone's load time (particularly if they might cause horizontal scroll, effectively messing up entire friends' pages). Text doesn't cause much load time, however, so it shouldn't be lj-cut, as I'd expect the average user to be able to click "scroll down" once or twice unless they really have zero interest in my journal, in which case they should defriend me anyway.

As for splitting: who's journal is it anyway? I'd expect you to write about what interests you.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

I don't care much either way about cuts, but those on dial-up might. Some day's you just don't have the time to read every post on your friends' list, but you may wish to quickly skim over them in case there's something important there.

I think cutting long posts is the polite thing to do and with tabbed-browsing it's nothing for the reader to mouse up a post (or RSS link) for later reading. That's how I browse my friends' list currently.

[original-aj.livejournal.com]

I prefer a cut if an entry is more than a screenful or so. I'll generally open them in a separate tab. Usually a longer post will have comments (or I'll want to make a comment) so I'd be opening another window anyway. Yes I can scroll past, but once I've read it it's annoying to have to keep scrolling past if I am checking for new comments on a post further down the page.

I feel it's courteous to cut - and to provide a short explanation of what's behind the cut either as text in the cut field or accompanying text.

I don't think there's any obligation to be interested in everything someone says - we all have some but not all interests in common with our friends. It would be very self-important to demand one's friends read everything, and it's considerate to make it easy for them to skip the stuff they're not interested in. If someone consistently posted enormous entries - and I don't think you do particularly - I'd be likely to take them off my default filter if they didn't cut them.

I believe that the onus is on the author to make the reader want to read, not on the reader to accommodate the author. I won't read people's writings if they make it unnecessarily hard to read either - such as by consistently fail to even attempt correct spelling, grammar, punctuation and particularly capitalisation. Those standards evolved for a reason - it's damned hard to read if they're ignored. I don't mind people who try and get it wrong occasionally, just those who do it deliberately or through lazyness. [gets off hobbyhorse..]

If you want to divide journals I'd be inclined to do it via filters rather than completely separate journals - put everyone in and let them ask to opt out if they want to.

[kimberly-a.livejournal.com]

I don't use lj-cuts much, myself, except for things like boring lists of interest to no one but me (such as URLs with no indication of what they link to), large (or many) photographs, potentially upsetting/triggering stuff (such as dieting thoughts, suicidal thoughts, etc.), or entries that go beyond 2 screens in length (I don't know why I decided 2 screens was okay but 3 screens wasn't, but there you go).

But that's just what I do. It's your journal, and you get to make the rules.

I can tell you that I *do* find it annoying when someone (and I'm not thinking of you, just my friends list as a whole) posts 3 or more short posts within half an hour (or less). One woman on my friends list does this so often that I've considered unfriending her out of pure frustration.

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

I don't think you need two journal OR to use LJ-cuts in this way, simply start off with a paragraph or two and if the thing grows beyond your control, hide the rest of it behind a cut. If people are interested (and I most frequently am) they can click the link to get the rest.