14th March, 2008
It's the Community, Stupid!
Friday, 10:10 am in Bloglife
So, once upon a time 
matt convinced me to sign up for LiveJournal. This was back in ‘99 and I’ve had that account ever since (albeit with one name change). Strictly speaking, I don’t post to my LiveJournal; I post to my blog and LJ’s excellent XML-RPC interface allows me to mirror my posts from here to there. This interface is free; any user can take advantage of it, and people do, mostly thanks to the neat plug-ins written for 3rd party logware like WordPress. The fact of this interface is why I use LJ and not other, similar services like Vox that don’t offer it. I like my domain more than I like any of those third party sites but of course that begs the question…
Why bother to do it at all?
And the answer is simply that I make friends on LiveJournal; there’s something about the community that… I dunno, encourages interactivity in a way that free-standing blogs often don’t. Maybe it’s the enforced egalitarianism of default templates; I dunno. But whatever it is, the fact remains that no matter how gently I try and encourage people to comment here rather than there, they don’t; most of my comments (and discussions) come from LJ. Which is vexing but, alas, the truth. And the flip side of that coin is that I comment on LiveJournal; a lot. I comment more on people’s journals than I do on the blogs that I read. Because, at the end of the day, it’s a community.
This is why I have a permanent account. Yeah, I shelled out the US$150 in the last sales round to buy one. Not for the features. I honestly don’t give a crap that I get some ridiculous number of userpics. I don’t post by phone or email (because of the XML-RPC thing). Strictly speaking there’s not much more that I can do as a Permanent Account that I couldn’t do as an Early Adopter, but after eight years of use I figured it was time to give something back to the site.
The reason I’m thinking about this right now, incidentally, is because of something LJ creator Brad Fitzpatrick said in his post about the recent account type changes SUP has made at LJ:
In any case, SUP apparently sees no value in freeloaders not looking at ads, not paying, and oh wait… producing most the content for other members to read, other members who are looking at ads and paying for their accounts.
Quoted From: Brad Fitzpatrick
And that’s… interesting because that’s what LJ is to me and maybe I never really consciously realised it before. LJ is not its features – technically, it’s back in the Web 1.0 stone age – but rather its people. The reason I don’t care much about places like JournalFen1 is purely because I don’t have an active friends list there. I can shout out into the silence well enough from v-s.net; I don’t need a third party site to do that for me, no matter how many bells and whistles they claim to have.
So… I dunno. Maybe SUP doesn’t get this. Maybe. Maybe we all got blinded by chrome and the potential for revenue and forgot that LiveJournal is the longest running, consistently successful social networking site on the internet. MySpaces and Friendsters come and go but LiveJournal stays eternal by… what, exactly?
Not money, that’s for sure.
Edit
Reading through the comments I’ve gotten on this post has made me think about the features that I think make LiveJournal ‘work’ for me, as opposed to every other social networking site I’ve abandoned. It seems everyone’s answers are fairly similar, but here are mine:
- The remote posting client. Because if it’s a choice between here and my domain, my domain wins.
- The ability to have f-locked posts. Most free-standing blog software (other than sk.log, which I based off LJ) has limited if any support in this regard, especially linked with…
- The friends page. Not for its own sake – because, really, that’s why God invented RSS – but when combined with the above. I think it makes the community more… private? I guess; because people don’t have to worry so much about who’s reading their Deepest and Darkest Most Thoughts.
- Threaded comments, with notifications. Flat comments drive me nuts, so does not getting notifications of replies to me personally (as opposed to ‘blanket’ responses to the whole post). This is another thing I ripped from LJ to put into sk.log.
- Communities. The fact that they’re so tightly-coupled with the rest of LJ is a pretty unique feature, especially in the otherwise pretty free-standing world of blogs.
So, there you go. Those are the features that I think help build the community that makes me keep coming back to LJ. Note that in an of themselves they’re not the incentive, but rather they’re the tools that I think LiveJournal does well that other social networking/blogging tools are lacking. If you build it, and all that.
So, while we’re here; what keeps you coming back?
- Incidentally, if anyone wants a JF account, let me know. ^
- « Previous
- Next »
Related Posts
Comments
-
There are two reasons why I still have my LJ account:
1) the communities, of which the only thing remotely similar are forums but they each of course require their own login
2) keeping up with people who can’t be bothered to get “real blogs”
That said, if SUP decide to get rid of the basic accounts 100%, I won’t stick around. I don’t want to see the adverts, and I am not paying for the service again. I did it for a couple of years, and didn’t find it of any further use than the free account.
–
Remember all those years ago I asked you about XML-RPC? I never did get around to doing anything with it :S
-
As far as the ads go, I mean, well, Adblock goes a long way. And places like
no_lj_ads devote themselves to showing people how to use various other Firefox extension hacks to clean up the site. So you never have to see anything. But it is kinda the principle of the thing. (Being a Basic user only entitles you not to see ads on your own journal; you still see ads on Plus accounts and on the main LJ pages.)Remember all those years ago I asked you about XML-RPC? I never did get around to doing anything with it :S
Heh. Did you want me to send you the LJ classes out of sk.log? Post mirroring is fun! And it’s really not that hard (the major chrome are things like, believe it or not, picking the userpics).
-
Well, NoScript does get rid of the majority. It took me months to realise that LJ had even added the things because I don’t read the news community. It’s the principle of the thing, like you said.
Nah, don’t really need it now - people who’re interested just subscribe to my feed syndicated on a separate account. (Plus, I’m just lazy.)
-
I never knew about the XML-RPC thing, myself. I just used my paid account (when I had it) and my friend’s to make syndication accounts/feeds for my offsite blogs or what have you. Especially once I got tired of the drama on LJ and decided to finally host my own blog.
I used to stick around LJ for the community and people too, but somehow they lost the appeal they had some years ago as of late.
-
Yeah, the remote update call is one of the LJ server’s more downplayed features. I guess ‘cause it’s kinda technical?
You use WordPress, yeah? Because the plug-in for that is here.
-
Oh, sweet! I tried looking for it last night but wasn’t getting what I considered trustworthy results. Most of them were from 2004 or before and seemed kind of half-ass.
I’ll see about installing the plugin and trying it out.
-
I rarely go to LiveJournal, but I really like that place. I guess… it truly does have a special feel. I don’t know if those are the right words, or the right expression. But I like going to LJ once in a while. I have two accounts (because then I forgot I had created one, and instead of making sure, just made another). Cross-posting is possible? I wish I could do that. Posting from my domain and seeing my entries appear in my LJ would be a perfect solution.
I have always thought that the community is the most important element in any social network or similar place online.
-
Cross-posting is possible? I wish I could do that.
You just moved off WordPress, yeah? ‘Cause that’s a shame; there’s definitely a WP plug-in for it, but I doubt FanUpdate’s got one. The code’s not that hard to implement if you write it “from scratch”, but it’s doing all the UI stuff that’s really tedious.
-
It’s not a necessity, so I can leave that for later. But I’d like to be able to do post-mirroring from my blog at some point. It’s because I have many friends in there. Because, like you said… it’s more probable that they’ll comment on Live Journal than on my domain. Few of my friends take the time to visit my blog. They prefer to stay in those networks, I believe.
By the way, is JournalFen good?
-
JF is good if you, like, want somewhere to post your Snarry fanart or if you’re keen on Fandom Wank. It’s functionally mostly identical to LiveJournal – minus the instant messaging stuff – since it uses the same codebase, so whether it’s worth it or not I guess just depends on how many people there you know.