A Meta-LJ Post
Despite my recent long-ish posts, I must confess I'm a little unsure about my continued use of LiveJournal.
I first joined when Ailsa sent me an invite code back in 2003. (An invite code! How the mighty have fallen.) I've posted a lot of crap up here in that time, from infodumps to film reviews to political rambles to gloating about lesbians. But I've been posting a lot less recently, and my LJ friends list has died down considerably. These days it's possible that all I'll see for a couple of days are my regular feeds for comics and authors. I can only really think of three people I know from real life who still post regularly: Sacha, Paige and Ailsa. The sponsored advertising, once inoffensive banner ads, turned into flash adverts that shut the whole damn page down. And there's the spam comments, which have become a bigger problem recently - I now screen anonymous comments and had to close comments to one particular post from a couple of years ago becuase, on a weekly basis, it was getting a spam comment (No idea why that one post - think it was because it had about 17 legit comments so it looked "busy").
I know why use had dried up, of course. Nowadays basically everyone uses social networking sites and social netwroking is an ideal format for fire-and-forget short comments. If all you wanna do is share a BBC news link or a funny video or just say "I've been to see Thor and it was a good laugh", you can fit that in a Facebook post or whatever no trouble. The only value in a blog is for longer posts - the kind verbally unrestrained moi does on a semi-regular basis. :-) But if you're just writing a few lines, most social networking sites will handle it just fine. Heck, that's pretty much the design of twitter - essentially a mass internet text message, for short open communiques.
There's also the user-base issue - the more people use communication tools the more valuable they are. My IM platform of choice is MSN and has been since 2000, but I used a multi-platform piece of software for a while to support me on AIM and ICQ as well. I eventually chucked it when I noticed that basically no-one I spoke to on the other formats wasn't also on MSN, and that the lost functionality of a third-party program for MSN gave me no benefit when all I was effectively using was MSN. Once the bulk of my social circle was using LiveJournal, and other people who were following a dozen people on LJ might as well just make their own account and perhaps periodically. Even if you want a blog, would you go LJ these days without the user base? What's the draw over something like Blogger/
I'm always going to want a blog of some sort, because I've always been the kind of person who likes to write longer posts. (I remember getting grumpy on an email group in 2001 when I wrote paragraph long replies or arguments and would get two or three lines at most in reply.) And I have fond memories of LJ if only because there's posts from such a broad slice of my life - not always happy times, but it's an interesting chart of what I was thinking. Still, I've started wondering if I really want to keep this place or if I need another venue: or if I might need to tighten the posts up so they're all Friends-Only. (Which would of course make it even less likely that I'll get comments, but might be the only way to shut down the spam I'm getting.)
I first joined when Ailsa sent me an invite code back in 2003. (An invite code! How the mighty have fallen.) I've posted a lot of crap up here in that time, from infodumps to film reviews to political rambles to gloating about lesbians. But I've been posting a lot less recently, and my LJ friends list has died down considerably. These days it's possible that all I'll see for a couple of days are my regular feeds for comics and authors. I can only really think of three people I know from real life who still post regularly: Sacha, Paige and Ailsa. The sponsored advertising, once inoffensive banner ads, turned into flash adverts that shut the whole damn page down. And there's the spam comments, which have become a bigger problem recently - I now screen anonymous comments and had to close comments to one particular post from a couple of years ago becuase, on a weekly basis, it was getting a spam comment (No idea why that one post - think it was because it had about 17 legit comments so it looked "busy").
I know why use had dried up, of course. Nowadays basically everyone uses social networking sites and social netwroking is an ideal format for fire-and-forget short comments. If all you wanna do is share a BBC news link or a funny video or just say "I've been to see Thor and it was a good laugh", you can fit that in a Facebook post or whatever no trouble. The only value in a blog is for longer posts - the kind verbally unrestrained moi does on a semi-regular basis. :-) But if you're just writing a few lines, most social networking sites will handle it just fine. Heck, that's pretty much the design of twitter - essentially a mass internet text message, for short open communiques.
There's also the user-base issue - the more people use communication tools the more valuable they are. My IM platform of choice is MSN and has been since 2000, but I used a multi-platform piece of software for a while to support me on AIM and ICQ as well. I eventually chucked it when I noticed that basically no-one I spoke to on the other formats wasn't also on MSN, and that the lost functionality of a third-party program for MSN gave me no benefit when all I was effectively using was MSN. Once the bulk of my social circle was using LiveJournal, and other people who were following a dozen people on LJ might as well just make their own account and perhaps periodically. Even if you want a blog, would you go LJ these days without the user base? What's the draw over something like Blogger/
I'm always going to want a blog of some sort, because I've always been the kind of person who likes to write longer posts. (I remember getting grumpy on an email group in 2001 when I wrote paragraph long replies or arguments and would get two or three lines at most in reply.) And I have fond memories of LJ if only because there's posts from such a broad slice of my life - not always happy times, but it's an interesting chart of what I was thinking. Still, I've started wondering if I really want to keep this place or if I need another venue: or if I might need to tighten the posts up so they're all Friends-Only. (Which would of course make it even less likely that I'll get comments, but might be the only way to shut down the spam I'm getting.)