a poll

[charmian]

Poll #1648

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 24

View Respondents

What was your reaction to the post about LJ's Russian traffic?

View Answers

Surprised
5 (20.8%)

Confirmed my suspicions
15 (62.5%)

Didn't everyone already know this?
4 (16.7%)

Google Trends is massively incorrect
0 (0.0%)

(Post in question here)

As for my speculations, I'll save them for another post, but my suspicion is that it's not about what 'what LJ did' or 'what happened on LJ', but 'what LJ didn't do' and 'what happened outside of LJ.'

Anyway, here's an interesting article about Myspace's decline.

Comments

[morineko]

what happened outside? it begins with "faceb" and ends with "ook" right?

LJ-US's problem imo is that it occupies the uncomfortable space between social networking and blogging and isn't taken seriously as either.

[charmian]

I think that was one of the things. I didn't find many articles on LJ itself, but I found some interesting articles on things that have happened in the last two years re: blogging, social networks, and micro-blogging.

[matgb]

I agree with this. Not only not taken seriously as either, but didn't know what it wanted to be and didn't know how to sell itself, at all.

Lots of my original RL friends that I signed up for LJ for are now exclusively using Facebook--every so often one of them writes a "haven't updated for a year now" post but that's about it.

Combine that with Twitter, which appears to be helping deal with the signal/noise problem of blogging generally fairly well, and you have an LJ in trouble.

In Russia, they've got good marketing, know what they're doing and who their target audience is and, oh, the President has an LJ, that probably brings in a few more eyeballs.

[charmian]

IMHO, I think the lack of interface/UI being updated also played a major role as well.

I didn't use LJ for interacting with RL friends, but based on anecdotal evidence, it seems that the same is true for many people who used LJ to interact with RL friends.

Hmm, what do you mean by how it deals w/ the signal/noise problem? I think what's going on now is that a lot of the new microblogs are reinventing LJ's wheel(s) [see twitter's lists], and that can be potentially even more trouble. (Well, as well as creating new social media features, such as retweeting/reblogging: now when I use LJ, I feel annoyed I can't 'like' posts).

Also I suspect that advertising is more lucrative when your audience is mainly concentrated in two cities.

[matgb]

Agree completely on UI--it's something I've been banging on about for ages. But until there was serious competition with good UI (even for an essentially inferior product), it didn't matter. We now have FB and Twitter, both better UI &c.

For signal/noice, I'm thinking of the massive falloff in quiz memes and similar--I rarely see a "what X are you" thing these days, they're all on Facebook, and Twitter has discussions of the day and similar that takes out some of the other chaff--fun stuff, but got in the way sometimes.

But yes, a 'like' feature or similar is nice--'Fey's working on an improved 'share' function that'll include emailing, and we really need to improve memories to work more like a proper social bookmarking feature (which is what they really always were, just done so badly).

Anyway, gotta go, due at work, sorry for rushed answer.

[charmian]

Well, if you have no need for the full capacities of a product, arguably if there's a weaker one with a better UI, it is rational and most effective to choose the one w/ the better UI, especially if using it casually. IMHO, I think if a product is difficult or frustrating to use, it does also make it inferior. If a car is difficult to drive, even if it is faster and has more features, people might want the one that is easy to drive even if it is slower, I think.

Well, memories were bookmarking, indeed, but IMHO they were never very social at all. (Tumblr does the social bookmarking thing quite well, and Posterous doesn't do it as extensively, but both are quite sociable about it)

[franzeska]

Well, if you have no need for the full capacities of a product, arguably if there's a weaker one with a better UI, it is rational and most effective to choose the one w/ the better UI, especially if using it casually.

Very much agreed! (And I almost never log into facebook for this very reason. I hate the UI, and it's far too much trouble to figure out how to turn off or avoid all of the busy crap that I don't want to see.)

My suspicion about LJ's US traffic is that it isn't just microblogging or any one particular other site that's directly responsible. I think English speakers, and especially English speakers in the US, just tend to be the primary target demographic for every new social networking/blogging/getting eyeballs to look at ads thing that comes along. With tons of competition and constant shiny new things to distract people, it's no wonder a given older site has trouble holding people's interest.

Not that there aren't plenty of multi-lingual sites and not that there aren't sites that don't care about having US eyeballs looking at ads, but...

[charmian]

I don't think it's necessarily any one site either. There's a lot, especially because LJ is sort of hybrid in the features they have, meaning there's a variety of 'competitors.'

Eh... I think that there are other countries to that do have a competitive social networking sphere as well. I personally don't know that much about the market in Russia (I do know that IIRC their most popular social network isn't Facebook). So I actually have no idea what the real reasons behind LJ remaining popular in Russia are.

[azurelunatic]

It got a really, really strong foothold at the start, and I think we can credit that to LiveJournal's internationalization effort -- flawed as it was, it offered a no-tech-skills-required journaling solution to everyone who had internet and read Russian; they did not have to muddle through directions in English like MySpace and the like.

[charmian]

True, but I mean, nowadays there are now native Russian services out there, so I'm wondering why they remain popular and the competition hasn't hit them that hard, it seems.

[azurelunatic]

I'm guessing twofold:

Inertia. It's well-established and it works and anyone who is anyone is sticking there, pretty much.

Once SUP took over locally, which was before the buyout, it became a native Russian service in almost every important way, so the other native services no longer had that as an advantage.

[charmian]

Hmm, but I mean, there are a lot of social networking-ish services/or blogging services, whose star has risen and fallen, and inertia probably helped them, but in the end, that wasn't enough. I suppose the competition is not as moneyed and aggressive in Russia, though.

[azurelunatic]

The LJ codebase is still the standard for granular security, and its community features are pretty well up there too, I think.

I was over on Facebook doing a bit of a rundown for a dude.

[charmian]

Huh, is it? I'm not really very familiar with coding stuff, but IIRC aren't there some other sites that have similar granular privacy features?

[azurelunatic]

There may well be, but LJ is pretty well world-class.