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“The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

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Re: “The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

#101

Post by JohnBooty »

secabeen wrote: post #92
JohnBooty wrote: post #72

I will unabashedly say that the "Livejournal era" was my favorite era of the internet to date. You can still blog in 2019, obviously, on LJ or elsewhere. But your friends aren't going to read it. That's why LJ worked: it was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts, and you all had a more or less equal ability to comment and respond to each other. Crucially, LJ had enough markets…

LJ also had a culture of longer, more introspective posts. Facebook encourages the light, picture-plus-a-quick comment post because they're easy to make. LJ was much more comfortable for deeper engagement.

Yeah! I don't know where to do something like that today!

(Where it would actually be read, and a sufficient number of my friends might do similar things)

Re: “The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

#102

Post by walterbell »

username223 wrote: post #68
walterbell wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any recommendations on how to discover them, since search engines don't work (SEO)? Is there a search engine which does web of trust analysis on indie blogrolls/webrings?

When you stumble upon a good article, subscribe to its RSS feed if it has one, and unsubscribe if it gets boring. Eventually you'll end up with an interesting collection of blogs. I wish I could help more, but most of the blogs I follow are probably uninteresting to you.

Yes, I've taken a similar approach with RSS and a subset of social media. If only there was an algorithm which would take a web of links and show a web of related links :)

Re: “The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

#103

Post by JohnBooty »

patorjk wrote: post #89
JohnBooty wrote: post #72

I will unabashedly say that the "Livejournal era" was my favorite era of the internet to date. You can still blog in 2019, obviously, on LJ or elsewhere. But your friends aren't going to read it. That's why LJ worked: it was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts, and you all had a more or less equal ability to comment and respond to each other. Crucially, LJ had enough markets…

> But your friends aren't going to read it. Even back in the day my friends weren't reading my LJ. I wound up discovering the only people reading mine were a few internet friends, ex-girl friends, and a professor I was working for (which taught me the lesson of never writing something on the internet that I didn't want out as public information).

Yeah it definitely depended on your friends circle.

The vast majority of the people I knew didn't actually use LJ. But, I was a member of a few online communities, and I had plenty of friends (and friends-of-friends) from those places that were also on LJ.

I'm glad most of my IRL (I find myself nostalgic for this outdated term) friends weren't on LJ. I'd have felt much less inclined to be honest and open -- it would have wound up being like FB today, which has a certain practical value (it's a point of contact, a convenient way to plan events, etc) but really doesn't lend itself to introspection or anything.

Re: “The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

#104

Post by JohnBooty »

pnathan wrote: post #98
JohnBooty wrote: post #72

I will unabashedly say that the "Livejournal era" was my favorite era of the internet to date. You can still blog in 2019, obviously, on LJ or elsewhere. But your friends aren't going to read it. That's why LJ worked: it was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts, and you all had a more or less equal ability to comment and respond to each other. Crucially, LJ had enough markets…

LJ had a much more pleasant culture in terms of interacting with strangers. I'd call that an artifact of the number of weirdos, along with the pre-Eternal September Internet world in general. The text orientation also helped. There were also a lot of highly knowledgeable people: professors and the like.

    LJ had a much more pleasant culture in terms of interacting with strangers.
I agree, and even when strangers were nasty there were less of them. It was manageable. I mean, sure, sometimes there were trolls or whatever. But it wasn't like social media today where there can be absolute deluges of bad-faith interaction.

Re: “The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

#105

Post by JohnBooty »

nitemice wrote: post #88
JohnBooty wrote: post #72

I will unabashedly say that the "Livejournal era" was my favorite era of the internet to date. You can still blog in 2019, obviously, on LJ or elsewhere. But your friends aren't going to read it. That's why LJ worked: it was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts, and you all had a more or less equal ability to comment and respond to each other. Crucially, LJ had enough markets…

" it was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts, and you all had a more or less equal ability to comment and respond to each other. Crucially, LJ had enough marketshare to make it feasible that you might have a reasonable number of friends that used it too -- but it wasn't designed to make it trivial for your coworkers or neighbors to find you on there. " Probably not today, bu…

That was my impression as well but I could never get anything going on Tumblr.

It seemed essentially worthless to bother posting any original content there because it just got swallowed up in an absolute ocean of reblogs which, of course, was pretty much the entire point of that place.

I'm sure part of this was due to having a smaller circle of friends on Tumblr than I had on LJ, but it was difficult for me to see how anybody could have any sort of "community" experience on Tumblr. It seems some did though!

Re: “The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

#106

Post by JohnBooty »

amyjess wrote: post #83
JohnBooty wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you post a link to your blog on linkedin, maybe 5-10% of people will click it, from my experience. Well, that's what was cool about LJ. LJ was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts. The latter of those two aspects (and the fact that it was aggregated with the former) is what made it unique.

Yeah, when I was in college, I self-hosted a Serendipity blog (and a NewsPro/Coranto blog before that) for a while before moving to LJ, and I moved because of LJ's social aspects. Having that friends list was a huge benefit, as was being able to use to tag my friends in posts. Plus, I'd have access to communities! Social is important. And eventually, around the time I graduated college, I stopped using LJ and started…

    > FB had picked up a significant amount of blogging features by then, including status updates, notes
It's funny, because the "notes" feature could in theory make for a very decent social blogging platform. But it's really de-emphasized in FB's UI, and if you do bother to make a "note" it doesn't seem to get much visibility in people's feeds... whether that's because FB's algorithm doesn't give notes much weight, or because longer-form "notes" posts simply aren't what people are looking for when they fire up FB.

Re: “The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

#107

Post by mikekchar »

nine_k wrote: post #86
cirgue wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, probably not much, but approximate to the ARPU for google, which I think is around $25 per year. Also, if anyone is interested in working on something like this, shoot me an email at the address in my profile.

I think you vastly underestimate your value as an ad target for Google. They likely make much more on you per year, just selling targeted ads. It's an uncomfortable thought, I know.

The most uncomfortable thought is that I end up paying for this in the goods I buy, even if the advertising was not useful to me. The irony is that I don't think I've ever bought something that I saw in an ad on the internet. I have frequently seen ads for things after I bought them though (in the case of internet purchases). It's downright impressive how well the various parties share information, but as far as effective advertising... it is not, as far as I'm concerned. On the other hand, I don't buy things off the "shopping channel" on TV either and that's still pretty big business...

Another sad thought: the amount of money my employer spends in ads directed at me because I've repeatedly hit a certain part of our website while fixing bugs... I really should fix bugs in privacy mode :-)

Re: “The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

#108

Post by sgentle »

JohnBooty wrote: post #72

I will unabashedly say that the "Livejournal era" was my favorite era of the internet to date. You can still blog in 2019, obviously, on LJ or elsewhere. But your friends aren't going to read it. That's why LJ worked: it was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts, and you all had a more or less equal ability to comment and respond to each other. Crucially, LJ had enough markets…

I think that's exactly why LJ was replaced by the latter titans of social media. When they say "we never had the clear mental model of what the site was", I hear "we never had a clear plan for how to turn our users into a commodity"

What made the early web the early web was all the surplus value left on the table. A modern LiveJournal would never make the mistake of just building a platform that's useful, with no regard to whether it's sticky, high-engagement, or compatible with microtargeted content marketing. It was better, yes, but less economically efficient.

Weep for all those eyeballs, all that content, just sitting there with no clear mental model of how to use them to provide great brand experiences.

Re: “The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

#109

Post by sdrothrock »

derivatives wrote: post #46
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #17

Although this article brings up Dreamwidth it doesn't actually describe the full relationship behind DW and LJ. When LJ banned adult fandom fanfic, the group moved to DW and also a separate fanfiction site ArchiveOfOurOwn(AO3). AO3 in particular is part of an organization that pushes real legal change for the freedom of derivative works. LJ did not have this explicit in its creation and so fanfic writers universally…

Adult fan fiction, though. It’s... It’s just... Honestly, it makes a lot of sense to eschew the genre, no matter your stance on legality, free speech or whatever.

I'm not interested in adult fiction or fan fiction, but I'd still be interested in hearing what you think that.

Re: “The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging

#110

Post by temp1892 »

derivatives wrote: post #46
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #17

Although this article brings up Dreamwidth it doesn't actually describe the full relationship behind DW and LJ. When LJ banned adult fandom fanfic, the group moved to DW and also a separate fanfiction site ArchiveOfOurOwn(AO3). AO3 in particular is part of an organization that pushes real legal change for the freedom of derivative works. LJ did not have this explicit in its creation and so fanfic writers universally…

Adult fan fiction, though. It’s... It’s just... Honestly, it makes a lot of sense to eschew the genre, no matter your stance on legality, free speech or whatever.

> Adult fan fiction, though.

The actual adult-fanfiction website or just fan fiction with adult situations?

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