recent LJ controversies, Three Weeks for DW

[charmian]

Been busy translating some stuff, although I am planning to put up some links about the latest Facebook events.

Hmm, at this point a lot of my thoughts about LJ's latest scandal regarding the Driving Revenue/Outboundlinks stuff can be summed up by this animated .gif. Here are tips on dealing with the issue, in case you haven't heard already.

Also, there's a comm on DW dedicated to creating exclusive content for DW for three weeks. Since most of the content in this blog is original and not cross-posted to anywhere else, I guess you could say I'm already 'participating.' Anyhow, this campaign makes me wonder whether it is true that one of the impediments to DW growth is that there is a dearth of original content on DW?

Poll #2875

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 55

View Respondents

What do you think the main factor impeding/slowing DW growth is?

View Answers

Lack of DW-exclusive content
6 (10.9%)

Dearth of active comms
33 (60.0%)

Invite code system
3 (5.5%)

Insufficient publicity
1 (1.8%)

Something else which I will detail in comments
12 (21.8%)

Comments

[starlady]

I guess my experience of interacting mostly in personal journals is not typical of LJ, then? Because I just don't understand why people aren't quitting in droves; I wish I could quit entirely, in all honesty, though for various reasons that's not feasible for me atm, and may not ever be.

I tend to think it's the lack of BNFs, really, coupled with "dearth" of comms. copperbadge only gets 1 or 2 comments per post here, which is ridiculous when compared with his LJ; I know when I added him here that I made a deliberate choice to lose the comments from his readers, which are a good portion of the fun, I admit. And a good chunk of the mid-list sff and YA authors are wedded pretty tightly to LJ, since they are all mutual friends with each other; I feel like if Jim C. Hines would move over here, maybe, that might break the logjam.

[charmian]

Personally speaking, although I've participated in comms in the past, in general my main interaction has been on personal journals, both mine and those of others. From the comments here, other people do share that pattern, though.

I think I do understand, however? A lot of people are generally very satisfied with LJ, recent performance problems aside (personally speaking, I didn't even notice the performance problems). So they see no reason to quit. Others may feel annoyed with some of the things LJ does, but not very much, and simply accept it as the nature of LJ. For others, it may be that the reason they are on LJ doesn't exist on DW (or on Tumblr, etc). If there isn't a viable alternative (in terms of content and specific groups, not software), then it doesn't really make sense for them to move.

When I polled people on LJ long ago about what would prompt them to move to another journaling/blogging service, the most popular answer was 'if all of my friends moved and all of the communities I was a member of moved.' Which is somewhat different from 'there are cool people there and neat comms;' according to those long ago results, it seems to be that people want those specific people and those specific comms. There was a post awhile back, though, that sort of said that actually this is not a realistic expectation currently, and that what people should expect out of DW is that there will be (new) cool people there and (new) neat comms there.

That could be. As I was saying to torachan, I think even a BNF would lose a substantial chunk of readers in a transition.

[starlady]

I think about 90% of my circle on DW, maybe even 95%, are "new" people/comms to me--ironically the person who got me into DW was someone I had friended on LJ literally like a week before I won the Open ID lottery. And I like my rlist a lot.

I did notice the performance problems, even using LJ in the limited capacity that I do these days, and in fairness my capacity for accepting LJ's shenanigans as the nature of the beast is just low in general. But most of the journals I was reading on LJ were not mutual friends, which doubtlessly helped me make the switch to the extent that I have.

[charmian]

I actually didn't notice the performance problems on LJ when I went to the site during that period. It was rather odd.

Yeah, I think lack of mutual friendings definitely helps there; if you're just reading non-locked content, you had might as well use google reader, or read as a feed on DW.

Here via Holyschist

[liv]

This this this! Among my circle pretty much the deciding factor in which service to use is where their specific, individual friends (and communities) are. People don't care if there's a lot of activity in general, or a lot of interesting discussions in general, or a lot of active communities in general. They care about a specific community they've been a member of for years and that has seen them through all kinds of major life events. They care about a small number of real-life friends who use LJ as a one-to-many email system.

I know lots of people who completely agree with my view that DW is technically and ethically better than LJ in many ways, but they won't move because most or all of their friends haven't moved. So DW growing faster, or more unique to DW content, or more active communities, or more fannish feedback, none of those things are going to overcome this Catch-22 situation where people won't move because they won't move.

Re: Here via Holyschist

[charmian]

I think among the sort of people you're describing, you're probably right.

Hmm, but in that situation, it seems things are quite hopeless then? No change could persuade them to move.

[liv]

You might be interested in the discussion my crowd had on this topic. (Yes, it's at LJ, but the whole point of the post was to discuss why LJ people aren't using DW, so posting it here would have been self-defeating.) My read of that is that people are clinging on to LJ as it gets worse and worse, and they all have different thresholds of what counts as unusable but there's a consensus that LJ is approaching them.

I know denise wants us to talk about why Dreamwidth is good, and not about what's wrong with LJ, but honestly, I'm here myself primarily because I got pissed off with LJ, and I think LJ's increasing problems are a lot more likely to drive people to Dreamwidth than DW's wonderful shiny features. Which people don't care about because they want to be where all their friends are.

(There's also one person in the discussion who was initially excited about Dreamwidth, but gave up because she found OpenID too buggy and hard to use. I do find that incredibly sad, but them's the breaks.)

[charmian]

That certainly IS the most effective place to put it, I would think! That was a pretty interesting discussion, especially the chart of DW's growth that your friend made. It doesn't really seem that in terms of active users that DW has grown that much since 12/09, but it seems to have grown in terms of daily posts.

Yeah, openID I think is a problem, but it's not really one with an obvious solution. :(

[holyschist]

I guess my experience of interacting mostly in personal journals is not typical of LJ, then?

I don't think it's nontypical--I have a whole reading list full of people who are more journal-focused (two, technically). But the people who are personal-journal-focused seem to be happier with DW, and consequently aren't the ones talking about it being too quiet.

Would love statistics on this, though.