What's the appeal of LiveJournal?
I've got a friend who is a successful internet businessman, widely-read blogger, and perhaps a bit of an internet celebrity who I respect greatly. He totally does not get this LiveJournal thing. Why use give LiveJournal your content when you could keep it in your own WordPress blog? Why be content with LiveJournal's theming when other blogging systems give you better control? Why syndicate RSS feeds when there are superior dedicated RSS readers? He doesn't necessarily look down on LiveJournal, he just doesn't understand the appeal.
Here's why I choose LiveJournal when there other, debatably "better" options.
I was a regular of talk.bizarre back when usenet was used for something other than porn and warez. Most of the t.b crowd seems to have emigrated to LiveJournal and at least parts of that community have continued here. A lot of my non-t.b friends seem to have accounts here as well. Co-workers, spouses and ex-spouses of co-workers, Burning Man people, flipside people, tokyo santacon people, random pranksters, friends I went to high school or college with who I haven't seen in years. These days when friends tell me that they have a LiveJournal I'm not even very surprised anymore. Beyond pre-existing friends I've made a number of real life friends here. Not just "random people I would say hello to in passing", actual honest-to-goodness members of my social support network. yanners popped up when I announced my move to Montreal and became one of my best friends there. I connected with giantlaser and slownewsday while they were in Iraq and we've made it a priority to get together in person as much as it's possible to do so. It's given ioerror and me a chance to get to know each other. It's given kraquehaus and me a chance to interact other than at one conference a year. I've been able to introduce daakroth and matrushkaka to dozens of my friends which would have been difficult in the real world for geographic, communication, and other practical reasons. LiveJournal has an installed base of people I care about and provides a good way to interact with them. That's a big deal for me.
If you get an account and get active in the community the quality of the available entries seems a bit higher than regular blog entries because of the LiveJournal permissions system. You can make posts "public", "friends only", or available to a user-configurable access control list. There might be ways to do this with WordPress and OpenID but LiveJournal makes the process simple and consistent. I like being able to write posts that will be readable by a few dozen people without being readable by my employer, I like being able to read other people's semiprivate thoughts, and I like having a degree of confidence in the permissions system which seems to work pretty well. The opt-in nature of friends lists and the ability to selectively ban authenticated identities controls trolls and griefers creates a chilling effect on abusive behavior. People know their freedom of speech depends on other people choosing to read it, and these people don't post what they know other people won't think is worth reading.
In traditional blogging most of the communication is one-way: you write the post and they read it. There's a comment system but the comments aren't usually threaded, the identity of the commenter isn't authenticated, and the quality of the comments is usually so-so. With my LiveJournal every commenter is authenticated with a persistent identity. Every commenter either writes their own blog or has a blog that they could choose to write in (whether or not they do). If you get a new or confusing comment you can figure out where the person is coming from before you respond - who are their friends, what are they reading, what have they written, which region they live in. You can respond to their comment because the commenting system is threaded. The result is a conversation where the initiator of the conversation can decide how public and how many authenticated participants are involved. The reader knows that each participant has their own blog and can start following any of those participants. That's why I use tags like tongodeon instead of URLs; to indicate to the reader not just a location to find more information but the persistent identity of a person who they can get to know. I think the authenticated identity, the threading, and the connection to commenters' own journals has a lot to do with the quality of the comments and the conversation which emerges. That's actually why I'm posting this here; this post is as much about soliciting comments from readers as it is communicating my opinion to the public. (What's your appeal from LiveJornal?) I like being able to ask an involved question and get mostly insightful answers from people I actually care about.
For some reason LiveJournal is a stable community. I joined LJ back in October 2003 - back when Friendster was the latest, hottest thing. 95% of the people I knew back then have continued to use this social networking service while Friendster and Tribe and Myspace and Facebook have risen and fallen. People here seem happy with what they've got. Happy enough for many of them (myself included) to pony up $20/year for a paid account - something that even the New York Times had trouble with. The social networking aspect of LiveJournal seems to actually have some substance behind it - while other sites seem to draw people with promises of success at work or online dating or exchanging photographs, LiveJournal seems to be for actual social networking. Blogs and comments are a more accurate reflection of the person's identity and personality. Social networking on LJ means ideas and personalities actually interacting, and I think that's what keeps the community stable as other sites come and go.
LiveJournal has a reputation for being a haven for drama queens, teenagers, southern furry secessionists, cutters, bad poetry writers, and all sorts of other content authors who most sensible people would not want to read. But LiveJournal is opt-in; you don't have to read anyone you don't want to read, and in practice the communities seem to remain relatively free from crossover. The bad reputation that LiveJournalers have in general doesn't have an effect on my experience. The negatives don't seem to apply to me.
There's no single feature in LiveJournal that isn't available in some form or another with other CMSes or other online services, but the combination of the features seems to have encouraged the creation and maintenance of a stable community that's particularly pleasant to participate in. You people. I like LiveJournal because of you people.
Here's why I choose LiveJournal when there other, debatably "better" options.
I was a regular of talk.bizarre back when usenet was used for something other than porn and warez. Most of the t.b crowd seems to have emigrated to LiveJournal and at least parts of that community have continued here. A lot of my non-t.b friends seem to have accounts here as well. Co-workers, spouses and ex-spouses of co-workers, Burning Man people, flipside people, tokyo santacon people, random pranksters, friends I went to high school or college with who I haven't seen in years. These days when friends tell me that they have a LiveJournal I'm not even very surprised anymore. Beyond pre-existing friends I've made a number of real life friends here. Not just "random people I would say hello to in passing", actual honest-to-goodness members of my social support network. yanners popped up when I announced my move to Montreal and became one of my best friends there. I connected with giantlaser and slownewsday while they were in Iraq and we've made it a priority to get together in person as much as it's possible to do so. It's given ioerror and me a chance to get to know each other. It's given kraquehaus and me a chance to interact other than at one conference a year. I've been able to introduce daakroth and matrushkaka to dozens of my friends which would have been difficult in the real world for geographic, communication, and other practical reasons. LiveJournal has an installed base of people I care about and provides a good way to interact with them. That's a big deal for me.
If you get an account and get active in the community the quality of the available entries seems a bit higher than regular blog entries because of the LiveJournal permissions system. You can make posts "public", "friends only", or available to a user-configurable access control list. There might be ways to do this with WordPress and OpenID but LiveJournal makes the process simple and consistent. I like being able to write posts that will be readable by a few dozen people without being readable by my employer, I like being able to read other people's semiprivate thoughts, and I like having a degree of confidence in the permissions system which seems to work pretty well. The opt-in nature of friends lists and the ability to selectively ban authenticated identities controls trolls and griefers creates a chilling effect on abusive behavior. People know their freedom of speech depends on other people choosing to read it, and these people don't post what they know other people won't think is worth reading.
In traditional blogging most of the communication is one-way: you write the post and they read it. There's a comment system but the comments aren't usually threaded, the identity of the commenter isn't authenticated, and the quality of the comments is usually so-so. With my LiveJournal every commenter is authenticated with a persistent identity. Every commenter either writes their own blog or has a blog that they could choose to write in (whether or not they do). If you get a new or confusing comment you can figure out where the person is coming from before you respond - who are their friends, what are they reading, what have they written, which region they live in. You can respond to their comment because the commenting system is threaded. The result is a conversation where the initiator of the conversation can decide how public and how many authenticated participants are involved. The reader knows that each participant has their own blog and can start following any of those participants. That's why I use tags like tongodeon instead of URLs; to indicate to the reader not just a location to find more information but the persistent identity of a person who they can get to know. I think the authenticated identity, the threading, and the connection to commenters' own journals has a lot to do with the quality of the comments and the conversation which emerges. That's actually why I'm posting this here; this post is as much about soliciting comments from readers as it is communicating my opinion to the public. (What's your appeal from LiveJornal?) I like being able to ask an involved question and get mostly insightful answers from people I actually care about.
For some reason LiveJournal is a stable community. I joined LJ back in October 2003 - back when Friendster was the latest, hottest thing. 95% of the people I knew back then have continued to use this social networking service while Friendster and Tribe and Myspace and Facebook have risen and fallen. People here seem happy with what they've got. Happy enough for many of them (myself included) to pony up $20/year for a paid account - something that even the New York Times had trouble with. The social networking aspect of LiveJournal seems to actually have some substance behind it - while other sites seem to draw people with promises of success at work or online dating or exchanging photographs, LiveJournal seems to be for actual social networking. Blogs and comments are a more accurate reflection of the person's identity and personality. Social networking on LJ means ideas and personalities actually interacting, and I think that's what keeps the community stable as other sites come and go.
LiveJournal has a reputation for being a haven for drama queens, teenagers, southern furry secessionists, cutters, bad poetry writers, and all sorts of other content authors who most sensible people would not want to read. But LiveJournal is opt-in; you don't have to read anyone you don't want to read, and in practice the communities seem to remain relatively free from crossover. The bad reputation that LiveJournalers have in general doesn't have an effect on my experience. The negatives don't seem to apply to me.
There's no single feature in LiveJournal that isn't available in some form or another with other CMSes or other online services, but the combination of the features seems to have encouraged the creation and maintenance of a stable community that's particularly pleasant to participate in. You people. I like LiveJournal because of you people.