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

[holyschist]

Fannishly, I'd mostly use tags to find out what I wanted (or scrolling/memories in the pre-tag days). I'm still mildly active in some non-fannish LJ comms, but they're not the OMG Super Active sorts of comms that a lot of the comm people seem to be missing. Like, to me, if a comm gets a post more than once a week, and these posts are not always the same people, it's "active". I think a lot of the comm people are defining "active" as "multiples comm posts a day".

[charmian]

These comms were on my flist back on LJ, so eventually I removed them when the percentage of posts I was interested in dropped.

I don't know, I think what people are complaining about are entirely dead comms: see this comment, for example. I think activity also depends not only on post volume, but on comment volume as well, also. If there is one post a week, with no comments, the comm looks pretty lonely.

[holyschist]

Oh, yeah--but there are a zillion entirely dead comms on LJ, too. It's just that there are more comms overall, so there are numerically more active comms. (And the last couple times I've gone looking for comms on a particular topic at LJ, they either didn't exist, had never been posted in, or only existed in Russian...and they weren't that weird topics. LJ doesn't actually have EVERYTHING in the internet.)

I wonder if it would be possible to get at some stats for comms on both sites to see if one has a greater percentage of dead comms (although that might be somewhat skewed on DW by name-squatting).

[charmian]

True, LJ isn't the entire internet, and there are certainly topics of mass interest which it is weak on... however, I think to someone using both sites, if DW doesn't have a live comm on a topic LJ does have several active ones on, they may feel dissatisfied.

[holyschist]

Totally understandable!