3W4DW: The exodus to Facebook and Tumblr

[liv]

Got into a discussion with damerell about the fact that so many people have left LJ and DW and all gone to Facebook, which is just unspeakably awful. And ayngelcat chimed in with the comment that it is't Facebook that everybody's gone to, but Tumblr.

I tend to pontificate about FB fairly regularly, but hey, one more can't hurt. I absolutely agree that Facebook is unspeakably awful, and it's not because I'm some enlightened super-geek who can see through their façade; everybody thinks FB is awful. The awfulness of FB is a standard small-talk topic among grandparents who are only just getting to grips with using their first computer. But we're all using it anyway. Well, some people have managed to stay out of its tentacles, but "I don't have a Facebook account" is really the new "I don't have a TV" for showing off one's elite status.

So what, exactly, is FB's killer feature? I'm coming to think the answer is in fact not just one thing. It's not quite a boiling frog thing, it's that it's gone through so many incarnations where it was providing some useful feature, and when the PTB decided to revise what it was trying to do, everybody was already there so it was easier to use FB for whatever new purpose than to leave when it stopped being good for the old purpose.

Who remembers when FB was restricted to just a few American university campuses? Then it was very useful, a low-key way to meet people at your uni and friends-of-friends. That created an atmosphere where people felt very comfortable being startlingly open under their real names. I mean, it's a bit silly to trust everybody who happens to go to the same university as you, but it's less ridiculously self-destructive than trusting, like, everybody on the internet with your innermost thoughts. But the trusting your classmates thing set up the atmosphere where people talk about about their personal lives online, and why FB was far more successful than earlier incarnations of automated systems for meeting friends-of-friends (Can you say Friendster with a straight face? Orkut?).

So when FB grew beyond being an electronic version of a campus noticeboard, it was already primed to be a much better replacement for things like classmates.com and Friends Reunited. I appreciate as per the discussion on my earlier post that some people would rather stab their eyes out with a rusty spork than have any contact with the people they were at school with, but the majority of people are quite glad to have a low-effort way of satisfying curiosity about people they've encountered at earlier stages of their life. The culture of using wallet names and real-world contact details that had already built up helped with that, and indeed for a while FB acted like a magical self-updating address book. I remember being quite excited about it when that's what it did, jumping through hoops to get an Oxford alumni email address in order to get a FB account.

Then I think there was a phase where several different things coincided to give FB a lot of traction. They had some really good publicity going for a bit back in the late 2000s, I remember when every newspaper I picked up had an opinion piece / advertorial on how FB was going to be the future and everybody had better join it quick or they'd be left behind. The self-updating address book thing combined really well with the events system, which many people who have come to hate FB still consider the absolute killer feature. Nothing on the spectrum between sending out group emails and using a dedicated events management site that people have to sign up to or at least remember to check can possibly compete with the convenience of setting up an event on FB and allowing people to RSVP with one click and see who else is planning to go and communicate with fellow attendees.

The other thing that I think allowed FB to enter its log phase growth was that it was almost spam-free. The walled-garden effect meant you could set things up to only get messages from people you'd actually chosen to communicate with. So pretty much everything in your FB inbox was wanted, useful messages. Not Nigerian scams and penis enlargement spam, which yes, can be dealt with by decent filters, but not everybody knows how to set up decent filters. And perhaps equally importantly, not promo emails from every company you bought products from once, not mailing lists you signed up to because one message in 50 is actually useful to you, not pointless messages inappropriately cc'd or reply-all'd to the whole organization. Nowadays I consider FB to be pretty spammy, but the fact is it's still pretty secure against bulk-messaging, the only way to spam FB is to convince human beings to spam their friends. So (even though humans are pretty gullible) it's still better than just about any blog or pre-FB social network or less than aggressively filtered email. This means that FB, certainly back in the day, gave people plenty of opportunities for the reward, the hit, of wanted messages with very little of the negative reinforcement that comes from information overload.

Then Zuckerberg and co realized they were sitting on an expletive gold-mine. You had this mass influx of people, many of them very little internet-savvy, all in one place, sharing their real-world identities and details, ripe for the plucking. FB needed to move on beyond simply displaying lots of adverts to serious monetization. I think that's the moment FB "turned evil", though it was certainly never benevolent. The introduction of apps, to encourage people to actually spend time on the site rather than just checking it occasionally, was the start of the rot. For a while, FB was making most of its frightening amounts of moolah from Farmville and similar addictive without actually being fun social games. The security also got a whole lot worse, because anybody could write an app which had access to a massive amount of personal information about the people who chose to use it.

The social gaming thing is still around, but it's no longer the big thing about FB. Nowadays the big thing is companies having their own pages and using FB to get advertising directly into people's trust networks. FB's customers are no longer the advertisers in the sense of the people who pay them to put "lose belly fat now!" ads on frequently visited pages, those are bottom-feeders that I imagine contribute negligible amounts to FB's revenue. FB's customers are major companies who can buy both valuable demographic information and even more importantly, direct access to customers' emotional hooks. Hence the whole awful parasitic ecosystem of click-jacking, like-stealing, the works.

So why are people still using FB when it's become this much of a cesspit? Partly because of lock-in and the network effect, and after all the event organizing thing has outlasted all the various incarnations of the site. But also I think because FB has become almost a job, rather than a leisure activity. You have to (not literally have to, but there are strong pressures) be on FB because it looks suspicious if you're not, and besides there are lots of bits of economic life you can't participate in, like when you can only book a place at an event via the organizers' FB page. And you have to carefully manage your reputation and what information can be found about you and what image you want to promote to, say, potential employers. I said I was just going to talk off-the-cuff and not look stuff up, but I have a couple of links that have been in my posting queue for a while that fit quite well here:

Rob Horning's Data self piece, which is rather technical and academic-y, but I think makes a really useful point, and is worth it for the marvellous pull-quote: “Becoming oneself” has turned into a crappy job — a compulsory low-paying, low-skill job.

Erin Boesel's Your feels as free labour is magisterial, really collecting together all the most useful recent writing on the users-as-product hamster wheel.

She also wins my heart because she's a (former?) LJ user and has lots of asides about why LJ is just so obviously superior to FB. But it doesn't help, because in spite of the marketing, FB isn't a social network any more, in any meaningful sense. FB is a constant arms race to keep your own personal brand buoyant while all kinds of companies are employing experts whose entire full-time job is to persuade or trick you to provide free advertising and information gathering for them.

Eastercon this year really made me understand emotionally that LJ as a community-forming tool is dead. First of all it's the fact that Eastercon isn't even using an LJ community for pre-con chatter any more, it has a bland little Wordpress blog. And then when I went to the con I put Liv on my badge and everybody was confused as to why on earth I'd have such a quaint thing as a handle. And I met a bunch of interesting new people, but can I maintain connections to them after the con's over? Can I heck, people are not exactly going to give out something as personal as a wallet name / Facebook name to a chance acquaintance who happened to be in a late night discussion with them at a con, but they don't have (active) LJ presences any more, so they can't give me access to a pseudonymous yet personal aspect of their life. I think some people were kind-of using Twitter for this sort of thing, but I've never really got the hang of using Twitter as a way to get to know new people without being intrusive. And most of the pro authors have blogs, but a lot of them are more about publicity than interacting with people, and there's little or no fan community anyway.

I don't think it's the case that people have left LJ to go to FB. It's that people have left LJ and people have gone to FB, more or less independently. People have left LJ partly because everything online is fragmented now, whereas it used to be all in one place, so you had a mix of essays, personal diary stuff, artworks and photography, fannish activity, memes and sharing funny pictures, ephemeral one-liners, links to interesting content etc, and now all those things have their own specialist sites. People have also left partly because the interaction barriers are just that bit too high. Hand-coding HTML was cutting edge in 2000, but now people can't be bothered when most other places on the internet make multimedia posts and comments as easy as simply typing into a box or selecting items from a GUI. That's also partly exacerbated by the fact that people are increasingly accessing the internet from phones rather than desktop computers; that pushes it much more towards a read-only or read-and-click-like, read-and-share, rather than read and respond with a thoughtful comment or your own spin-off post.

So how does Tumblr fit in? I fully admit that I am too old and boring for Tumblr. I've been sitting on the edge observing it for years now, and I still don't really get it. I have a Tumblr, and you're very welcome to follow it if you want to see my random pretty or cool things. But I don't really fundamentally understand what Tumblr is for or how it works.

Of course, this is exactly the place where I write long speculations about things I don't really understand. My theory of Tumblr is that it's precisely the anti-Facebook. It's completely and properly anonymous, it doesn't even have the danger increasingly present on pseudonymous sites including LJ clones that you can easily identify people by analysing their networks and patching together personal information from their indiscreet friends. Because you can't really tell who someone's friends are on Tumblr, or not automatically anyway. And there's almost no advertising (indeed, I am substantially worried about what on earth Tumblr's business / revenue model is supposed to be; surely Tumblr Radar can't be enough to make megabucks?) And there's very little danger (or at least very little perceived danger) that people are going to get screened out or fired or otherwise get into real world trouble for what they put on Tumblr. There's a culture where all kinds of grey-legal things are acceptable and indeed expected, from various kinds of exotic porn to making gifsets of clips from extremely valuable commercial properties such as the Game of Thrones series.

The other thing about Tumblr is that it's much more about curating than creating original content. Pretty much every Tumblr I've ever seen has a majority of reblogs from other Tumblrs, far outweighing content actually created by the Tumblr author. Some of it is, like mine, a random stream of everything-that-catches-my-eye, and some of it is literally curated, gathering together stuff with a distinct theme. And it certainly does fit in to the not quite passive, but very low effort, read-like-share model of using the internet. But that can't be the whole reason why Tumblr is successful; after all, SixApart, the company that bought LJ from its original owners and later sold it to SUP, tried to make a site where it was extremely easy to share multimedia content, and it was a complete flop (in fact, you probably don't remember Vox unless you're as much of a giant social media nerd as I am!)

Some people do use Tumblr for writing thoughtful, blog-style essays, and apparently get some benefit from the fact that there are no comments and the only way people can respond to your stuff is by reblogging and adding their own commentary. I don't comprehend how that works, but it certainly exists. It may be because the negativity generated by the entire internet falling on your head when you post something controversial is far greater, for some people, than the positivity of getting lots of comments and feedback.

I can sort of see how that works for certain types of media fandom. It used to be a truism that fanwork creation was really driven by feedback, but perhaps that's not actually true. Perhaps getting your stuff liked or shared is enough of a reward that people don't need comments. I can imagine there's a sort of freedom in knowing that your stuff is unlikely to be criticized if it doesn't work or offends someone. Plus the free playground of a subculture that apparently hasn't heard of copyright must be great for fans!

I don't see Tumblr as an alternative to LJ/DW, though. Or only in the sense that people have limited time for online activities, and time that's being used for Tumblr is probably taking away from time that might otherwise be used for DW. For me, the main features of DW are comment discussions, which Tumblr lacks, and the ability to get to know people two hops away from me or who have something in common but aren't otherwise connected, which Tumblr is pretty poor at.

Is there anything DW can do to get these people back? One thing that would help would be having a usable mobile app, and another would be replacing the sack-of-crap RTE with a modern point-and-click system for posting, including pictures and embedded media without having to hand-code your own HTML. But I suspect that even if those features ever get further than a half-hearted spec, it may not be enough or too late to deal with fragmentation. Trying to be a rival to FB and Tumblr is a mug's game, that much is sure. The only hope I have for getting people back is for DW to be a place people go as well as Facebook and Tumblr (and Twitter, Pinboard, Instragram and any number of other sites that wouldn't be on topic for this post). However, to end on a positive note, these days DW is far more active and lively with ongoing conversations than LJ, and in lots of ways I like that it's small, I like that it still has the ethos of what denise calls a "Mom and Pop business". And, y'know, I've been here 4 years and I'm still very content with my online home; four years in to my time on LJ I was already casting around for some less evil / annoying alternative.

Comments

[kaberett]

[have read, appreciate your essay-writing, don't especially have thoughts at this stage. x]

[liv]

Thank you for commenting to say so! This isn't essay-writing, this is just dumping words onto the screen, but it's nice to feel appreciated.

[siderea]

Some people do use Tumblr for writing thoughtful, blog-style essays, and apparently get some benefit from the fact that there are no comments and the only way people can respond to your stuff is by reblogging and adding their own commentary. I don't comprehend how that works, but it certainly exists. It may be because the negativity generated by the entire internet falling on your head when you post something controversial is far greater, for some people, than the positivity of getting lots of comments and feedback.

Tumblr's killer feature is its lack of comments.

So, it turns out that for most bloggers on most blogs, comments are the problem, not the reward. Moderating one's comment space turns the free and joyful sharing of squee into a grinding chore and a source of anxiety. It's not just responses to controversial topics. It's two socialpsych phenomena:

1) We experience negative stimuli more strongly than positive ones. One trollish comment -- heck, one slight -- can be more conditioning than 10 positive ones. If one out of every twenty comments is in any sense experienced negatively -- not just insults or argument, but also correction, mansplaining, spam, etc. -- and one gets on average 20 comments per post, I promise, one will come to associate clicking "post" with the thought "and now someone's going to say something unwelcome to me".

2) What possible responses to a post are there, if the post consists of sharing an image, sound, video, or text, simply because one likes it? The range of positive comments are forms of "I like this too". Meanwhile, the range of negative or aversive comments is potentially unlimited: "I don't like this." "You're wrong for liking it." "I am going to take this opportunity to explain what is wrong with you/what you said." "Would you like larger genitals?" etc. If all positive comments boil down to "+1", then reducing all feedback to either "+1" or NULL is a net win.

But the awful wrinkle is the social norm that says one is supposed to like comments, and that welcoming comments demonstrates an openness which all supposedly virtuous people are to aspire to. People actually get snitty on LJ (and presumably on DW) when someone posts with comments off.

Tumblr came in and -- quite deliberately! I'm not making this up, this was all their conscious design -- liberated users from the social expectation of allowing comments on their posts.

If you want free comment areas on your tumblr, you can turn on Disqus. But the default is no comments, except the equivalent of pingbacks: people can't write on your tumblr, they can only reblog your content to and comment about it on their tumblrs.

Tumblr exploded because getting comments had become the most aversive part of participating in social media for people whose primary mode was sharing things. Tumblr provides a (much closer to) stressless posting environment for sharing media.

I think the whole thing is brilliant, and I am in awe of the folks behind tumblr from a social engineering standpoint.

ETA: I keep having this conversation with therapists about blogging. They're all "BUT I HAVE TO HAVE COMMENTS ON MY BLOG" and I'm all "Do you realize you just signed up for a job full of drudgery that will make you hate blogging and possibly life itself?"

[liv]

Gosh, this is fascinating, thank you so much! You've been hinting for a while that you know about Tumblr's secret sauce, and I am really interested to get an insight into that.

Also mindboggling to me, because I'm fairly certain I genuinely do like comments, I'm not just trying to project an image of myself as a virtuous, open person. I get a real, tangible sense of reward every time someone comments on one of my posts, even critically, and likes and shares just don't cut it. And I not just would give up blogging if I didn't get that reward, I frequently have – my "proper" Wordpress blog died a death because I never got any comments, my Tumblr gets updated maybe 20 times a year and I don't get any pleasure from it, whereas I've been making a serious hobby of courting comments on LJ and here for 10 years now.

Comments as chore and anxiety and drudgery... that explains why several of the most popular blogs fizzle out with posts like "I just can't deal with all the comments any more". Sometimes it's people being actually hounded off the internet by hate-mail, but a lot of the time it seems like bloggers are struggling under the weight of adulation. Maybe that's partly the phenomenon that even a small proportion of negative comments in the mix create bad associations. I don't know how I would feel if every post of mine here were like the one that went viral and picked up 250 comments.

The other thing this perspective could add to my theory of LJ and descendants is that the culture of intense positivity is probably more important than I think it is. Like, there's this expectation that a journal is someone's personal space, you should default to being supportive and if you're going to be critical you should soften what you say as much as possible, or take it to your own journal (à la Tumblr reblogging, I guess). I don't know if that quite gets up to a ratio of 20 positive responses for every negative one, but it's a lot closer than in many other internet discussion spaces.

Also in FB you basically never get comment spam on your status updates, and rarely get a huge comment explosion or dog-pile, cos stuff slides of the feed so quickly. That's probably more of a draw to Facebook than I'm realizing.

Wow, so many thoughts sparked by this insight, thank you again!

[green_knight]

Tumblr came in and -- quite deliberately! I'm not making this up, this was all their conscious design -- liberated users from the social expectation of allowing comments on their posts.

I'm finding this extremely interesting, because it adresses a different _style_ of interaction.

I'm coming from usenet, [and later livejournal (and now, mostly, DW)], where the comments are more or less the purpose of the post - you post something, and other people pick it up and comment on it and you develop discussions (usenet discussions could stretch over several months and several hundred replies, and did.)
The thing I like least about the fragmented internet of a thousand and one Wordpress blogs is that so many bloggers don't see it as a conversation (the LJ/DW platform makes netowrking easy: you read an interesting comment, you click through that person's journal, you friend them and continue interacting with them) but rather as a broadcasting medium. You never used to get the same profusion of 'ten tips to do x' that you're getting these days - people were sharing more, and inviting more discussion.

And it's not as if there weren't dickheads, but they were a) less likely to find your LJ, and b) easier to ban. The more open platforms are harder to moderate, attracting a lot more spam, and suffer more from drive-by comments.

[ironed_orchid]

So, it turns out that for most bloggers on most blogs, comments are the problem, not the reward.

This is so fascinating and so right.

I think LJ was successful at what it dd precisely because it allowed comments in a way that encouraged conversation, AND ALSO because it allowed people to choose who could participate in those conversations.

But the main model of comments on mainstream blogs has been for people to interact with the blogger, rather than with one another, and like you say, those reactions are usually variations on "I agree" and "I disagree" and it's the the people who disagree who have more incentive to go into detail about why.

[foxfirefey]

Previous post:

I don't know why communities never took off here. I think it's partly because there are better ways to interact with and find people and just form informal communities via personal journals than on LJ. But also because it's really hard to start a new community from scratch and build up enough momentum for it to feel like a vibrant place that will attract people to post. I still have some friends who are LJ-only, so I will be very sad indeed if they do force the infinite scroll friendslist on everyone.

One thing I've come to realize lately is that for community based stuff that LJ used to do, the inheritor isn't Tumblr or Facebook so much as it's Reddit. It has handles, it has threaded comments (with up/down voting), and a gazillion "subreddits" aka communities for many, many topics.

[liv]

Huh, Reddit. I always forget about Reddit and similar community-based discussion sites! Thank you for bringing that up. It seems like that is maybe the direct inheritor of Usenet more than from LJ, both for good (very free, unmoderated space, pseudonymous, encourages detailed, topic-centred discussion) and for ill (belligerent culture, inclined to get overrun by zealots and fanatics).

[nicki]

I think communities were really LJ's answer to message boards. They were bait for the message board people. And all active communities did was spam your flist. Then message board people discovered that, yes, they really did like message boards for messageboarding activities (and archives for archiving activities), so the communities on DW never took off because people had discovered they liked the old solution better than the new one.

[liv]

That does make sense. I never really got into messageboard culture, but yes, it may well be that DW communities are a poor substitute for that. It seems like LJ is moving much more towards being a place to host communities, or at least that's what SUP wants to do with it. ontd and all those other huge mega-communities. So I imagine people who like that are either still on LJ, or else as you suggest have gone back to messageboards.

[ursula]

Yes, pictures! I've seen a lot of people lately swapping from lj to wordpress/blogspot for things like costuming journals, and I think easy photo posting is a huge factor here.

[liv]

Makes sense. I am a very text-centric blogger, and I think the people driving the direction of DW are too. Which suits me very well, but DW is never going to be popular if it remains almost text-only (unless you are willing to go through a huge amount of faff to find a different site to host your images then hand-craft the HTML to link to them and make them display properly.)

[azurelunatic]

Tumblr has very poor archives. While it might be a morass for the journal owner to then comb through, I think perhaps the ability to import one's tumblr to Dreamwidth (and I was looking at the API and coming up with a spec for it) would be helpful.

After a while of all the seamless sharing, at least a few of the folks I know would like to be assured that their stuff is somewhere that they think of as stable, where they actually know how to find stuff.

Tumblr's the place where you can start a thing and have it go all over if it wants to; DW/LJ is where you go when you want the whole discussion to be under your control. So perhaps the personal, not the political.

Tumblr criticism can be *merciless*, because it's not happening in the own-space of the person who originated whatever thing. "Tumblr social justice" is, um. Lots of people I know into social justice. Lots of people I know into tumblr. But put these two concepts together and, um. I stay away from those areas, mostly.

[liv]

Really good point about the archiving thing. I think some people specifically prefer very ephemeral social media; they feel liberated by not having to be afraid that some chance off-the-cuff remark will come back to haunt them in years to come, which I think was one of the blocking factors in the early days of Web 2.0. (Even Usenet had the whole X-no-archive thing, didn't it?)

I am really barely aware of people trying to have SJ conversations on Tumblr. It seems like a terrible idea for several reasons, but your account does certainly weigh up against the theory that people like Tumblr because they only get likes so it's more positive than traditional blogging.

[kore]

I took the bait about the Wordpress "easily archive your Tumblr here! whoo!" PR, and while the archiving process was indeed very automated and slick, by its very nature Tumblr is picture-heavy and the free Wordpress storage was tiny by comparison -- something like 3GB. I was able to archive about 10% of my posts. If I wanted to archive all of them plus have a bunch of special features, that's $100 a year upfront -- which I just can't afford right now. I'd love the ability to export Tumblr to DW, but I have no idea what would happen re image hosting unless there would just be a hotlink back to the original source, or something.

[ewx]

> People have left LJ partly because everything online is fragmented now

One of the early effects of LJ taking off was fragmentation of certain precursor Usenet-linked communities. I remember some amazing strops at the time (not necessarily unjustified by the people having them, either).

[liv]

Fragmentation in what way? If everybody who was previously on Usenet came to LJ, why was that fragmented? You mean because you couldn't find the people you'd been interacting with on Usenet because they reinvented themselves and formed different networks?

[antisoppist]

My problem with Facebook, apart from it wanting to sell me to advertisers, is that the people who have friended me on it are a) old close friends who have moved to the other end of the country, b) new local acquaintances organising events that I or my children might want to attend, c) clients in Scandinavia, and I can't think of anything I would want to say to all of them at once. I also find it odd to get e-mail asking me whether I want to translate something by Tuesday when the same person is simultaneously telling me how they went out last night and got drunk on Facebook. I want my life more compartmentalised than that and consequently don't use it at all.

I am now thinking I might have to because of the events organising aspect of it that you highlight. It is often the only place that you can find out about or sign up for things happening locally.

[liv]

Yeah, FB really really needs a way to segregate different bits of your acquaintance. They've made a few half-hearted attempts, particularly when Google+ launched, but it's never really been good enough to make people feel safe.

For example, at one point they changed the name of the group that you're friends with but don't have access to your more private stuff from "Limited profile" to "Restricted profile" and everybody who had been in the former group suddenly got access to all the stuff you'd deliberately excluded them from. I mean, I didn't come to any particular harm from that, but it didn't inspire confidence in FB's compartmentalization!

But yeah, I have a similar problem to you, my FB friendslist has: my actual friends, people I went to school with (some of whom are really quite conventional), some of my distant family, some (mostly former) work colleagues, and a whole bunch of people who know me in the context of being a lay leader within the Jewish community and through interfaith stuff. That last category is the most difficult to manage, because some of them are kids I taught at Sunday school, some of them are friends with some of my actual students from my day job, and politically they're all over the map. Lots of people who really don't need to know about what I do with my leisure time, even if the actual activities are perfectly innocent, let alone if they involve alcohol, sex etc.

Definitely agree that it's increasingly difficult to get involved in local community stuff if you don't use FB's events organizing. Which is a really annoying thing, but maybe the alternative is that you have to remember logins for 15 different dedicated events sites. Bleh.

[cafeshree]

Interesting stuff. I don't have a FB at all and don't want one, anytime there's something that's sign up by FB only, I think either it wasn't for me in the first place, or I let the group know that not everyone has FB.

I have a Tumblr that I use for pictures, I tried in the beginning to figure out conversations but just couldn't so now it's a place just to look and there's no pressure on staying current, so I could skip it for a week and then go scrolling through.

The comment thing is interesting too, because sometimes there's not much to say beyond "like it" or "agree" but I didn't realize that was a big reason for Tumblr users.

I'd be happy if DW was easier for picture posting, not being much of a coder, the easier it is to post things the happier I am. Also, maybe Pinterest is becoming so popular because it's similar to Tumblr, but easier to organize and find things.
Thanks for the thoughts.

[liv]

Welcome, thanks for commenting, and I do love your reading woman icon! I'm impressed that you've been able to stay away from FB in spite of the major disadvantages.

And yes, Tumblr is explicitly low-pressure, there's no expectation you keep up with everything, and I can see the advantages of that.

[kerrypolka]

I don't know if you've seen this, but I've just learned about something called Ghost, a minimalist Wordpress fork aimed at blogging.

Q: Yeah, but WordPress are already going to revise their dashboard, WordPress.com is experimenting with a potential simplified version... so why bother with this?

A: Sorry, but Tumblr already did this - it's not the future of blogging, it's the past.

Ghost isn't about sharing "Fuck Yeah [Dogs/Sharks/Girls with Tattoos]" - it's about publishing - which means writing - rather than mashing a few buttons to make sure that everyone can see and appreciate your latest funny picture/status, which is surely the most funny picture/status you've ever posted.

Tumblr, Pinterest and Facebook already have this locked down.

[liv]

Colour me cynical but I really don't buy that. He's right that there is a need for a simple yet text-focused blogging platform, but I'm completely unconvinced that guy has the skills or the staying power to be the one to implement it. I've been wrong before, but that looks pretty much like vapourware to me.

[jack]

Random thoughts.

I want more interoperability. It can work fine if some people are on LJ and some people are on reddit, etc, etc, if there's a sensible way of following social media elsewhere.

Often the things I didn't think of are what turns out to be important. Or it's not what you _can_ do, it's what it's _easy_ to do. Eg. in theory I can post 255 character LJ posts, but twitter makes that easier and more accepted.

I want a spectrum from "writing big essays" to "seeing what someone is up to today". I like having a text-focussed platform, but I appreciate why some people don't. Different scales:
- essays (eg. proper blog)
- personal journals (eg. livejournal)
- short (eg. twitter, facebook)
- hey look, cute thing (tumblr, facebook)
- community, like, "oh hey, you're on dreamwidth too".
- low-key keeping in touch (facebook, nee frienster, friends reunited)

I think the posts people write throw-away can be more interesting than those they intend to be big interesting posts, so I like that I see a mix of stuff and don't have to wait until people have time to blog "properly".

[lovingboth]

I think that's what I do, apart from trying to minimise my use of evilFacebook.

I discovered another reason to hate it this week: the absence of threaded comments led to someone thinking a later comment to a post was a comment on their comment, not to another one, and getting very distressed.

[damerell]

As it happens I also don't watch TV. :-)

[liv]

I am not in the least surprised. I guess the difference between opting out of TV and opting out of FB is that TV is only minimally interactive. If you're not consuming the same passive entertainment as the majority, well, you just have to find something else to talk about. But FB is more about socializing, and if you're not socializing with the majority, your links to your literal social network become more tenuous. This is not an argument for why you should be on FB, I definitely think you're better off without it. But they're not quite equivalent, I think.

[ceb]

"I don't have a Facebook account" is really the new "I don't have a TV" for showing off one's elite status

"Elite" is really not the word I'd use. The practical effect of both is that (a) people think you're weird (b) you spend a suprising amount of your life explaining why you're weird.

[liv]

That's interesting, I would have thought that your social circles would be similar to mine in the sense of being full of people who are proud of their minority tastes and interests and tend to look down on anything that's popular. Indeed some people get really defensive, the response to "I don't watch TV" or "I don't use FB" can often be along the lines of, well, I totally wouldn't either except there's some compelling reason why I have to.

Sorry you're having to keep explaining why you're weird, that sounds annoying! If it helps I haven't had access to a TV since I left home to go to uni, and I wish I had never joined FB but now that I'm there I don't have the energy to escape.

[ironed_orchid]

I don't think it's the case that people have left LJ to go to FB. It's that people have left LJ and people have gone to FB, more or less independently.

I think this is spot on. I was very resistant to joining fb, because I was fully ensconced in my lj usage and didn't need another platform to share stuff, especially not one where real names were required (or at least, normalized). I did end up getting an account and using an easy to identify pseud, and I use it a lot because the people on FB are the same people who had no idea what I was talking about when I told them about IRC in the 90s or blogs in the early 2000s, and yet they are still people I want in my life, and don't have the time or inclination to spend half of every day in a cafe the way I could when I was a student, and neither do they.

I think for those of us who liked the lj model of different levels of security and threaded comments which mean that the good stuff often happens in the conversations rather than just the initial entry, fb and tumblr and twitter will never replace that. I love DW, and I have a fairly active reading page here, but I still have some friends who are clinging to lj, and many more who have left altogether.

I would love to have an android compatible app for DW, or at least a mobile version of the site which is easier to navigate. I use FB and twitter on my commute because they are so easy to use on my phone, whereas if I get a DW comment in my inbox, I will wait until I get home before answering it.

TL,DR: I agree with lots of the things you say and are glad people are talking about this

[liv]

Hello there, and thanks for subscribing back.

I absolutely agree with you about FB, it's not an LJ replacement, it's doing very different things. Essentially I use FB to socialize with non-geeks, notably people who don't get pseudonymous culture at all. I do like having 200-odd FB friends (ie people from different parts of my life) with whom I would never in a million years have time to maintain an extensive correspondence, let alone hang out in cafés. That's why I really hoped that G+ or Diaspora would provide a non-evil FB alternative, but G+ turned out to out-evil FB, and Diaspora was way too geeky.

I do think that we will eventually get LJ-style security levels by default, because there's so clearly a need for it. Even FB is trying to move in that direction, even though their current implementation is shoddy. But threaded comments and discussion-focused space, I'm less optimistic. Especially if siderea is right and most people actually prefer not having to deal with comments.

DW really really needs a mobile platform. We've already reached the crossover point where more people access the internet from smartphones than desktop PCs, and that's especially true for DW's core demographic. I think the problem is that most of the devs (staff or volunteer) are the kind of geeks who have jobs where they spend most of the day at the computer and their employers are fairly lax about personal browsing on work time. Plus the US cellphone market is really lagging behind the rest of the world. So the people who have the ability to make DW work on smartphones are also the people who don't see why this is so needed.

[daharyn]

One thing that's made a big difference in how I use social media, and I don't think it's vaporware: IFTTT. I automatically send new Flickr sets to Facebook that way (each new set generates a new Facebook post), but I also use it for a whole host of other sync services. I like how customizable it is. I feel like it gives me a greater sense of control over my social media use and trumps some of my own bad habits. That may be an illusory sense of control, but I'll take it.