Social sites meta thinkery
I've been thinking lately about social networking and the various sites I've been part of. I'm feeling disgruntled and mopey about the whole thing. I know, I know, I never post anyway (though in fact I have been posting pretty frequently on Twitter of late). Nonetheless, I'm going to subject you all to my thoughts on the subject.
Livejournal: It all started with LJ. I think LJ was the second site I created an account on when I got back online after leaving college (the first being Yahoo email). It was also my first foray into writing on the web, back when it was not exactly new, but not yet mainstream. Seemed like most of the people who were on LJ were moderately intelligent, moderately thoughtful, and capable of coherent expression. The interface was good, features good, it was run by some guy in his basement or something. I got a paid account initially just to get on (days of invite codes, you remember), then kept on paying because I wanted to support the site and felt a responsibility to donate. That's right, donate. I never saw myself as a customer.
Fast forward to now. LJ has changed hands at least twice, all manner of stupid shit has been done by new owners. Instead of donating to support the site, I'm forced to pay not to see annoying ads. Commercialization. Censorship and sneakiness and lots of changes that made the site function worse for me. I stopped paying because LJ has become the sort of company that I don't want to support ('course I'm still supporting them in a way by posting, however infrequently). Plus, the volume of posts from people I know is much lower - people's lives have changed, I guess, and/or they're writing elsewhere.
I dunno. Most of the people I know IRL I met either directly or indirectly via LJ, including my husband. Makes me sad, because I think for me LJ is done.
Dreamwidth: Dreamwidth is in a lot of ways the answer to what LJ's become. It's run by a couple of people, promising transparency, ethical behavior, not giving in to censorship demands, etc. And delivering, as far as I can tell. The interface is basically LJ, but they're fixing things that have bugged people for ages. They have LJ cut expansion! They've separated friending from reading! When you click a comments link, it actually brings you to the comments, not the top of the post (this always drove me nuts). And it's run on the model I prefer, ad-free and user-supported, which almost no sites are anymore. Only problem is, it's very, very quiet. I've added a bunch of feeds (LJ/clone format is still my preferred way of reading feeds). But other than that it's pretty dead (I know, I'm not exactly contributing to keeping it active). Even people I know who crosspost to LJ get comments on their LJ not their DW.
Dreamwidth basically has what I want from a journaling site. I'd love to see it succeed as a general platform, but I'm not terribly optimistic. Only the fandom areas seem to be really self-sustaining right now.
Facebook: Ergh. Facebook's like an attractive guy who you know is a jerk: tempting, but I have too much self-respect. Everyone's on Facebook: people I know, husband, husband's colleagues, my brothers, cousins, neighbors, etc., etc. I don't think my parents are on yet, tho. I could interact (for some value of) with lots of people I don't otherwise really get to talk to. But (1) the company are unethical twats whose goal is clearly to sell their users as far as they can get away with. And (2) everyone's on it. It's like reading the comments section of news websites - morons galore. I know this because I read
jaq's Facebook every day ;)
Twitter: A weird beast. I got a Twitter account for library school, for a paper on social networks. That was 2008, before it got so huge (but not so long before, I think). I couldn't really figure out what to do with it, and as soon as the paper was done I abandoned it...
...until a few months ago, when, desperate to interact with humans who can form actual words, I started up again. And it's working pretty well for me. The 140 character thing matches up well with the 10-20 second chunks of time I have between baby-wrangling.
On the other hand, again, everyone's on it. And it feels weird to read all these famous (or semi-famous) people's tweets. Also, I'm really annoyed by the all-or-nothing privacy setting - it's not at all how I want to work. And the way conversations happen on Twitter is not very satisfactory to me. Finally, just today I noticed sponsored tweets and trends, aka the kind of commercial infiltration that made me so uncomfortable on LJ. Ergh.
Freestanding blogs (Wordpress, etc.): These seem to be best used for single-topic blogs. I recently started a gardening blog. There are oodles of gardening blogs out there, and I read a few. Haven't really decided what I'm going to do with mine. So far I've hidden it from Google (my default action with anything internetty) and not tried to draw attention to myself on any other garden blogs. I feel most unsure about the etiquette, and even what my goal is. Am I hoping to record stuff for my own use? Or share with family/friends? Or connect with other gardeners??? These freestanding blogs somehow seem like a different beast from any of the other services.
Myspace: this is dead, right?
There's a whole other post I could write about online personas and overlap with real life, but you will have to wait, it's bedtime.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth
Livejournal: It all started with LJ. I think LJ was the second site I created an account on when I got back online after leaving college (the first being Yahoo email). It was also my first foray into writing on the web, back when it was not exactly new, but not yet mainstream. Seemed like most of the people who were on LJ were moderately intelligent, moderately thoughtful, and capable of coherent expression. The interface was good, features good, it was run by some guy in his basement or something. I got a paid account initially just to get on (days of invite codes, you remember), then kept on paying because I wanted to support the site and felt a responsibility to donate. That's right, donate. I never saw myself as a customer.
Fast forward to now. LJ has changed hands at least twice, all manner of stupid shit has been done by new owners. Instead of donating to support the site, I'm forced to pay not to see annoying ads. Commercialization. Censorship and sneakiness and lots of changes that made the site function worse for me. I stopped paying because LJ has become the sort of company that I don't want to support ('course I'm still supporting them in a way by posting, however infrequently). Plus, the volume of posts from people I know is much lower - people's lives have changed, I guess, and/or they're writing elsewhere.
I dunno. Most of the people I know IRL I met either directly or indirectly via LJ, including my husband. Makes me sad, because I think for me LJ is done.
Dreamwidth: Dreamwidth is in a lot of ways the answer to what LJ's become. It's run by a couple of people, promising transparency, ethical behavior, not giving in to censorship demands, etc. And delivering, as far as I can tell. The interface is basically LJ, but they're fixing things that have bugged people for ages. They have LJ cut expansion! They've separated friending from reading! When you click a comments link, it actually brings you to the comments, not the top of the post (this always drove me nuts). And it's run on the model I prefer, ad-free and user-supported, which almost no sites are anymore. Only problem is, it's very, very quiet. I've added a bunch of feeds (LJ/clone format is still my preferred way of reading feeds). But other than that it's pretty dead (I know, I'm not exactly contributing to keeping it active). Even people I know who crosspost to LJ get comments on their LJ not their DW.
Dreamwidth basically has what I want from a journaling site. I'd love to see it succeed as a general platform, but I'm not terribly optimistic. Only the fandom areas seem to be really self-sustaining right now.
Facebook: Ergh. Facebook's like an attractive guy who you know is a jerk: tempting, but I have too much self-respect. Everyone's on Facebook: people I know, husband, husband's colleagues, my brothers, cousins, neighbors, etc., etc. I don't think my parents are on yet, tho. I could interact (for some value of) with lots of people I don't otherwise really get to talk to. But (1) the company are unethical twats whose goal is clearly to sell their users as far as they can get away with. And (2) everyone's on it. It's like reading the comments section of news websites - morons galore. I know this because I read
jaq's Facebook every day ;)
Twitter: A weird beast. I got a Twitter account for library school, for a paper on social networks. That was 2008, before it got so huge (but not so long before, I think). I couldn't really figure out what to do with it, and as soon as the paper was done I abandoned it...
...until a few months ago, when, desperate to interact with humans who can form actual words, I started up again. And it's working pretty well for me. The 140 character thing matches up well with the 10-20 second chunks of time I have between baby-wrangling.
On the other hand, again, everyone's on it. And it feels weird to read all these famous (or semi-famous) people's tweets. Also, I'm really annoyed by the all-or-nothing privacy setting - it's not at all how I want to work. And the way conversations happen on Twitter is not very satisfactory to me. Finally, just today I noticed sponsored tweets and trends, aka the kind of commercial infiltration that made me so uncomfortable on LJ. Ergh.
Freestanding blogs (Wordpress, etc.): These seem to be best used for single-topic blogs. I recently started a gardening blog. There are oodles of gardening blogs out there, and I read a few. Haven't really decided what I'm going to do with mine. So far I've hidden it from Google (my default action with anything internetty) and not tried to draw attention to myself on any other garden blogs. I feel most unsure about the etiquette, and even what my goal is. Am I hoping to record stuff for my own use? Or share with family/friends? Or connect with other gardeners??? These freestanding blogs somehow seem like a different beast from any of the other services.
Myspace: this is dead, right?
There's a whole other post I could write about online personas and overlap with real life, but you will have to wait, it's bedtime.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth