Why fandom won't leave LJ until LJ collapses

[antennapedia]

This is pretty much what went through my mind when all the kerfluffles happened last summer. I've only gotten around to expressing it coherently now. I continue to think about it because the project is tempting: I look at fanfiction.net and I see a terrible archive platform; I look at LJ and I see an even worse one. But today seems like a great day

Comments

[mimi_sardinia]

Content creates inertia. People have a lot of content stored up, and few good ways to move it. Some people have five years of journal posts and comments, plus five years of fic that might or might not be backed up elsewhere.

This is exactly what I think.

I have well over 3000 memories stored in my memories folder on this journal. Most of them are fanfic. I don't want to lose those, but if I quit LJ, I will, and it's likely I will never find them again, because unlike my current fandom (Transformers), some of my past fandoms abhor FF.net like the plague and LJ seems the only place the fanfic I have in my journal memories has been archived in.

[antennapedia]

You've just pointed out something I missed in my essay, I think: Even if you move/rescue your own content, what happens to the fic posted by other people who don't make the jump? All those memories, as you say. Sigh.

[mimi_sardinia]

Well there is one thing, something I did a bit of before my fic folders got so high in memorised posts that the idea of doing so now scares me with how big a job it'd be - archive posts.

Basically, I went through all the memories and collated them as links in a journal post - usually with the fic title as the link text and basic info like pairing and author name. Multichapters would turn into lists of consecutive links for chapters.

Posts like that can be transferred, but as I said, currently most of my current memories are fic, my collective Final Fantasy/Kingdom Hearts folder and Doctor Who/Torchwood folder both have well over 800 each and Transformers is coming up to that really damn quick.

But the other thing that worries me about a fandom move is that if a favourite author moves, they might decide to delete their LJ and there's no guarantee of finding all their fic again when they set up elsewhere. That's a lot of dead links.

[tiferet]

del.icio.us.

Do I look forward to moving all my kazillion memories entries there? Not so much. But I adore del.icio.us--I don't lose my links whenever I change computers or upgrade browsers or anything.

[yourlibrarian]

Great post, this pulls together a lot of things. And I agree about the subscription model. A lot of people were willing to spring for permanent accounts on IJ when they ran $40 or less even if they weren't really planning to use them. A lot of people are spending that much each year on LJ. My guess would be that most of the content producers have paid accounts and most of the more casual readers have unpaid ones, but that's a complete guess on my part. I definitely think tiered accounts should include a free type, even if it's basically just a name registration for comments and access with nothing else attached.

The public is separated from the personal.I suspect that this will actually be a drawback for many people. For example, the embedding of video seems to be a major advantage for many people but since the video isn't actually hosted onsite, I fail to see how it's any more helpful than a link to a streaming site. The only advantage I see is that it increases comments because it serves as a reminder for viewing whereas a

[antennapedia]

I think I should have been clearer about what I mean by public vs personal

(jumping in :P)

[quivo]

Re: public v. personal:
I'm definitely with antennapedia on this one. There are people I *still* haven't friended on LJ or stuck in my RSS reader because I don't necessarily want to follow their more personal posts, even though I end up checking on them regularly for fic or meta or whatever. I think the fact that people will be able to connect personally aside from following each other's public content will be enough to offset the drawback of the separation of public from private content. The people that have big blogs and so on seem to find time to get to know others on the internet without necessarily posting pics of their cat and whatnot, after all-- they just use other methods to talk to and keep in touch with close friends than their blogging software. Separation would mean people would be able to maintain connections and make new ones as well as publicly share their work.

Re: (jumping in :P)

[yourlibrarian]

I definitely agree many readers likely want to separate the content. I think it's the writers who prefer to keep them together.

[chipotle]

I sort of wandered here after poking around at reactions to a post I wrote on similar subjects a week ago (“ What’s SUP, Doc?”).

I actually don’t think that LJ is descending through the levels of credible ownership, although that’s a wonderful turn of phrase (and something I’ve certainly seen happen). Without rehashing my post too much, in Russia, LiveJournal is the social media property. It’s MySpace, Facebook and Blogger all rolled into one. SUP is indifferent, but they’re not clueless - they’re indifferent to you. The fannish communities on LiveJournal are, at least partially, under the impression that LiveJournal needs them more than they need LiveJournal. This is pretty much 100% backward from the way SUP sees it. And, SUP is pretty much right.

I’d really like to see any hypothetical “ElseJournal” be something other than, well, somebody else running LiveJournal’s software. Even though I’ve never looked at LiveJournal as a good place for publishing fiction in the first place, your analysis of what a replacement for LJ should

[antennapedia]

That's a great post; informative and perspective-setting. Thanks for the link. And it pushes me even further in the direction of thinking that fandom needs a new home, 'cause its current one is going to change in ways it probably won't like.

[quivo]

Just finished reading the essay you linked to-- that was an awesome job. I'd never actually gone to livejournal.ru. The difference between that and the LJ.com front page really brings it home.

[antennapedia]

Thanks! I tried to stay focused and at least mostly constructive-- I want to find a solution here :)

[erinrua]

Just wanted to say thanks for the brilliant and balanced analysis. You've articulated a lot of things I could only ponder intuitively. Thank you for putting (eloquent) words to a volitile and difficult subject. Hope you don't mind if I save this to mems! (Yet another feature non-LJ forums won't/don't all have ...)
Cheers ~

Erin