09/30 Blogiversary

[darkemeralds]

Happy LJ-versary to me. On this date in 2004 I made my first bewildered post on LiveJournal. The online world has changed a lot since then, hasn't it?

Like, in 2004, LiveJournal was still owned by Brad Fitzpatrick, and I think they still had an office in Portland (I remember seeing it; I'm sure that's not my imagination. It was down by the river near the Broadway Bridge. I cannot find corroboration of this memory online). MySpace and Facebook were just getting started, and Tumblr wasn't quite yet a gleam in the eye of whoever founded Tumblr.

FastCompany wrote about a LiveJournal "comeback" last year, and got some good comments from current (presumably US-based) users saying that LJ's comeback plans have nothing in common with what the core US user base wants--to wit, the journal world as it has always been, with threaded comments, screening, privacy, security, adult content allowed, no advertising. In other words, Dreamwidth.

I'm six days/posts behind in my big September 30/30 plan. Whoops.

Comments

[dine]

happy LJversary! thanks for linking to that article on LJ's 'reinvention' effort; interesting, but the commentors have it right, SUP has proven they don't actually grasp what users want/need, and the slow bleed to DW and other platforms keeps happening, undercutting any progress they've made in attracting new users

[darkemeralds]

Yeah. :(

It's not solely bad management on SUP's part, though. The exodus from LJ began during the Great Strikethrough, and wasn't that under SixApart's leadership? That bled a lot of users here to DW, and DW certainly contributed to fracturing the user base. But DW offers almost everything the classic LJ users are looking for, and clearly that hasn't done the trick: this place, too, is bleeding users. There are more exciting fannish spaces, spaces with better mobile support, spaces with better multi-media support. I believe good conversations may be going on to some extent in some of those places. Or maybe conversation is morphing yet again into something I can't recognize.

[bluemeridian]

Oh ho! Happy LJversary! After seeing this, I checked mine - just 2 days from now, but in 2005 instead.

[darkemeralds]

Well then, happy LJ-versary to you, too!

[ranunculus]

Happy anniversary!
It is a wonderful community isn't it?

My anniversary is with May 2001, and only that late because I was slooowwww to adopt.
Like so many others I've virtually moved to DW. Of course I got a permanent acct there the instant they went public, literally within hours. Don't remember the year, just remember it was in a coffee shop in Anchorage! Since then I've never had a second thought about my move -- except I refuse to leave my wonderful LJ community behind. Heck, I'm still communicating with some of the first 5 LJ friends I ever made, mostly, in those days people old enough to have something in common with me.
Of course No One in DW land lists "riparian restoration" and only one or two LJ ers do. Sigh.

[darkemeralds]

You really are an early adopter!

One of my sorrows about LJ/DW and every other social network thingy I've tried is that genuine communities of interest are very hard to find. Even fandom itself, though very well represented around here, rarely offered the kind of targeted, episode-specific conversation that used to be an everyday occurrence on Television Without Pity, where there would be an active forum for this show, this episode, even this character. Go outside of fandom and lots of people may list certain interests, but there are no active communities and no current posts.

I find that for, say, bicycling, I get more out of reading and commenting on bike-specific blogs (BikePortland being the most specific to my interests). The more targeted the blog, the more intelligent the comment-conversation seems to be. But it's still just commenting. The quality of getting to know individuals both through their own personal journals and their comments on yours, is a true pleasure.