Dreamwidth too fandom-centric?

[charmian]

morineko has some thoughts about Dreamwidth possibly being too fandom-centric to attract non-fandom potential users, and how the front page may be giving visitors the wrong impression. Although the definition DW users for a 'creative artist' might be a very broad, it does sound like the site is something like Deviantart, or a writing community. (For the record, I am totally not an artist...) IIRC LJ's marketing angle was about "sharing your life" w/ your friends, so this does mark a departure. (Right now, the site emphasizes that it's versatile and can be used for many things) I suppose also, since the word "blog" isn't used, it's not exactly clear what kind of site it is (I think these days people might not be sure what journal refers to).


It can't really be denied that fans are a large presence on DW, and that matters, because on this kind of service, the future userbase will be probably drawn from the "social graph" (meaning people they know) of the previous users (absent types of marketing other than the viral), and because this will shape the tone of the service, the user culture, and probably the development of new features.

Actually, I had previously been talking to some people who said that rather than fight the impression that DW is a fannish service (rather than a service directed at everyone, although now that I read the site copy it really does seem to be aiming at some kind of niche rather than a generalist audience; BTW, they really ought to explain on the homepage how DW differs in terms of features from LJ, also, there's something weird about that red box on the homepage in IE7), DW should instead embrace it and market heavily to the fan audience, rather than make a lot of claims (this occurred several months ago) that it is NOT a fan service, etc. I think there's some truth in this; simply because a service is "for fans" doesn't mean that other people can't sign up, though of course this really depends on how it's presented, and a company often doesn't have 100% control over its public image anyhow.

Maybe I'm totally wrong about this as well, but it seems to me that the word "artist" is somewhat vague, especially as IMHO, LJ (and forks) simply well... kind of behind when it comes to non-textual media, and only adequate when it comes to textual media. Wordpress and Posterous both have advanced media features, and Tumblr has sort of a template for producing picture posts, and also attempts to market itself to artists (they explicitly say that they are trying to go for the creative market in some of their materials. I may blog on this), and a LOT of sites are trying to put out features for bands and audio artists to use their service. The market for artists using social media is very competitive these days, it seems.

Also, it seems there's a tension behind "artist" and "privacy." Nowadays, especially in these "DIY marketing, we don't have enough budget for anyone to market your book/photos/band" days, artists seem forced to relentlessly publicize themselves, and seek the tools that help them to do that, such as SEO (not an expert, but IIRC LJ has bad SEO) and being on simultaneously many social networking platforms. elena linked me to a tool that helps bands update a gajillion different blogging/social networking platforms at once. Artists using social media as artists seem to be enterprise-level users who seek publicity and engagement with all.

I've seen cases on LJ where an aspiring professional artist began to find success and found that for blogging professionally they needed to get something else, like move to their own domain and start using Wordpress. LJ's domain forwarding is crappy, which doubtless contributes to this. So LJ works more like a social network than a blog because it's typically inward facing rather than outward facing, and thusly, probably the biggest reason for an artist to use an LJ-type service is to interact with existing fans (of them, that is) on the service, if they already exist there in large quantities.

Comments

[fleetfoxes]

I think you make a really interesting point, in that MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and various other social media sites often are used by celebrities to interact with fans, and the LJ(+forks) template doesn't provide a good medium for that – professional novellists seem to like it, for the same reason fandom does I guess, as it's mainly block-of-text and feedback -based. But celebrities who want to blog, or post pictures, or samples of their latest project, tend towards sites which focus on making those aspects easy and accessible.

And celebrities can be used to draw new users; Twitter is the first example which springs to my mind, followed by Myspace and its music, but I know TypePad's the required service for interaction on a couple of celebrity.com websites, too.

As for the "for fans" thing, I don't think Dreamwidth should be exclusively fandom-based just because that's really exclusionary to certain people, and part of LJ's popularity with fandom was you could post your fannish stuff under a filter to your fannish friends or on a fannish community and still write entries about your job for your "real life" friends to read. As someone who has spent hours upon hours just browsing LJ's random feature and reading through journals from 2001-2004, I was shocked at how many LJs were a combination of a personal diary and the kind of newsletter you might send family at Christmas, and for a fairly small group of readers/friends. Dreamwidth doesn't have that kind of appeal to gain its foothold with – perhaps because the need for that kind of service has been overshadowed by Facebook and Twitter.

Which brings me around to:

(I think these days people might not be sure what journal refers to).

This parenthetical made me really depressed.

Anyway, uh, this is all just my $0.02. I'll be going back into lurking now.

[charmian]

Exactly; I totally forgot to mention the importance of celebrities and other notable people in the popularity of social networks. They are IMHO, very, very serious factors. Tumblr also has celebs, and that IMHO not only attracts the fans, but also provides "social proof" to the site as a whole, meaning that aspiring artists in the same field will see it as a useful place, and others, even if they are not enormous fans, will learn about the site and see it as relevant.

Hmm, I'm not sure about "professional novelists" as a category. It seems only certain genres, and that might be for other factors as well; it seems more like it's because of the social network that SFF authors have (because the authors are in SFF fandom) that it's become popular. So their sort of celebrity might be not exactly the same as other types.

Yeah, although typepad is a pay service, so it's less of a social network, more of a blogging protocol.

Well, I don't think they should be another Journalfen and say FANS ONLY, that's for sure. The question is, though, currently what do they have which appeals to non-fans.

Actually, I'm not really in fandom now, but when I was, I exclusively used it for fandom activities. I didn't use it at all to interact with non-fandom friends. When I wrote locked entries, it was for more personal content, so in a way, it was reversed with me! Though, that's just an anecdote.

But yes, the need for that kind of service has been overshadowed by FB and Twitter. My FB friends don't really use the Notes blog-like feature on FB very much, but I know people whose relatives and friends actually do private blogging, directed towards an audience of people they know. Actually, on DW right now, I generally don't make locked entries. I'm slowly seeming to communicate with people in private more through other channels, such as my locked Twitter account.

Well... what I mean is that 'blog,' everyone seems to know what it means; same for 'social network,' or 'social media.' 'Journal' doesn't seem to have become a recognized "genre" of online site.

Heh, thanks for the comment! ^_^

[sophie]

Hi! You don't know me but I came here from Azz's Follow Friday links. (Last week's, not this week.)

The text on the front page was set before open beta as something Denise quickly knocked up, and hasn't been changed since. A few people have mentioned the "artists" thing, and they say it sounds pretentious. I think the text needs to be revisited, so I'll go ahead and talk to her about it and see what she thinks. :)

[charmian]

Hi!

Well, I don't know about pretentious. My personal opinion is that it's just confusing to a person who knows nothing about the site and is seeing the front page. For example, it doesn't really sound pretentious for a site like Deviantart or maybe a photographer's social community to say it is aimed at artists.

[azurelunatic]

Even though I am a fan, I don't think of my online presence as being primarily fannish. I certainly do fannish things, and my interests and the massive stockpile of links in my Delicious do reflect my fannishness, but I'd not be comfortable with labeling my own journal as if it were only fannish content, nor would I be comfortable with Dreamwidth branding itself fannish a la Journalfen.

Making it explicitly welcoming to fans, and easy for fans to find other fans (perhaps a "hi, here are some of our lovely subcultures; do you like SPN? perhaps the Sims? perhaps you are here for the feminism?" section, perhaps leading to relevant interest searches/update streams section on the logged-out front page, and a more in-depth page for that logged-in) would not alienate me, especially if there was attention shown to showcasing some of the non-fannish subcultures.

[charmian]

Yeah, I think it would run the risk of turning off people if they did go that route.

Indeed, that would be helpful for any group (links to specific types of content from the front page)

[piranha]

here via azz on twitter -- thoughtprovoking post, and yeah, definitely something D&M should be thinking about.

i'm here primarily because i know D, like the business model, and am very disappointed in LJ. even though i am only on the fringes of fandom (and most on my LJ flist aren't in fandom at all), i prefer this type of culture over blogs, myspace, twitter, facebook -- i come from usenet and its culture of vigorous discussion, and while this isn't all that great for it either, it's better than the others. there really isn't a good term for it, is there; you're right that "journal" doesn't capture it, and in fact, the private journals i kept throughout my life don't compare to this well, because they have no social features. so this is a hybrid that fills some of my needs for communicating with people, but only so-so.

and it is very textually based -- yes, i publish my photos daily, but they are of course not hosted here. and i've just signed up to a site that offers me loads more photo-specific features, through which i'll also be selling them. whether i'll move them into DW's photo hosting when that's written probably depends on how it'll be designed.

thanks for talking about this. must ponder.

[charmian]

Hi!

I have to say, I'm more of a blogging kind of person. I feel what you're saying. I'm on LJ-type platforms for the discussion. (I figure it might also be found on some forums/message boards) I think the thing is, if you imagine social media as a graph with two axes, broadcast<----->social and light<------>heavy (in terms of depth/length of thought, potentially), blogs are on the broadcast/heavy part, and facebook is on the light/social part, and on the line that is formed between the two, Tumblr and Twitter are kind of between them. But LJ is both heavy and social. (This idea came from a post I saw... I may blog about this later)

Oh, which site is that? Yeah, perhaps that is because "journaling" is often seen as written.

[piranha]

yeah, that's how i see the different services too, as points in various places on a graph like that. that's be an interesting graph to draw.

i'd be more happy with the LJ clones if they facilitated discussions better; the advantage of usenet is that it keeps it mostly in one place (while also allowing crossposting); here it can easily frazzle among many different journals, mostly unconnected.

on the other hand, here i can share more personal things than i ever would on usenet. and i know some people who use LJ solely to broadcast, not to interact, which make it very bloggy. i don't know that i'd bother with blogger or wordpress instead; i tried them, but, eh... (i really don't want to lose the interactive part though, so i am probably just not the right target audience for them).

i think my ideal would be a site that does complex content management, something built on drupal, for example; announcements, forums, blogs, galleries, all connected.

the photo site i decided on is http://smugmug.com -- not cheap, but it came out on top of all the ones i looked at for my purpose. and it's even easier to post my images to DW from there than from LJ scrapbook.

[charmian]

Yeah, I need to track down the blog entry that had that.

Actually, Virb is like that (see my past entry). They have announcements, forums, blogs, galleries, audio as well, and they have the ability to form groups and then say you just want to share this content with one of those groups.

I actually think at some point someone will create a blogging site that does have that kind of granular privacy that LJ has. (Posterous allows you to have a private blog, actually, so if you don't use filters, it may be a good substitute for LJ in that sense)

Ah, I've heard of them.

[azurelunatic]

I braindumped into suggestions a bit: http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/186288.html

[azurelunatic]

I'm wondering if Google Wave will become the heavy debate tool of the future.

[piranha]

yeah, i wonder too. if google wave goes at all where i see it going, it will probably finally be what i've been wanting for decades. :)

but i expect it'll be a while yet.