Official Geographic communities

[radiantsoul]

Title
Official Geographic communities

Short, concise description of the idea
All new members are automatically subscribed to an official, moderated community that represents their geographic area.

Full description of the ideaThe idea is that there will be several geographic communites; say UK, France, Germany, Russia, etc. These would be moderated

Comments

[the_cynic]

And if this is implemented, who decides what a "region" is? How big of a country gets their own community? What do you do with fictional countries/regions? If LJ creates an official United Kingdom comm, there will be requests for separate English, Scottish, Welsh, etc. comms.

The potential for wank is way too great with this suggestion. I believe LJ should pass.

[7rin]

There's already an 'official' UK comm.

[radiantsoul]

I search on UK and get 385 communities. Some are general, some defunct, some have several hundred members, some have four members, some have nothing at all to do with the UK, etc.

The opt in thing was a typo. But probably I would present the option to opt in rather than making it mandatory.

[radiantsoul]

This is not a popular idea and isn't going anywhere!

I do feel LJ does need a center though. It lacks the prebuilt "social network" of facebook, the celeb cool of "twitter", etc. If you join where do you find friends or communities?

[turlough]

No thank you. No one I know of have joined LJ because they wanted to interact with people in their own region and there are plenty of other sites on the net that cater to that urge.

[radiantsoul]

It is easier to interact with people in your language, timezone, etc. Lots of people's journals discuss politics, news, sport, etc which are geographic in nature.

[turlough]

That's a matter of personal preference. Personally I find there are more important things to have in common with people than where I happen to live right now or what language I speak.

[radiantsoul]

Yes, and your journal seems to largely be about fanfic which is pretty region independent.
I don't really know what proportion of people use their journal for what purpose. It would be an interesting piece of research. I suspect there are far more day-in-the-life bloggers with 20 odd friends than anything else, but who knows?

[rizzo]

-1

While most people are sticking to the fact that it's odd phrasing- "auto-subscribe" and "opt-in," I think my biggest problem is the part about making it an official LJ community. First off, some of the maintainers/moderators of smaller communities (for instance, the st_louis community that I'm in) wouldn't be able to handle a large group of people, some would get power trips, and it would just in general be a bad idea and probably isolate and anger a lot of the users you were hoping to bring into the fold, so to speak.

The only other option would be to seek out and essentially "hire" maintainers that could handle the load. LJ Staff doesn't exactly have the time to prospect for new maintainers of each of these communities. And somehow I doubt LJ Support volunteers would really want to get behind it. I know I wouldn't.

I think I garbled that a bit, but I'm barely awake so that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Re: Hallo Missouri!

[rizzo]

:P :P :P

I DISCLAIMED THE FACT THAT I WAS BARELY AWAKE!

[untypoed]

Great Idea. Better than going to a community made by some highschoolers for his jocky jock highschooler friends. But, I think there should be communities for areas, not countries, and I'm sure you were thinking of that. Like, Columbus, Ohio, New Orleans, Louisiana.. etc. There are some like that but not for everybody. So, if you're in that one town in Arkansas no one has heard of, you're in hell.