lj-cut considered harmful

[mmcirvin]

Well, 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?

Comments

[mezdeathhead.livejournal.com]

i don't really see why people get so uppity about lj-cutting. i figure, it's their journal. if what they do bugs me, i'll defriend them.

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.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A while back Beverly White (whose LJ username I can't remember now) made a rare LJ post in which she suggested that it was irresponsible for LiveJournal to name the "friends" feature that, since it overlaid a bunch of unnecessary emotional implications on what is really an aggregator watchlist and security group mechanism-- it implied that it somehow mattered publicly to be defriended, and therefore made it more difficult to defriend someone than it ought to be.

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.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

She's weds. The implication does seem to be there, but i try to pay it no mind. And i cringe when i see people covering their ass in their user info regarding friending or unfriending people.