lj-cut considered harmful
Sep. 7th, 2003 03:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinWell, not exactly. But Patrick Nielsen Hayden doesn't like it when he has to click a link to read the rest of an article.
He has some other thoughts about the design of group blogs there, too. LiveJournal is an oddball case in that it's a system of individual blogs that are also loosely bunched together through the friends-page mechanism, which is sort of halfway between a group blog and a syndication aggregator.
Anyway, because of friends pages, there's a certain amount of social pressure on LJ to put really big things behind the lj-cut tag, thereby causing the annoyance that is bothering Nielsen Hayden. But it occurs to me that people don't tend to get really mad unless you inline such things as big photographs or elaborate quiz doodads; there's much less resistance to just posting long text pieces without the lj-cut. And it also occurs to me that I tend to get more comments on longer pieces when they're not hidden behind that "Read more..." link.
Any thoughts on your own personal usage guidelines?
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-07 07:50 pm (UTC)I think many people are more apt to skim past entries that have an LJ-cut. Me, it just depends on my mood. Sometimes I'll skim past longer entries that appear un-cut on my friend's page, yet end up reading LJ-cut ones because they required me to open a separate window that I will leave open until I'm done reading my friend's page, if that makes any sense. In other words, it can cut (no pun intended) into someone's reading both ways.
-- Schwa ---
no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 12:52 am (UTC)I understand that LJ would want to set some reasonable limits so that nobody's pulling down 30 days of entries from 200 friends every time they load, simply because the user's bandwidth is up to it.
I think that a more customizable friend page would go a long way to resolve some of these complaints, especially if it was browser-side.
Probably some of these things it can do already, but as far as setting up one's account, at least back when I did it, friends page config was never offered and seems like an afterthought.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 12:10 pm (UTC)Beyond that, I suspect you'd be better off using an external aggregator application; the level of customizability and UI sophistication you want is beyond what would work well in a public browser-based interface. But with LiveJournal there's the problem that the RSS feeds for unpaid accounts are kind of skimpy.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 12:15 pm (UTC)overflowproperty combined with explicit element heights), you could probably hack the style template to give you something like an automatic length-based cut on the browser side, though it wouldn't negatelj-cuts that are already there.no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 01:25 am (UTC)out of respect, i like when people put uber-violent or pornographic images behind a cut with some kind of warning. just cause some folk don't wanna see that junk.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 12:04 pm (UTC)On the other hand, if the feature were called "aggregator watchlists and security groups", most users would probably never take a second look at it. Interestingly, Clay Shirky, who is one of my favorite pundits on such matters, seems to think it's one of the most ingenious pieces of social-software engineering he's seen. It is what it is, I suppose, and the structure it gives to the LiveJournal universe comes the social implications as much as from the mechanics of it.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 01:48 am (UTC)I don't have strong feelings about other people using them, except in the case of big images that throw off horizontal scrolling. And the way msnbc.com put the first paragraph or two of its stories in large type at the top of the page, and then "Click for more" to jump further dowm the page, has always driven me nuts.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 04:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 12:47 pm (UTC)But the distinction has blurred, and now a blog is just about any page that has dated posts on it, especially (but not necessarily) if it lists them in reverse-chronological order and/or has archives and permalinks and/or is updated through some lightweight CMS.
Which also means that, while blogs are usually seen as a late-nineties innovation, the term arguably applies to sites all the way back to the dawn of the Web, and the first popular blog may have been Cool Site of the Day.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 09:08 pm (UTC)Out on the web, some Peter Merholz person thinks he's the one who coined "blog", two years or so after Jorn did. Funny, that.
Your distinction reinforces my point that a journal is a journal and "blog" is an abhorrent term.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 10:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-08 03:50 pm (UTC)I also am annoyed by having to click through to read the rest of an entry, which is why I don't cut the long ones. And I trim the pictures I post.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 01:22 am (UTC)I'd like it if you could specify whether LJ cuts will be displayed on your friends page or not. To that end it would be nice if there were a few kinds of cuts which you could choose to display or not:
Then you get to choose which of these get automatically displayed on your friends page and which don't.
But you asked what guidelines I use. I use cuts to hide the last two types of items, which I think makes sense and hopefully is not objectionable to people.
I also use cuts to hide stuff that I don't think is of general interest to everyone -- stuff that might be of interest to a few people but which I don't think everyone will necessarily want to read. Examples: the actual text of a spam I received (enough information to explain why I thought it was funny was outside the cut), set lists, the majority of a transcript of an ArkMOO conversation (with enough left unrevealed that people will know what the discussion was about). I should maybe stop doing this, or at least should try to be more consistent about it.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 01:26 pm (UTC)In terms of what I like when I'm reading other peoples' Livejournals, I don't particularly mind scrolling down or clicking on cut links, so either option is fine with me. Of course a cut means it's less likely that I'll read the whole thing if I don't find the topic of the post particularly interesting, but that's the point, right?
It does annoy me when people have wide images or <pre> blocks with very wide lines and don't hide them with a cut, as it means that my entire friends page goes out of whack. I've occasionally posted bitchy comments to people who post such things.
threading
Date: 2003-09-09 01:55 pm (UTC)I've occasionally wished for that too. But while this is what we're used to from Usenet, I'm not sure it would be the best thing for LJ, considering knock-on social effects. In the world of weblogs there's a tendency to discount new comments attached to weeks-old articles as the work of cranks and idiots, not worth responding to. On Usenet that inhibition doesn't exist, and it helps off-topic flamewars go on forever. Abandoning the weblog paradigm for time-sorting in LJ might mean that we'd come to need all the really advanced filtering paraphernalia like scorefiles and such, on top of the filtering mechanisms that already exist.
Of course this could be prevented just by putting a hard limit on the age of commentable posts, as some have.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 01:30 am (UTC)