Video killed the radio star
Dec. 17th, 2012 02:45 pmIt's almost a ritual complaint by now, that "nobody" posts to LJ any more, they've all gone to Facebook. I don't think this is entirely true, or at least it's only a very small aspect of the problem. TBH, LJ had a good run; 12 years is absolutely ancient in internet terms! It's only to be expected that something else would be the cool thing by now, and even FB itself is kind of falling out of fashion, the real cutting edge isn't there any more. The question is, why hasn't LJ been replaced with something as much better than LJ as LJ was better than MySpace?
( semi-informed rambling )
This started out as a response to Anil Dash's more measured and more technically knowledgeable article on the web we lost. (Dash was one of the real pioneers of blogging culture, by the way.) I think the problem with the Facebookification of everything goes deeper than what he talks about. It's a problem that most of the people I want to talk to are on FB, and FB as everybody knows has terrible privacy policies and exists to serve its advertisers, not its users. But that's not the whole story. The dominance of Facebook and its model, along with solutions worse than the problem to spam, is making the whole rest of the web worse. It's making it so much harder to meet interesting new people online, and without that, well, communities around existing networks fragment and become dormant, to the point that nobody really posts to LJ any more except to complain that nobody posts to LJ any more.
Obviously, I would like it if Dreamwidth were the answer to this problem. That is in fact why I continue to post actively here even as more and more people are drifting away. But pessimistically, I fear that DW will always be too small to compete with all the sites that are optimizing for getting huge numbers of users, rather than for being actually useful to have conversations.
( semi-informed rambling )
This started out as a response to Anil Dash's more measured and more technically knowledgeable article on the web we lost. (Dash was one of the real pioneers of blogging culture, by the way.) I think the problem with the Facebookification of everything goes deeper than what he talks about. It's a problem that most of the people I want to talk to are on FB, and FB as everybody knows has terrible privacy policies and exists to serve its advertisers, not its users. But that's not the whole story. The dominance of Facebook and its model, along with solutions worse than the problem to spam, is making the whole rest of the web worse. It's making it so much harder to meet interesting new people online, and without that, well, communities around existing networks fragment and become dormant, to the point that nobody really posts to LJ any more except to complain that nobody posts to LJ any more.
Obviously, I would like it if Dreamwidth were the answer to this problem. That is in fact why I continue to post actively here even as more and more people are drifting away. But pessimistically, I fear that DW will always be too small to compete with all the sites that are optimizing for getting huge numbers of users, rather than for being actually useful to have conversations.
