Not so much a social medium as a social sub-par

[gerald_duck]

I'm seriously missing the good old Livejournal days. For the most part conversation was lively yet temperate and cogent.

I finally gave up and joined Twitter and Facebook; it has to be said that both are pretty grim in their respective ways.

While there's a certain art (or was until they doubled the length of tweets) to constructing something concise and pithy, to a first approximation Twitter appears to consist of:

• Celebrities saying a few interesting things
  
• Arseholes of every stripe screaming abuse at one another
  
• Jokes and memes
  
• A few friends saying things I disagree with and would like to discuss, but daren't tackle via Twitter

Meanwhile, Facebook is full of people who've friended everyone they know, and are now carefully trying to project a sanitised image of universal acceptability. They don't want to get political because their racist uncle bought an iPad last year, and they can't say anything too lewd because they don't want their boss's children reading about sex-toy wholesalers. Facebook's algorithms show you the stuff people hit "like" on the most, which rapidly descends to the lowest common denominator. Oh, and conversations are only threaded one layer deep, so… yeah.

Livejournal used to be a platform for having conversations with the people you wanted to have conversations with. Not your friends. Not your relatives. Not famous people. Debaters. Raconteurs. Conversationalists.

That's largely gone, now. The realisation of how much I feel the lack has only gradually crept up on me. Somehow, slowly but surely, posting stopped feeling like it was worth the bother. Result: I'm now staring at a six-month-long gap in my blog. )-8

A few weeks back, I was chatting to joebunny who remarked about my recent radio silence. I said some of what I'm saying here now. Three or four of us all agreed that we missed Livejournal. All it would take for blogging to flourish again is for people to blog again; I wonder if that could happen?

Cross-posted from this Dreamwidth original. If you can, please comment there instead.

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