heads up

[pauraque_bk]

I'm about to take some LJs off my flist here because the people are crossposting everything to DW, and I never post anything locked on LJ so it doesn't matter whether I've got you friended here or not. (Every time I do this, I think I've eliminated all the duplicates, and I'm always wrong.) If I screw up and take you off when I shouldn't, tell me.

This is something I was going to do anyway, and nothing to do with the recent unpleasantness, though it is certainly becoming more and more evident how ill-suited LJ is for fandom at this point. I mean, it never was "for" fandom -- we were never a majority or probably even a very significant source of their income -- but there was a time when it worked quite well. Or at least we could put slashes in our tags without breaking things, you know...

I've seen it pointed out today that if you have anyone on your flist who would be dumb or insensitive enough to repost something locked and/or connect your fannish identity to your real name when you told them not to, that person shouldn't be on your flist in the first place. Of course that's true, but it's not entirely the point. It's just something that would never even be suggested, let alone implemented, on a service meant for fandom. For us, it's pointless and has obvious potential for abuse. For the people whose business LJ wants, maybe it seems like a good and useful idea, I don't know.

Comments

[cschick.livejournal.com]

I think it's evidence that LJ has never quite been perceived as a true blogging service--everything they are doing has been pretty common on the straight blogging services for quite a while.

[cschick.livejournal.com]

Hmm, let me edit. It hasn't been quite as easy as LJ is making it, but there are many bloggers on Twitter who have been say, both posting responses to their blog and to their Twitter feeds (whether automatically or manually).

It doesn't surprise me that LJ has gone this way, since everywhere else is going to this content-sharing between all social media model.

[pauraque]

See, this is something I wouldn't even know about, because I don't have a Facebook and I mostly use Twitter to keep up with fandom friends.

When LJ got started, what was innovative about it was the community aspect -- automatic aggregation of friends' posts, and a comment system that was much better than any other online journal service at the time (and is still better than the non-threaded comments on many blogs). It was clearly designed not for one person to talk at lots of other people, but for people to talk to each other. "True" blogging services have not gone in that direction, as far as I can see, so the separation has remained, until now I guess.

[cschick.livejournal.com]

And I wonder if that's the issue. LJ is falling by the wayside. The "show your ass" method of being online is becoming the predominant one.

[pauraque]

Which is interesting, because I've seen it come full circle now. When I started going online, many people used their real names, because they had internet through their school, so their email was JDoe@berkeley.edu or whatever. Then anonymity became the thing... I guess for most people it was because they took the "everyone online is an axe murderer" scares seriously, and of course as internet access became more universal, those who had potentially embarrassing online activities didn't want their boss to search them on Lycos or whatever.

The return of real names has been creeping up for a while. Remember MySpace and Friendster? It seems to be reaching a real critical mass now. But there are still people who want the ability to keep separate identities -- lots of people. The company that runs WoW recently threatened to require real names on forum posts, but had to go back on it because the negative response was so overwhelming. People still do want to be able to compartmentalize.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

on a service meant for fandom

As you say, I think this is the crux of the issue - current LJ management is embarrassed by the large, fannish part of LJ. They want to be Facebook and Twitter and roll around on giant piles of money while being constantly mentioned in the news.

[pauraque]

Well, I understand, it's their business, they want to make money. But the funny thing is, I don't think most people even think of LJ as a place for fandom, but merely as a place for people too young or too dumb to have a "real" blog (like AOL was thought of as a service for people without a "real" ISP). I think it's unlikely they'll be able to shed that stereotype.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

It's one thing to want to make money, but quite another to write off your existing customers in an attempt to enter a crowded market with an older product! LJ's strength is in its comment threading, which would work very well with high-traffic blogging, but they don't seem interested in that, either.

[sedesdraconis.livejournal.com]

word is that the "/" in tag thing is a bug

saw someone comment:
"apparently the / debacle is unintentional and programmers are working to fix it - so said marta somewhere around about page 17 of the comments on that news post."

fwiw

[pauraque]

Good to know. I'd figured it was a technical problem or limitation of some sort, and certainly not a secret conspiracy to mess up the tags of slash writers. But as a bug, it just had the worst timing, since fandom was going to get mad about the other stuff anyway.