Help us make it easier to find communities & make new friends!

[theljstaff]

First, we wanted to thank you for all the wonderful feedback you provided in our previous post! A few of the common themes we saw that we wanted to talk more about today are the ideas of using LiveJournal to read and participate in its communities, to meet new people and build meaningful friendships with them, and for having a private or semi-

Comments

[euphrosyna]

Better, filtered searches. A way to filter out the Russian language sites (or whatever languages you want), filter out communities that haven't had posts in x amount of time, maybe even an indicator of how often on average posts are made in the community in the results. Maybe a way to search by multiple interests.

[gonzo21]

A translation tool so that we can understand the Russian posters, and vice versa?

[slinkslowdown]

I don't know how much people would appreciate that... FB has a translation tool and 99% of the time, the translated text is so bad it's as good as useless.

[mr_spock]

I have yet to find a computerized language translator that is worth using. They have no grasp of multiple definitions or idioms.

[tilia_tomentosa]

When somebody develops such an efficient tool, I'll be a very unemployed translator. :)

[lafinjack]

It uses the Bing translator, so...

[lifestation]

No, this would be a half-measure. If there's no way to eliminate Russian post(er)s completely, there should be a way to filter them out altogether. - This is a rather popular view of things. There are lots of English profiles (mostly of people from the USA) where they say something like "don't friend me if you are Russian, if you do this I'll ban you". Though, I guess,it's just another way of being "friend-only" :)

[gonzo21]

I think the problem there was of the... 7 or 8 Russian language journals that have friended me over the years, every one turned out to be a spammer or bot.

[lifestation]

I agree that spam|bots were a problem and probably they still are in some cases. But that's a background, and what it all has boiled down to is the "Filter-'em-out!" thing.
Actually, I have friended English journals about a couple of times and was banned without any... hm... anything at all :D

[ritaxis]

I have been friended by Russian posters that were spambots and Russian posters who were real. I don't know why in these particular cases: I didn't find anything in common with them. But they were real.

[matrixmann]

It does not disturb if you put some interest in them and are capable to understand them at least a bit.
Think the problem on this would be there are not many English-speaking users included in all these listings (because not too many English-speaking users are that heavily active as the Russian ones).
If you understand at least 75% what's written on the Popular or Latest Entry page, think, it doesn't hit the eye that much.
...Say, that's it when you're (English-speaker) the minority somewhere.

[lifestation]

Well, my first comment was kind of a sad joke on that matter as well.
I think, this has its pre-history. Two previous LJ owners acted like rank-crazy rating maniacs. Everything should have been ranked, have a rating number, the entire policy was in favor of advertizing and monetizing, any modifications were made in the pursuit of social networking buzz-fashion, not with LJ specific users needs in mind. Since LJ is a top blogging platform in Russia and isn't in the rest of the world, the tops and ratings were occupied with Russian popular stuff for which an average English-speaking user will hardly care, and an average Russian user will hardly need any special top-list.
Actually, I've tried to search the top several times for some non-Russian stuff. Well, let's say - it wasn't quite a success story :D
Judging by the latter events, this, including language filtering, is finally going to be addressed.

[matrixmann]

Let's say, language filtering perhaps will enable to handle this matter.
At least the situation now is like the English-speaking community is one of the minorities of the network and that won't change very soon.
Best thing with filtering would be if you could collapse it not only down to one specific language, but also to many (or to use none). There are also users out there which speak various languages besides English as a common to communicate, so sorts of content matter twice to them just because the different languages.
Some language community parts also don't deliver that much content because there are not many persons active out there which post written in them.

[markf]

Existing auto-translation tools are still pretty rough. You can get the general idea of a post out of them in most cases, but it's not a good enough translation to make it a particularly enjoyable experience to try and read auto-translated entries. Unless the technology improves, better measures for filtering by language when determining what posts or journals appear in various search results seems like the way to go.

[gonzo21]

I had a suspicion that might be the case. Just seems a shame that there are these two userbases out there, and never the twain shall meet.

[mr_spock]

Well, you could always try to learn to read Russian!