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

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. :(