charmian | The Debate about Dreamwidth in Media Fandom Continues

So now people are talking more about Dreamwidth in critical terms (at first there was mostly Dreamwidth boosting). I think in some ways, the critics do have a point in that while DW does have a lot of great features planned, right now DW is a rough draft, and in some ways it is better to get people to try and move into the condo when they're done with the elevators and the pool and the gym.

Disarm_d has issues with the DW price. As I was never a paid user on LJ, I personally don't care much about the price. I don't care about icons either. However, I don't think it's really fair to compare LJ's current price with DW's starting price, especially when the 19.99 price is only if you have automatic renewal on, and DW isn't taking advertising. Also... how can you 'lose' members of your flist when you can import their feeds into LJ anyhow? On the other hand, I use more than one site so I don't really get the angst.

Viciouswishes is cynical about DW and fandom. I wonder what they even mean by 'don't believe in fandom the way you do.' Probably I am not a fandom believer anyway, whatever that means. I think Jennyo and Viciouswishes come up with the good point that DW really needs to integrate, somewhere down the line, more web 2.0 technologies, such as messaging. Making dumb quizzes, though, is not such a bad idea (since people seem to really enjoy these dumb quizzes). Basically rather than a siege mentality against Myspace and Facebook, where everything done there is denigrated and dismissed, like there was on the LJ suggestions comm a lot of the time, I prefer an attitude that acknowledges that successful social networks and blogging services have a lot to teach.

I think at this current stage, DW has a lot of features that are either geared towards interoperability with LJ (and not non-LJ yet) or improving things that annoyed some LJ users (though not all of them, or perhaps, not even a majority). Of course, DW is a rough draft, really, at this stage, so I think Viciouswishes is completely correct when she says 'call me in September.'

Randomly, actually, you know what I would like? A site scheme that has a white background. I find it easier to read than grey. Maybe I'm in the minority here.