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

[cheryln.livejournal.com]

I tend to put particularly personal or TMI-ish entries behind lj-cut. I guess it's because I figure only people who want to know intensely personal or too much information about me will bother to click--I don't mind "inconveniencing" them with an extra step, and people who only skim me anyway can skip it.

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.