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[striver]

One of the first posters in this community brought up the subject of dead communities. You can read the comments here. There were a couple interesting statements:

"it seems like a lot of people view communities kinda like watching a show on television. Somebody else is the producer, and they are the consumer, as opposed to the way in which a real

Comments

[striver]

well...it's not that it feels like a chore. I have always done stuff like this because I enjoy it. But I enjoy a lot of things and there are only so many hours in a lifetime. I enjoy watching over a community and taking part in it, but I don't have time any more to make it my whole life.

[sealwhiskers]

yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot recently. The poetry community I'm one of the moderators of, is dying, after being alive for a good many years. Part of it is LJ becoming smaller and facebook and twitter taking over..but that's not the whole explanation. I think part of it was that apart from the moderators, in the later years there was a kernel of fairly dominant, expressive and maybe even intimidating people taking up room in there, and the rest of the people were rather content sit and watch, dropping the occasional comment, and when these expressive people followed other internet trends and spent time on other sites than LJ, the rest either followed like sheep, or sat by, still not doing anything. There was a time, maybe 4-5 years ago where many people were fairly active, but all that has changed now, and there's just enough a moderator can do to keep it going. Although I must confess, I haven't even had time to try some serious CPR.

[striver]

Is LJ becoming smaller? I was recently looking at this post that I did in 2003. It gives some of the LJ stats from that time. "307692 livejournals have been updated in the past month" and 832563 users total. There are now over 25 million total users with over 900,000 posting within the last 30 days. So LJ has 3 times the active users now as it did in January 2003.

I know that is only two points on a graph so it doesn't tell the whole story but it does show LJ is bigger now than the time this community was really active.

[sealwhiskers]

In that case I think it would be interesting to know how many of these journals that were updated are Russian. What I meant, but didn't write was that I suspect the English writing community on LJ is shrinking, but that there is a huge Russian market adding instead, which I'm fairly uninterested in. (not to sound like a bitch, but I don't want to read Cyrillic letters)

[striver]

That is a good question. Their statistics don't show where the currently active accounts are. They list "active in some way:1909159". But the number shown for US participation is 4723909 so clearly that is not active accounts in the US.

And why on earth is there such a huge spike of 30-year-olds in the age groupings? People over 30 not wanting to admit it? :)

http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml