Now that I've had a chance to fiddle around with all this stuff

[petronia]

I've been telling people** not to worry about Twitter, that the hype is mostly just hype and won't be changing the face of the universe any time soon. Of course this is vast simplification but the fact is only a small percentage of people enjoy using Twitter to its "maximum potential", and they do not tend to be The Kids.

Speaking of losing The Kids, I think the rush over to Dreamwidth one sees is... a bit like boxing up the furniture and hiring movers while the drywall hasn't been put up, no? XD; I have an account and I'm playing with it, tweaking things for fun and experimentation, but that's it for the moment being. It's not so much that you have to be cynical as you have to be sensible. It's going to take a year, maybe two, before the service gets up to speed; no doubt the site owners will trigger wank somehow, which will cause people to be disillusioned and horrified that they have not in fact succeeded in creating a Golden Samarkand for media fen; and so on and so forth. In the long run, I think the DW team has a good (not 100%) chance of presenting a total service package that's objectively superior to LJ's, but a lot of that is LJ itself being dire. In the meantime I still have about 18 months before I break even on my permanent account (although I did that calculation before I learnt the concept of present value, so it's actually longer).

There is also flapping of hands re: how to get the message out that this is not a Fandom-specific project, to which I say nonsense. XD At this point, anything based on LJ's code base is a dinosaur, but that's okay because Fandom loves, wants to use the deprecated tech, so sticking with the deprecated tech is the only way to get Fandom to move its butt. If you're not in Fandom and don't LJ, you have better options. If you're not in Fandom but already on LJ, LJ probably hasn't done anything to offend you. It's called serving a niche, and a great strategy as long as you don't fall prey to the temptation of being everything to everyone.

As for Tumblr: it's really lovely, in a retro sort of way, and because it's a hipster nexus like Muxtape (RIP) it's very easy to find cool content. XD But it's clearly doomed, because the people running it don't understand that if your users are implementing hacks,*** you must give them the functionality they want regardless of whether it dovetails with your idea of what the site should be used for.


** In RL, not LJ. People are perfectly capable of making spamposts and linkposts without involving RSS, it's just easier to do it from the Twitter interface. Just like it's easier to post a Youtube video with one line of commentary in Tumblr.

*** Such as, oh, TEXT COMMENTING? Inorite, it's a challenge.

Comments

[meril.livejournal.com]

Just wondering--if one, let's say, wants a place to journal in a locked manner that is NOT Facebook, where's the best place to put it?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Is that "locked to friends" or private locked? If it's private locked, none of the services out there are designed for private journaling, by definition it's networking or at least outward-facing. Xanga's privacy controls are a bit worse than LJ's, from experience. Facebook isn't a service for blogging/journaling, period. IDK if I'm understanding correctly. ^^;

[meril.livejournal.com]

Locked to friends.

Isn't that really the LJ-and-clone niche anyway? I've been on since 2001 and the only reason I got a journal was because one of the people I knew from blogs was doing flocked journaling due to people she knew offline reading her blog.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

For sure. But that's probably the only non-fandom reason anyone would get an LJ these days, and so LJ will gradually turn into a bunch of little walled gardens of friend networks. Which it is already, I think. ^^;

[kuroraka.livejournal.com]

All the hype about Dreamwidth actually makes me want to stay far, far away from it, but that could just be my usual reaction to overhyped stuff...if eventually everyone i know/ all the interesting communities will jump ship, i might reconsider, but for now i'm just observing since i don't see the point in getting yet another account i'm not gonna use in the end...

Plus, like you, i've got a permanent account and i'm not willing to let it go to waste.

[troisroyaumes]

Such as, oh, TEXT COMMENTING? Inorite, it's a challenge.

Amen to that. And yet Blogger's commenting functionality was horribly backwards for a really long time (this is why Disqus started in the first place) so it's not only Tumblr that has trouble getting a clue. -_-;;

Hm, maybe you're right about DW offering nothing to people who are not in fandom and not already on LJ. That being said, as I said to Charmian just a moment ago, I do know of people who want LJ's combination of journaling and social networking functionality but don't want to use LJ itself because of its reputation, so I think that DW still has potential in that respect.

[tsutanai.livejournal.com]

Except that if, as DW matures, it goes all fannish... That could form a perception block before it's even fully out of beta.

[troisroyaumes]

That's very true. Though I think that at least for LJ, it's not so much fandom that's the turn off, but the general youth of the userbase, and DW seems to be doing slightly better on that front.

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

That is pretty much what I have been thinking about DW except a lot more coherent. I do wish I had an account, though, all the hype is making me curious enough to want to poke at it.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'll send you a code if I ever get another. XD

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

\o/ Yay! I suppose it opens soon, so if I don't manage to get a code I'll be able to poke at it soon enough, anyway. 8D

[star-flare.livejournal.com]

I actually don't really get the DW hype? Idk, I think it's partly because I am totlly clueless about the on-goings of fandom, being currently fandomless. But Tumblr, I love. I have it permanently opened, right next to my Gmail when I'm online. And I toy with the idea of having sub-Tumblrs, and I used to have several before I narrowed it down to the primary following/reblogging Tumblr, and a more personal/art-ish Tumblr, and... I don't exactly know why I'm rambling here. HI, I'M JUST DE-LURKING.

[akatonbo.livejournal.com]

Actually, the reason I want off LJ has nothing to do with fandom whatsoever -- up until SUP decided it was a good idea to take away adless free accounts, I was actually removing people from my flist for wanking about LJ's supposed sins toward fandom. They'd ACTED in some monumentally stupid ways, but the underlying policies were only outrageous from a POV totally blind to Real Life, and when people rioted, they recognized they'd done something dumb.

After the basic account fiasco, however, I stopped giving LJ money (this account is permanent or else I would have left on the spot, but I had others that were sometimes being paid for features) and planned to jump ship as soon as the plans began for a service that I knew would be worth sticking with. (I've known D casually since before either of us even had an LJ, and my first journal was created about a week before her first journal in 2001.)

I'm also only barely "in fandom" anymore. (I still do a lot of fannish things, but my actual social activity about them becomes more and more insular as I grow more and more convinced that the majority of fannish institutions need to DIAF because they're nothing but wank factories.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Going to b-school has really made me understand the other perspective - it's not so much that there's no free lunch, but the biz people would be surprised that anyone would expect a free lunch. If you're not explicitly paying for a service, you should obviously expect it to be paid for via ad views... and besides, all of it is really an elaborate con on the media buyers, as it's well-known that viewers skip over ads with their eyes anyway. Indeed, no one seems to complain much about ads on Facebook, or on privately run blogs.

The logical conclusion the smarter social media biz people should arrive at is that Fandom (and people who think like Fandom) are customers that cost you more money to retain than to lose, which puts a nice conspiracy spin on some of LJ's actions. XD; Which is why I think DW (as a service that is run by people to whom profitmaking is explicitly a secondary concern) and Fandom are well-suited for each other, and probably for no others.

[akatonbo.livejournal.com]

It's not the fact that there are ads at all -- although I despise large flash ads pretty violently no matter where they are, and finally broke down and installed adblock despite my inherent dislike of blocking things -- but the fact that they tried to eliminate the possibility of ad-free accounts entirely when there had been a previous promise not to have ads at all (which I did not like, but was not up in arms about, when it was broken because the way it was implemented was acceptable). And I've always been a paying customer, who they've lost because of the gross overcommercialization. (And there are more than enough other reasons for me to steer clear of Facebook and MySpace than the ads.)

But no, I really don't share the other perspective at all. I do not, generally, believe in a free lunch, and in fact often distrust the reliability of wholly free services even if I can tell how they are being paid for, but I have a very low tolerance for obnoxious corporate behavior.

[bell]

It's going to take a year, maybe two, before the service gets up to speed; no doubt the site owners will trigger wank somehow

I agree on both counts; it's going to take a while for DW to really settle down as a service (no one is *there* yet, for crying out loud, and even those who are, are reluctant to post DW-only because their friends are elsewhere).

And, yeah, the people DW are going to screw up, one day or another, because that's what happens when you have something big running and thousands of people using services. Wank happens. I'll be curious both the reaction of the management and of the clients... though I'm pretty sure at least the former will be responsible/mature/good. It's one of the main reasons why I wanna switch out of lj.

[helvetius.livejournal.com]

I tend to think of Tumblr as one of those cork boards where one can thumbtack random (or maybe, not so random) images/quotes/quirkyweirdnonsense. The fact that people opt to choose them as a means to blog sometimes baffles me as there are better options out there. :x

Twitter just veers between a cock tease or a complete bore. XD;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well, it makes it really frustrating when you want to say something about the images/quotes/quirky nonsense someone else has posted and... can't! XD

(I think the people who choose to blog extensively on Tumblr fall into two groups: people who are sort of talking to themselves, and people whose posts take as starting point the pointing out of neat stuff out there - music, video, quote, whatever. Tumblr makes this last operation less onerous than any other service out there, but doesn't allow you to have a two-way, much less multi-way conversation about it without multiple reblogs, which seems like ideological silliness.)