Comments | guitargrrl: LJ post about LJ.

guitargrrl

LJ post about LJ.

Dec 07, 2022 19:15

There was something magical about the original old school days of LJ, before social media became the norm. Paragraphs full of peoples deepest thoughts were replaced with quick Instagram photos of their dinner and news got condensed into tweets that were limited to 2 lines. Facebook placated the already shortened attention spans of most people as it ( Read more... )

Comments 4

rock_dinosaur December 8 2022, 06:30:57 UTC

My experience of and feelings about LiveJournal are very similar to yours. I never felt as connected to the world and as able to express myself as fully and deeply as I did during the year-or-two after I discovered LiveJournal. I regard that period as one of the most positive and adventure-filled times of my life. Prior to that, I'd felt sure there must be people in my city and elsewhere with whom I had interests in common, but I'd had no way of knowing who they were or of connecting with them. I too made friends whom I still think of and miss, though they went elsewhere long ago and seemingly can't be tempted to return. Feeling as I do about LiveJournal, I have never understood why the vast majority of its users were so willing to leave it for patently inferior sites. When interaction on LJ became almost non-existent and months went by with no comments on my posts and nothing on my friends-page, I reluctantly followed the crowd to MySpace, then Facebook, but I found them wholly unsatisfying. I think Facebook is an absolutely abysmal ( ... )

Thank you. guitargrrl December 8 2022, 19:23:27 UTC

Hello new friend,

Thank you for giving me some of that LJ "magic" i was writing about, two days in a row. I didn't see that you had added me, because I never check my friends list anymore because- well- as we both noted, the acoustics around here sort of echo with your own voice these days. I'm going to go add you and look forward to reading your words and thoughts.

I relate so much to what you wrote!

RE: Thank you. rock_dinosaur December 9 2022, 11:58:14 UTC

I don't know about you, but I sometimes wonder if I'm just wasting my time and clinging to false hopes in sticking with LiveJournal, but I don't know what else to do. It's well-known that Facebook (and the other social-media sites, no doubt), is harmful to mental health. I certainly found that being on Facebook made me feel frustrated and depressed and actually caused me to feel more isolated and disconnected from people; even from family and real-life friends. And then there's the algorithms, the adverts and the censorship, all of which should be intolerable to anyone with any principles. I don't see going back to any of those sites as an option, so it's LiveJournal or nothing for me ( ... )

RE: Thank you. guitargrrl December 15 2022, 02:10:44 UTC

Facebook and instagram are designed to make people feel bad about themselves, in my opinion. I had a friend who used to post photos and updates of all these great adventures and I was always in awe of her posts until one day I took her somewhere and she wanted no part of the actual adventure- she just wanted to jump out of the car and take a photo for ten seconds pretending to be on that adventure. I found it sad, but also hilarious that I had spent so many moments sad, feeling that I was missing out on something that was about as much smoke and mirrors as a hollywood movie. It started opening my eyes to the reality of how damaging it is. It takes away from communication when it was supposed to be designed to bring people closer. How many actual birthday cards, calls or visits do you get since FB was invented? Remember when people actually visited, called, or even wrote? Now we all get a carbon copy "Happy Birthday." Birth announcements, weddings, even deaths are advertised on facebook right there with the photos of the fake ( ... )