LiveJournal

[settiai]

I only know a handful of Russian, so I've been mostly depending on online translators to read the non-English comments in the post about LJ's planned changes to the friends page. Apparently, it seems that there's a belief that your journal's style is meant for your readers instead of you, which... really seems to be the opposite of what many people

Comments

[settiai]

Huh. I actually come at it from a completely different direction. I have my journal set up in a way that makes it easier for me to read: in my case, a dark font on a background that's lighter but not super light. If I go to someone else's journal that's white text on a black background or something along those lines (which, for some people, is much easier to read than, say, black text on a white background), then I assume that's the format that's easiest for them to read and I simply add ?style=mine to the end so that I read it my journal style. That's why I have a journal style in the first place, so that I can read things that otherwise I wouldn't be able to. Also, I assume most people who read my entries are already reading it in their own style, because they're accessing it from their friends list.

The idea of not being able to read my friends list in my own style could very well mean that I wouldn't be able to read my friends list, period. Because what's clear and easy to read for one person might be migraine inducing for someone else, simply because of differences in how they process things.

[amenirdis]

I think my background is showing! :) When you do a website for an organization, or press releases, or a blog or whatever, you're trying to make it easy for the "customer." It's not for you. It's for them. When I want people to read my fic (or my books) I want it to be easy for them. They're my "customer." They don't have to spend five minutes thinking about my story. There are tons of other things for them to be doing. So I try to be as simple and accessible as possible, the same way I did when what I was providing was links designed to help people find legal assistance, etc.

[settiai]

*nods*

Yeah, I definitely think it's just that we're coming from different places. As I said in a below comment, there are dozens of people who I've been following here on LiveJournal for years but if I was to stumble across their journal without seeing their name the odds are that I wouldn't recognize it. Because I read people's entries on my friends list, in my own style. And when I go to comment on their journals, I have it set up to show in my preferred style as well. It's extremely rare that I ever even see people's posts in their own journal style, thanks to ?style=mine, and - based on what I've seen - I've been working on the assumption that most people are going to add ?style=mine to an entry if my particular style isn't easy for them to read.

Also, for example, the journal style in your professional journal is easy for me to read, so that wouldn't be so big a deal to me if I were reading it in the style you have set up. If I were to go to your amenirdis journal, though, I literally have to view it in my own style because the light-colored text on a dark-colored background isn't something I can read, at least not on a computer screen.