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

[liv]

I'm maybe not relevant here because I'm not really in fandom. But I barely use communities at all. My LJ paradigm for six years, and my DW paradigm now, is that I use the friending / circle system as a sort of distributed meta-community. I'm way way way more interested in personal journal interaction than communities.

I don't really want to surf randomly to find interesting people to interact with, I want to meet people who are loosely in my social circle and already have friends in common with me, and I found LJ's system of using friends pages as content aggregators incredibly useful for that. That system is in fact the whole reason why I stayed on LJ and didn't move to a far more feature-rich and user-friendly blogging engine such as Moveable Type in the early days, or Wordpress or Tumblr or Posterous more recently.

The downside of that is the huge inertia, almost lock-in. I lost patience with LJ when they first introduced ads, and I got really really sick of LJ sometime around 2008. But I couldn't abandon ship and risk losing the extended network which is the whole point for me. When DW came along, I decided that it was sufficiently geared towards inter-operability that I could take the risk. Seems it's not quite interoperable enough yet; lots of people find the OpenID stuff incredibly annoying or confusing, and we don't yet have the promised feature of cross-site reading lists, so people pretty much have to keep LJ accounts anyway. I can't blame them for not being very active in getting things going here, in the circumstances.

[charmian]

Oh no, everyone is relevant! It's very useful to have a wide range of perspectives.

Yeah, that does jibe with what people have been saying, that while for some users LJ comms are essential, for others they are nearly an afterthought.

Hmm, actually though, Tumblr and Posterous do have a 'friends-page' feature. It is hard, though, I agree, on DW for people who have that style of LJ usage to start expanding their social circle.

Yeah, I think a lot of people in these discussions underestimate the extent to which the avg user finds OpenID annoying/confusing. Out of curiosity, do you think cross-site reading lists will change things a bit, or not?

[liv]

Yes, some of the more modern blogging systems are starting to include aggregators of some sort. Even Twitter has lists now! But I think they're still really primitive compared to LJ, and you don't have a whole community built around those systems yet. I think the other thing that works to the advantage of LJ-style friends pages is that comments get almost equal emphasis with original posts. So if I read posts on my friends page, I see lots of the same people commenting repeatedly, and if there's someone I like, I add them, and they're already someone who knows several of my friends, and that works out well more often than if I add someone's Tumblr blog to my Tumblr dashboard because they made a one-line comment on a friend's Tumblr.

The OpenID thing is so frustrating, because I'm sitting here getting all excited that DW's implementation works so much better than LJ's, but for lots of my friends, "better than LJ" is nothing close to "good enough". Most people won't try a different variation if it errors due to underscores versus hypens in usernames, or a bug on LJ's end, and many prefer not to comment at all if it's not immediately completely obvious how to use OpenID on the comment form.

I think cross-site reading lists may be the killer feature; it will make a lot of the people who prefer DW in principle but aren't prepared to leave their friends a lot more willing to start using DW actively. And I'm really hoping that will lead to a critical mass of "most people I want to talk to are on DW", which will hopefully persuade many of the others to move. But I may be over-optimistic; the fact that it's a paid-only feature will mean that it's not the best way to attract new people to DW. And a lot depends on the implementation details; if it's clunky to use or buggy then it will be worse than useless, even though I personally will love it.

[charmian]

It's not really a blogging system, but IMHO, despite FB's flaws, their privacy system is comparable or superior to LJ's. Buzz also has a similar privacy system. I think at this point, LJ's privacy/flist feature isn't really a comparative advantage? I think for Tumblr, though, in some Tumblr circles the reblogging thing does work out like commenting, and can really introduce new users to people.

Yeah, I agree. I've written in this blog about the many UI problems of OpenID, not really DW's implementation, but inherent to OpenID itself. (The OpenID advocates themselves realize that OpenID has problems)

I'm... personally a bit more skeptical? In fact, in that situation, I wonder whether a lot of the people who formerly crossposted are now just going to post to LJ alone instead. In the past, a big incentive for crossposting to DW was that you could reach people who had given up on LJ and weren't reading there anymore. But now that (some) DW people can easily read folks on LJ, one had might as well just post on LJ. But then, as you say, only a small amount of DW people will be able to do this, so the impact in any way might not be very large at all.

[cesy]

I haven't found Facebook's privacy controls to be anywhere near as good as LJ/DW's - posting to custom groups is not nearly as easy to manage.

[charmian]

I like that you can lock things to one person, or exclude groups/persons as well. But I guess YMMV.

[liv]

I'm not really talking about privacy, here. Privacy is nice, but I'm talking about LJ's network model primarily. (I think LJ stumbled into this accidentally, because what brad originally conceived was pretty much just a slightly more user-friendly email list.) What makes the LJ family different is how easy it is to go from knowing three people to knowing dozens or hundreds. On blogs in general, even when they have aggregators and privacy controls, you have two options: you either talk to the whole internet, in which case the overwhelming majority are people you have nothing in common with, or you talk to the three people you already know going in and there's almost no way to expand. (And you often don't have complete control over which of those happens.)

On LJ, you naturally meet and talk to the people who already know your friends, or share specific common interests with you. I should say I basically don't lock anything, just very occasional posts about family medical stuff, and my journal participation would hardly look any different at all if everything were completely public.

Now, I do agree that as systems are modernizing, and as search engines are getting more sophisticated at connecting everything together, this is less of a stark difference. But pretty much every other system, whether it's powerful and flexible for geeks, or whether it's dead easy and completely user-friendly to use, you have to fiddle and use it in a slightly off-label way in order to meet new people whom you actually want to meet. LJ just naturally makes that happen when you use the site in the most obvious way. That's how I got lots of people hooked when they initially created accounts only for the convenience of having emailed comments. I think the reason Facebook took off so fast in the early days is because it used to be quite good at that; when it was a way to meet people attending the same school as you, it was a very different proposition from how it is now it's trying to be the whole internet.

Also FB and Buzz have both picked up really bad reputations for suddenly changing the privacy rules on you so that stuff you thought was hidden becomes exposed, and stuff you thought was open but personal becomes actively publicized. I imagine that Buzz will continue to get better and FB will continue to get worse on that score, but at the moment, if it's privacy controls you want, those two are not the obvious choice.

I do think Tumblr is looking more and more promising. When I first joined it you had to roll your own code to even have comments at all, but it's definitely a lot better now. If DW doesn't do as well as I hope, I'll probably move there.

[charmian]

By network model, do you mean the friends-list page? Or the commenting? I guess I'm just not understanding what the unique part of LJ in this respect is.

Hmm, if commenting is important to you, and you're not as interested in the installed base, I'd actually suggest Posterous over Tumblr. Posterous has native commenting, so you don't have to create your own, though unfortunately, it doesn't have threading yet, and it has a reading page. (However, Posterous doesn't have reblogging. Though, if reblogging is not important to you, that doesn't matter) I also think that Posterous is slightly closer to a social network, because they have profile pages (for a sample, see mine.

[liv]

Yeah, I think you may be right to be skeptical about the cross-site reading thing. I am looking at people who basically want to be on DW but aren't willing to give up their LJ social circles; those people will be much happier with cross-site reading. But there may well be more people who only reluctantly use DW at all, and they will lose their incentive as you say.

The automatic cross-poster is one thing that, in my circles, is pushing people towards, oh well, might as well use both even if I don't passionately believe in DW. I kind of hope that the cross-site reading will have a similar effect, again contributing to tipping the balance in favour of DW being perceived as the more active site. But if it's too exclusive and / or too difficult to use, it'll end up having practically no effect (other than to make me happy that I don't have to load the insecure, ugly LJ site any more).

[charmian]

It's hard to say, really, although I think that the fact that it's a paid-only feature is going to highly limit whatever impact it has, positive, negative, neutral.

Huh, but then don't you still need to load the page to comment? I guess currently you can get a similar effect if you are using your personal computer with an RSS reader program, or if you use mobile you could read your flist through an RSS reader app which allows authentication.