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

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.