LJ is still a little relevant

[sabotabby]

I'm consciously avoiding Facebook these days. I don't even want to look at it. I gather there are probably some features on it that I need to disable.

Facebook's effect on social networking reminds me of what happened with Chapters-Indigo in Canada. All of the small publishers and bookstores went out of business, and everyone had to go to Chindigo, and then Chindigo realized that it was much more profitable to sell a small number of popular books and lots of diaries and scented candles. So everyone ditched and started buying books on Amazon. I don't know what the SNS equivalent of Amazon is.

I'm avoiding G+ because nymwars have resulted in practically no one I know using it for anything other than posting about nymwars.

I'm trying to like Tumblr but there is not a convenient way to comment. It doesn't feel very social or interactive to just click a heart. And I'm not sure that there is a big audience for pictures of pulp sci-fi covers that look like they have dicks on them, which appears to be the theme I've fallen into.

So I'm glad LJ is still here.

And also because I love you guys.

Comments

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

LJ is still my main place for a lot of interaction and content. I hate FB and am mostly on twitter for microblogging.

All the people I care about irl are either on email or phone. I find FB less and less relevant to my life.

Yay for old "obsolete" blogging platforms!

[sabotabby]

See, I have that phone handicap, so FB can be useful in that way. But basically I go on, and it's either people posting about how happy they are (which, when one is not in a happy space, is not wonderful), or people writing these long political diatribes that get excerpted to two sentences on my newsfeed. I feel guilty not reading them, so now I'm avoiding my news feed.

Yes, I did notice the scare-quotes

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

"Yay for old 'obsolete' blogging platforms!"

Well that's the thing, isn't it? Twitter is, just as you described it, a micro-blogging platform ... and FB really isn't a "blogging platform" at all: it's a social networking site with some trivial blogging features tacked on, not quite complementary to LJ (which is a blogging platform, with some social-networking features stirred in that distinguish it from most other real blogging platforms). So FB isn't the new thing that renders LJ obsolete; it's a different type of thing, with complementary strengths. (Like how helicopters did not make fixed-wing aircraft obsolete.)

The thing that updates LJ and replaces it in the same niche, the new to LJ's old is not FB or Tumblr or Twitter; it's Dreamwidth. And DW is (intentionally) very, very LJ-like -- it's not so groundbreakingly different that it makes LJ obsolete; just an alternative with some different features (which I personally consider to all be improvements, but again, not enough so to make LJ obsolete) and a different business model (which is a big deal for some of us).

LJ will become obsolete when (a) it stops keeping up with the most important-to-users aspects of the other platforms in its niche (definitely DW, arguably Wordpress, Blogger, etc.[1]), or (b) when blogging itself becomes a quaint, mostly-ignored backwater (which, despite the attitudes of many FB users, doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon -- AFAICT, one of the things FB is used for is sharing interesting blog entries you've seen with friends who don't read the same blogs you do, without having your own blog, so FB is (again) complementary to blogs). The equivalent of (b) in my plane/helicopter analogy would be Zeppelins -- blimps are still used, mostly for advertising and special-purpose lifting; there's ongoing research in dirigibles and blimps; but airship passenger lines are a thing of the past. There's still too much active participation in blogging for it to fall into the Zeppelins/buggy-whips/horse-drawn delivery cart category.

So basically, the reason our little 'obsolete' blogging platform still looks so useful, is that the platforms other people think of as replacing it and rendering it obsolete don't even come close to replacing it in the first place. It's only folks' ability to confuse tools in completely different categories (because all "web stuff" is interchangeable, right?) that drags the conversation in that direction in the first place.

[1] I would consider those to be directly comparable to LJ/DW, but a case can be made for LJ's social networking features pushing it into a separate category ... or for WP/Blogger to be obsolete compared to LJ/DW.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

A further thought about why FB seemed to thrive at the expense of LJ:

It's not that FB was a better LJ; it's that a lot of people may have been using LJ more for its social networking features which were not its core strength, and not because they actually wanted a blogging platform in the first place. So when FB became known as a much better social-networking site, that being its primary purpose, a lot of the "just here because LJ's social-networking afterthought features work better than some primitive social-networking sites" LJ users migrated their online presence to the site that's better at what they had really wanted in the first place. Leaving a bunch of really-did-want-a-blogging-platform users and really-like-the-hybrid users to stay here.

Maybe?

[sabotabby]

You raise a good point. Many of my favourite LJs to read from when I first got on are still here. But I'm a hybrid user, otherwise I'd blog on WordPress or something.