... Hello world?

[redsage]

"My people are going back to LiveJournal."

More people seem to be returning. Perhaps the zeitgeist will return here. One can hope.

At any rate, it's been forever since I've posted here, but having seen several fantastic people comment lately that they are returning... I shall do so, see how it works out.

Comments

[secretagentmoof]

I think it'll remain a trickle, but a more steady trickle.

I think part of it is that there are more media for expressing more evanescent thoughts, and so a big hunk of communication that used to take place here is siphoned away. Still haven't found anything better for longer-form communication, though.

[badger.livejournal.com]

Welcome back! :)

[dcart.livejournal.com]

I'm here every day. Never left.

[kmusser]

Some of us never left :-)

[kineticphoenix.livejournal.com]

Been thinking of returning. Have to be really careful what I say on The Book Of Face, and while Twitter allows for short, stream-of-consciousness type stuff, there are some meta things in my head that really merit more than a series of 140 character Tweets.

[murdercake.livejournal.com]

Argh I was going to make some sort of witty comment but the comment field formatting is different and now I feel lost haha.

[riordan.livejournal.com]

EXCELSIOR!

[arethinn]

Coming back from where?

LJ seems to be making more and more unpopular choices these days. Hardly a news post goes by I don't see people throwing up their hands, vowing not to renew a paid account, and packing off either to Dreamwidth or into the sunset in general.

[tyrsalvia.livejournal.com]

Coming back from Facebook, Twitter, and sometimes nowhere social at all. The biggest one I'm thinking of spending less time on is FB, for political reasons.

What sort of choices? I'd like to know more. Links welcome!

[arethinn]

Reading over posts and angry comments in news and lj_releaseswill probably tell you all you need to know, including but not limited to:

Ugly new "friends feed" that does not respect journal style, that nobody asked for, and which presents accessibility problems for some because of lack of being able to sufficiently customize its appearance (also, infinite scroll - at least they added an option to return to paginated form, rather than forcing you into infinite)

Ugly and kinda broken new update/new post page that nobody asked for (vs Dreamwidth's new update page which is pretty elegant, they went in completely different design directions)

Kinda ugly new profile page that nobody asked for

Kinda ugly changes to the site skin that nobody asked for (seeing a theme?), which affects official LJ communities like news as well as individual entry pages in non-paid journals, which besides having too much whitespace and trying to be too "slick" (subjective, true) as well as objectively breaking various functions for many users - userpic picker is a major bugaboo for some, others can no longer comment on LJ at all; accessibility issues in colors and formatting; weird behavior in how threads collapse; certain text appearing only on hover which can create flickery strobing effects when scrolling (merely annoying for someone like me, although I can't fathom why anyone would want it that way in the first place, but potentially problematic for e.g. epileptics)...

Introducing changes apparently without sufficient testing in the first place in a number of cases, and not listening to users' pleas to roll things back until fixes are in place

They basically closed down operations in the US entirely - there's a skeleton crew if that, Russia is obviously their focus and they don't give a damn about their US userbase

Various things that seem to be attempts to be Facebook or Tumblr or whatever and not just do what LJ did well, like "reposting" which is an analogue to reblogging on Tumblr, but (IMO) not as clear about who actually posted what, "LJ-Like", and "Social capital"

Things of a more political nature like "Strikethrough" and "Boldthrough" (not sure if you were around for those? they may have been off your radar due to being specifically fandom-related) which amounted to suspending people for bogus reasons such as what they had in their interest lists or posting certain kinds of content which was, afaik, at the time not against the TOS, possibly because of instigating action by a conservative/fundamentalist type group - see http://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough, http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=LJ_Strikethrough_2007

Doing any or all of the above things with lack of transparency or even explanation for embarassing periods of time after the fact, or first asking users what they might want

It just all adds up to "I am not comfortable giving these people my money [and in some cases content] anymore" for some people, including me. I prefer to give my money to DW because I feel they actually care about their userbase.

[zahraa]

I've never left. I've always felt it was better.

[onetarot.livejournal.com]

It's a lot quieter than it used to be, no question.

Thanks for coming back.

[witchchild]

I am in that camp of people who never left, as you know.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

I went back to posting here (well, to Dreamwidth, with automatic crossposts here) a few months ago, though found myself screaming into the void in a postapocalyptic wasteland. It's good to see more people coming back; it's hard to motivate oneself to write for an audience which may or may not exist.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see LJ or something like it (suitable for longform discussion/conversation, with sophisticated privacy controls, sustainably funded and thus not selling your eyeballs to marketers or making you pay for access to your friends' attention) thrive, though think that it needs a few technical improvements to catch up. One would be a modern RESTful API with OAuth-style login (and possibly support for other blogging/posting APIs that existing apps use); being able to post/comment/read one's feed from a mobile client (of one's choice; if Tapbots or the Reeder people wrote one it'd probably rock) would be good. Another one would be the option of Soundcloud-style “secret links” to protected posts, which would allow one to give access to them to people by another channel (i.e., posting them to Facebook or similar), and thus one's non-LJ friends could at least have a chance of reading one's non-public posts.

[shandrew.livejournal.com]

*ponders comment about mildly abusive russian overlord relationships*