Impressions of LiveJournal

[mmcirvin]

This was initially a comment, but I decided to delete it and expand on it a bit.


sunburn said in a comment that the atmosphere in this corner of LiveJournal reminds him of the good old days of Usenet, and wonders how that happened, especially given that LiveJournal doesn't have a stellar reputation for urbanity and savoir-faire. (A friend's immediate reaction when I told him about this was "The only people who use LiveJournal are 14-year-old girls." And I don't think he was talking about intelligent and erudite 14-year-old girls.)

I don't know why there are so many old alt.religion.kibology hands here. But, sure, LiveJournal is full of bozos like every other place. The interesting thing is that it seems to give you tools that make it very easy to pull the few nonbozos you like out of the vacuum and into a nebulous quasi-community centered around your journal.

If they're account-holders, that is. The other side of the coin is that interoperation with the rest of the blogosphere is not transparent: everyone outside the walled garden is posting to comments as the equivalent of Slashdot's Anonymous Coward, if at all. In some ways this is good-- it may keep the population from exploding into an unruly mob. But it does mean that some of my favorite posters are unlikely to leave AC status since there is little reason for them to get a LJ account.

And it's clearly not a hardcore, control-freak blogging tool. You can do a fair bit if you throw a few dollars at them, which I haven't (yet), but most hardcore bloggers end up eventually outgrowing things like Blogger or LJ, moving to Movable Type and some sort of roll-your-own hosting plan, and wish they had started out with that in the first place. They forget that ease-of-startup was probably why they started using Blogger in the first place.

The thing that annoys me the most, as a longtime advocate for Web standards, is that the default "styles" (an unfortunate choice of word, since they're HTML templates, not stylesheets) are really badly coded. There's some indication that by nature, LiveJournal is in some sense natively based on XHTML, but the templates are all based on HTML syntax, so you end up with a mixture of XHTML and HTML tags, sometimes with no DOCTYPE at all, which would never validate in a million years. If I do give them some money so I can mess with things, it will be for that reason.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Aha, I was wondering if I knew you. Haven't seen you around.

Anyway, the other thing I was going to say is that I fully expect the scene here to disintegrate after a while, too. The question is just how long.

friends lists and filtering

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

One thing I initially had trouble getting my brain around is how to deal with the fact that people post at wildly varying frequencies. If one guy posts ten times as much as everyone else, then your friends page just turns into that one guy. But I'm figuring out how to use groups to deal with that, at least for my own filtering purposes.

For years I assumed that no Web-based thing could ever hold a candle to Usenet, simply because you'll never have the same degree of filtering at the user end as you can get in a really good newsreader. That's still true. But most of that is necessary in the first place because Usenet was constructed as a completely anarchic thing intended for very low posting volumes, and was then driven far beyond its design parameters.

Re: friends lists and filtering

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And I should mention, in case anyone takes that remark personally, that on some days I have been that guy.

Marlo Thomas, call your lawyer

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Having just started paying attention to my friends list, I can assure you that you are /that guy/ at the moment. (I don't mind-- you're a poster who can save a thread from being marked as read when I read news, because I figure if it's good enough for you to have read and posted to, it's good enough for me.) One or two such /guys/ in a friends list, and a 20-post friends page can become unmanageable quickly, especially if the rest of your friends tend to spike at times like the breakfast log-on or after work. Then there's your all-day posters, who may or may not be /that guy/, but who displace binge-posters. I'd like a better LJ aggregator than user/friends is. But then, I'm never satisfied with other people's aggregators, and can't write my own. oh well.

Also, what you said about USENET being pushed wildly beyond its design parameters caused me to think of USENET as the Voyager holographic doctor. Both are full of arcane unnecessary skill-groups, and both are full of facts and devoid of sense. I wonder, therefore, if the doctor code-mass is primarily made of pr0n and mst3k episodes.

[cheryln.livejournal.com]

I use LiveJournal more than I ever posted to Usenet, although I've never quite navel-gazed enough to sort out why. I do find myself wishing there were a few Usenet tools here, though: an easy, one-step way to email posters privately, rather than having to go to another page and fire up an email client, for example.

And a killfile. I can prevent people who bug me for a spectrum of reasons from posting in my own journal, but if we have "friends" in common or belong to the same communities I can't hide from their posts and comments.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I got dragged into LJ by my brother palecur, as a by-product of the talk.bizarre influx started by rwx. My initial goal was to use it as a scratch pad. Just more of my damned optimism... but i can't quibble with what it's become: a way to keep track of friends, as well as pretend that people are actually interested in what i have to say.