I've seen all of these in the wild, and I admit that people who believe them probably aren't going to accept my rebuttals, but I thought I'd put something out there in case it's useful for anyone to point to it!
( Debunking )If you're sceptical, that's totally fair enough, but I invite you to try one thing: compare Dreamwidth's Latest Things page with LiveJournal's Latest Posts. Note the new features, particularly the tag cloud. Yes, you will see a snapshot that includes quite a lot of fanfic, but also plenty of other stuff. (To get a valid comparison, you probably want to skip the porn, spam and Cyrillic that make up the majority of LJ's latest feed; Russian-language LJ is a very different creature that happens to share the same infrastructure.) And more to the point, you'll get a much better idea of the sort of content that populates Dreamwidth, than you would get from the skewed sample that is people who make a lot of noise about Dreamwidth in fandom communities.
( Debunking )If you're sceptical, that's totally fair enough, but I invite you to try one thing: compare Dreamwidth's Latest Things page with LiveJournal's Latest Posts. Note the new features, particularly the tag cloud. Yes, you will see a snapshot that includes quite a lot of fanfic, but also plenty of other stuff. (To get a valid comparison, you probably want to skip the porn, spam and Cyrillic that make up the majority of LJ's latest feed; Russian-language LJ is a very different creature that happens to share the same infrastructure.) And more to the point, you'll get a much better idea of the sort of content that populates Dreamwidth, than you would get from the skewed sample that is people who make a lot of noise about Dreamwidth in fandom communities.
