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

[jwgh]

I haven't had a Livejournal that long, but ...

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:

• Cuts for content
• Cuts for spoilers
• Cuts for width/bandwidth [large or wide graphics, etc.]

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.

[jwgh]

As long as I'm putting together a wishlist, it would also be nice if you could sort your 'friends' page by most recently updated (so that old posts with recent comments would be at the top) as well as most recently written.

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

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Your suggestion amounts to thinking of LiveJournal entry age primarily in terms of comment threads rather than in terms of initial posts.

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.