Moving content, making waves
LiveJournal, LiveJournal, LiveJournal. You and I have never gotten along.
I feel silly whenever I sit down to write a post on here. I feel even sillier when I finish and upload one. I feel ashamed when I look back at the thoughts I once disclosed. This was never a good fit for me. This has never been a constructive enterprise. So, without further ado, I am shutting down. My account will squat. I will comment from it, and that will be all. I have saved my entries for my personal record, but I will not again make them accessible. Unless I find a new, active community of users with whom I desperately want to connect, this -- for the third and final time -- is it. This time, I have final reasons.
I do this because I think the premise is flawed. You cannot make a journal live without serious ramifications. Either you do not disclose how you really feel, or you do so and, inevitably, unless your friends are soulless or self-policing, drama ensues. I got hit by dumber drama than I thought possible in recent weeks, and I decided that was it. You might think to yourself that this is taking things out of proportion, that I shouldn't terminate my use of a service based on one more incident, but if you do, then I will ask you, what am I terminating? Not much. I have terminated far more meaningful things lately. LiveJournal is dirt under my fingernails, by contrast. What purpose has it served?
I have been studying computer science with the aim of understanding how the cybernetic world works the way it does, particularly the world growing in the cloud. I have concurrently studied design to understand why developers make the design decisions they do in rolling out a product. That might not seem relevant, but consider that interface begets content. LiveJournal is hardly meant for anything of import. It is, instead, built to host the day-to-day mental wanderings of teens and twenty-somethings. It's no coincidence that half-assed one-liners among our posts draw more attention than do well-crafted works. It is the certain flaw of the social aggregator that users' attentions are spread so thin. Do you use the web interface? Take stock in seeing how much they want you to write. Even Facebook built a better box: It expands.
Pretty metadata, though, I know. Spare me.
I'm nitpicking. Suffice it to say that I find the implementation pitiful. I could build a better journal site in a day in Ruby, not including the time to adjust it for security and scaling, just laying down the bare features. I don't and won't, however, because I have come to terms with the fact that the premise is -- if it is any good now that LJ has passed its heyday -- not for me.
My dissatisfaction comes from that feeling you get when you read something so sickeningly audience-aware as a journal post alongside writing -- real writing -- that someone has written for the sake of itself. Where is that writing in the age of social media? Why do we bother to leverage the awesome power of the written word to express our trifles, troubles and whims? Why have we allowed ourselves to indulge so deeply in the minutiae of our uninteresting existences? Life doesn't happen from one day to the next. Life happens in weeks, months, years. The sad truth of LiveJournal is that it promotes this kind of self-interested, vacuous banter. I am sorry to see that I have contributed to it for so long.
Every now and again, of course, there's big news. But this isn't Twitter. You might have to dig and dig and dig to find the big news, instead of seeing it jumping up and down within that 140 character limit. And this isn't Facebook. The big-news one-liners don't jump out among the lesser stories as brought about by engineering and graphic design, which, if not expert, is at least present. I'm not interested in helping to bury the big news anymore, and I'm not interested in writing my big news just so it can get buried.
And of course, there are much more skilled journal-keepers than I. Some have mastered the form. Some write such and lead such lives that every entry keeps you grabbing for more. But ask yourself: Does a linear aggregator do those journalers justice? For my part -- and I know at least kinders has my back here -- I would sooner keep my feed reader, and know with greater certainty when things have changed for them, as evidence by the big, fat, fucking numeral one. None of this filtering crap. No more scrolling and sifting. I hope you realize that you deserve better than this site, and if you do not, either you have built for yourself a much more vibrant and worthwhile experience here than I have, or I am sorry for your wasted efforts.
Why all my bitching about the design and engineering of LiveJournal? Because blogging, even social blogging, is a good idea, but baby always had to grow up someday.
To that effect, I'm moving over to WordPress, where everything I say will be for the world to read; where I will have a decent page and an RSS feed; where I will one day be able to pipe my content into another web site; where publishing and maintenance tools are all halfway decent, sophisticated and free; where I will have space to stretch out and write things worth reading. Maybe, in that process, I'll grow a readership beyond these arbitrary walls. You know how to ask me privately where to find me if you want to.
Goodbye, LiveJournal. It has not been fun at all.
I feel silly whenever I sit down to write a post on here. I feel even sillier when I finish and upload one. I feel ashamed when I look back at the thoughts I once disclosed. This was never a good fit for me. This has never been a constructive enterprise. So, without further ado, I am shutting down. My account will squat. I will comment from it, and that will be all. I have saved my entries for my personal record, but I will not again make them accessible. Unless I find a new, active community of users with whom I desperately want to connect, this -- for the third and final time -- is it. This time, I have final reasons.
I do this because I think the premise is flawed. You cannot make a journal live without serious ramifications. Either you do not disclose how you really feel, or you do so and, inevitably, unless your friends are soulless or self-policing, drama ensues. I got hit by dumber drama than I thought possible in recent weeks, and I decided that was it. You might think to yourself that this is taking things out of proportion, that I shouldn't terminate my use of a service based on one more incident, but if you do, then I will ask you, what am I terminating? Not much. I have terminated far more meaningful things lately. LiveJournal is dirt under my fingernails, by contrast. What purpose has it served?
I have been studying computer science with the aim of understanding how the cybernetic world works the way it does, particularly the world growing in the cloud. I have concurrently studied design to understand why developers make the design decisions they do in rolling out a product. That might not seem relevant, but consider that interface begets content. LiveJournal is hardly meant for anything of import. It is, instead, built to host the day-to-day mental wanderings of teens and twenty-somethings. It's no coincidence that half-assed one-liners among our posts draw more attention than do well-crafted works. It is the certain flaw of the social aggregator that users' attentions are spread so thin. Do you use the web interface? Take stock in seeing how much they want you to write. Even Facebook built a better box: It expands.
Pretty metadata, though, I know. Spare me.
I'm nitpicking. Suffice it to say that I find the implementation pitiful. I could build a better journal site in a day in Ruby, not including the time to adjust it for security and scaling, just laying down the bare features. I don't and won't, however, because I have come to terms with the fact that the premise is -- if it is any good now that LJ has passed its heyday -- not for me.
My dissatisfaction comes from that feeling you get when you read something so sickeningly audience-aware as a journal post alongside writing -- real writing -- that someone has written for the sake of itself. Where is that writing in the age of social media? Why do we bother to leverage the awesome power of the written word to express our trifles, troubles and whims? Why have we allowed ourselves to indulge so deeply in the minutiae of our uninteresting existences? Life doesn't happen from one day to the next. Life happens in weeks, months, years. The sad truth of LiveJournal is that it promotes this kind of self-interested, vacuous banter. I am sorry to see that I have contributed to it for so long.
Every now and again, of course, there's big news. But this isn't Twitter. You might have to dig and dig and dig to find the big news, instead of seeing it jumping up and down within that 140 character limit. And this isn't Facebook. The big-news one-liners don't jump out among the lesser stories as brought about by engineering and graphic design, which, if not expert, is at least present. I'm not interested in helping to bury the big news anymore, and I'm not interested in writing my big news just so it can get buried.
And of course, there are much more skilled journal-keepers than I. Some have mastered the form. Some write such and lead such lives that every entry keeps you grabbing for more. But ask yourself: Does a linear aggregator do those journalers justice? For my part -- and I know at least kinders has my back here -- I would sooner keep my feed reader, and know with greater certainty when things have changed for them, as evidence by the big, fat, fucking numeral one. None of this filtering crap. No more scrolling and sifting. I hope you realize that you deserve better than this site, and if you do not, either you have built for yourself a much more vibrant and worthwhile experience here than I have, or I am sorry for your wasted efforts.
Why all my bitching about the design and engineering of LiveJournal? Because blogging, even social blogging, is a good idea, but baby always had to grow up someday.
To that effect, I'm moving over to WordPress, where everything I say will be for the world to read; where I will have a decent page and an RSS feed; where I will one day be able to pipe my content into another web site; where publishing and maintenance tools are all halfway decent, sophisticated and free; where I will have space to stretch out and write things worth reading. Maybe, in that process, I'll grow a readership beyond these arbitrary walls. You know how to ask me privately where to find me if you want to.
Goodbye, LiveJournal. It has not been fun at all.