“The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered, then lost, blogging
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
You can still blog in 2019, obviously, on LJ or elsewhere. But your friends aren't going to read it. That's why LJ worked: it was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts, and you all had a more or less equal ability to comment and respond to each other. Crucially, LJ had enough marketshare to make it feasible that you might have a reasonable number of friends that used it too -- but it wasn't designed to make it trivial for your coworkers or neighbors to find you on there.
LJ felt like a quiet corner of the internet, shared by myself and a few dozen friends.
Broadly speaking that's obviously kind of what Facebook and other social networks do as well. But they do it an extremely noisy, public, and algorithmically-distorted way that... well, to put it diplomatically, winds up being something quite different. Those platforms have their uses, but if you attempt to use them as a relatively noise-free blogging platform you are really attempting to ice-skate uphill.
Of today's social platforms, Twitter probably comes the closest to providing some of what was cool about LJ.
Probably not today, but at one point Tumblr also provided a similar user experience.
It seemed essentially worthless to bother posting any original content there because it just got swallowed up in an absolute ocean of reblogs which, of course, was pretty much the entire point of that place.
I'm sure part of this was due to having a smaller circle of friends on Tumblr than I had on LJ, but it was difficult for me to see how anybody could have any sort of "community" experience on Tumblr. It seems some did though!
Even back in the day my friends weren't reading my LJ. I wound up discovering the only people reading mine were a few internet friends, ex-girl friends, and a professor I was working for (which taught me the lesson of never writing something on the internet that I didn't want out as public information).
The vast majority of the people I knew didn't actually use LJ. But, I was a member of a few online communities, and I had plenty of friends (and friends-of-friends) from those places that were also on LJ.
I'm glad most of my IRL (I find myself nostalgic for this outdated term) friends weren't on LJ. I'd have felt much less inclined to be honest and open -- it would have wound up being like FB today, which has a certain practical value (it's a point of contact, a convenient way to plan events, etc) but really doesn't lend itself to introspection or anything.
(Where it would actually be read, and a sufficient number of my friends might do similar things)
I get what you were trying to say, but you used the wrong signpost. The web remained a relatively civil place until the mid-00s; there were trolls and astroturfers, but they were mostly contained. The real culture shift happened with social networks and mobile, in the late ‘00s, when even people who couldn’t operate a desktop started to be online 24/7.
(And it’s 2019 already? Damn, I feel so old...)
LJ had a much more pleasant culture in terms of interacting with strangers.
What made the early web the early web was all the surplus value left on the table. A modern LiveJournal would never make the mistake of just building a platform that's useful, with no regard to whether it's sticky, high-engagement, or compatible with microtargeted content marketing. It was better, yes, but less economically efficient.
Weep for all those eyeballs, all that content, just sitting there with no clear mental model of how to use them to provide great brand experiences.
(This also became the moving of many scifi/fantasy writers in general, as the community is surprisingly small and word travels fast.)
It’s... It’s just...
Honestly, it makes a lot of sense to eschew the genre, no matter your stance on legality, free speech or whatever.
The actual adult-fanfiction website or just fan fiction with adult situations?
Standards for blogging API's also blew my mind. Metaweblog and Blogger API was pretty awesome.
We support indieauth in vouch https://github.com/vouch/vouch-proxy and have a few people that do use that auth flow.
It's an uncomfortable thought, I know.
Another sad thought: the amount of money my employer spends in ads directed at me because I've repeatedly hit a certain part of our website while fixing bugs... I really should fix bugs in privacy mode :-)
And yeah, I miss that too. Especially given how much more entertaining it often is to read a post by an interested expert than by someone trying to make a quick buck.
Back in the day, making money of your blog wasn't an option. Now, it is, which is why most people are doing it for money.
Unfortunately, we'll probably never get the old internet back. Eternal september has happened.
But you have to see the flipside too: There's never been more content. You can still get great things out of the internet, you just have to curate it (more) now.
E: like this https://tlgrm.eu/channels
I myself don't like to use Telegram like that, I prefer to separate my IM from my blogs. But your answer caused me to rethink Telegram, because now that I think about it I do know people who participate in that part of Telegram.
Without comments means it cannot be similar. LJ allows horizontal communication, Telegram channel is essentially a radio in text. No interaction except for polls initiated by channel owner.
Summing up it's not because facebook was better, it's because livejournal got worse, and secondarily forgot to become better technically.
Over time, I posted on Facebook more and more and LJ less and less. It got to the point where I'd go months and eventually years without touching LJ.
I think the last time I posted anything was in 2009. The last time I touched it at all was in 2011 or so when I had a phone interview with someone, and the interviewer said he saw my LJ and he made jokes about it. So after the call, I found a script to mark every post on my entire LiveJournal as friends-only, ran it, and threw a line in my bio saying that everything in there is years out of date, and that was that.
If I’d known it was leakable, I would’ve used a one-account email address as well as a one-account password. The scams themselves are getting quite disturbing.
It still dominates in the server, supercomputer & embedded markets.
And it seems that Google has plans to swap Linux with Fuschia in the long term.
It's GPL, sure, but being released under the GPL doesn't make it GNU.
But your modern desktop is probably Gnome or KDE or similar or something like i3 or similar. And tons of users run a shell other than bash. So why not KDE/Linux?
Your servers probably run stuff like containers, or node servers or php ones or java ones, or some database software and the like. How much of that is developed under the umbrella of GNU?
Your browsers most likely aren't GNU, your music players probably are not either, your videos get decoded and encoded by ffmpeg. Few probably edit their documents in GNU software, and even when it comes to text, GNU editors are far from dominant.
Few systems probably have their usage dominated by GNU (not merely GPL licensed) software, even if you count time spent in glibc.
So, to still insist that it's "GNU/Linux" sounds... a bit silly and narcissistic to me, given all the non GNU stuff that runs on a typical system and doesn't get - let alone requests - special mention.
Certainly, you'd expect most of the CPU time to be spent in application software, but we're talking about how to name the platform, aren't we?
> GTK+ is free software and part of the GNU Project.
GTK+ development does take place on gitlab.gnome.org, but it is still part of GNU (unlike the rest of GNOME, which did start out as part of GNU, but hasn't been run by GNU for years and years).
The Nokia N900 wasn't a GNU system at all—the userland was a mix of a non-GNU libc and BusyBox—but it still felt like a Linux distro because the UI used X11 with GTK+ and Qt, it had a terminal with all your familiar *nix command-line utilities (thank you, BusyBox!), and app distribution was done through an apt frontend. A good many apps for the N900 were straight-up ports of existing Linux apps, too... the ecosystem was almost entirely FOSS.
Android goes out of its way to hide the terminal, the GUI is based on nothing from the desktop, and it has its own packaging and package distribution format.
> “We were the Linux of social media,” as Hassan puts it. “We never had the clear mental model of what the site was, but we had the features. We had the knobs and tuneables and features. Every feature that Facebook has rolled out since I left LJ, we had it first: post by photo, post by SMS, we had those a million years ago. You could call a phone number and record a message, and the audio would get posted to your journal. We had custom friend groups so you could manage where you wanted to post. We had basically all the major features you see today, like a friends page. But we didn’t quite figure out how to tell the story or keep people interested. We had every option, but nobody could get it to work. We had the robust privacy options that nobody understands how to use on Facebook. It was a less-public age of the Internet, and one that I sometimes wish we could go back to.”
It isn't a mind blowing comparison, but it isn't bad either. I can only speak for myself, but I run more and more Linux instances everyday, but less and less of Linux itself. Which isn't necessarily an easy distinction to make, but I think you get the point.
In the late 90s I got so worn out with stability issues inherent to Win98 on laptops that I switched to the Mac, largely because a co-worker was using one and I could SEE how much it didn't crash, and how sleep actually WORKED, and how good the hardware was, etc. Since my job at the time was primarily project management, and I lived in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, I had no compatibility issues, and my work life got better.
Then the dot-com crash happened and I found myself coding again as a freelancer on web projects, all of which were LAMP-stack efforts. My Mac had shipped with OS 9, but by then I'd upgraded to OS X -- which could run the same frameworks we were using on the server. My dev environment was my actual laptop, which was GREAT.
I feel like that was the moment that the Mac pulled in a lot of very technical and very influential people, with good reason. If OS X hadn't happened, I suspect desktop Linux would be further along because lots of people like me would've been kinda forced into it ca. 2001-2002 instead of having the Apple option.
You can look right now at what's happening to these very technical people. The ones I know are giving up on Apple and moving to Microsoft instead: because the WSL subsystem works, and the keyboard has most of the keys they want.
We are living in interesting times!
Any keyboard issues w/ Apple are hardware reliability concerns, but that's really a separate issue, I think.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/59pipx/app...
Emacs, afaik, doesn't need the top row at all.
I'm more than happy with a real Mac application like BBEdit, but it's interesting to see how the other half lives.
The technical Mac folks I know aren't switching. They're just yelling a lot, and if they're on pre-butterfly keyboard Macs, they're putting off upgrades.
Of course, the VERY nerdy/technical folks can and do sometimes switch to full time Linux, but if you're used to the level of out-of-the-box just-works functionality you get out of OS X that's a hard sell.
It’s at least plausible to think that absent OS X, a lot of developers would have made do with then still very rough around the edges (desktop) Linux and, given that level of interest, it would have improved at a greater rate.
If this happened, and Jobs was still there, I suspect some number of those people who eventually switched might have given NeXTSTEP serious consideration, as all the underpinnings of a good UNIX system were in place.
Even if you post a link to your blog on linkedin, maybe 5-10% of people will click it, from my experience.
This is mostly a response to the comments, saying that blogging for sake of blogging has been lost. I don't think it's been lost; it's moved and transformed into social media.
Blogs are doing just fine. LJ simply became a Russian blog platform rather than and English language one. It did have some social media aspects back in the day, but it assumed a couple of standard deviation higher IQ (or at least attention span) in its users, favoring long form posts with lots of imagery. It didn't become a disgusting FB megacorp because it didn't cater to the lowest common denominator, or hire people to make it addictive. FWIIW Brad did fine.
Tools like this should be the goal, not evil garbage like FB.
I hate how true this can be.
"The internet is furious at celebrity"
Article sources the entirety of two mildly annoyed nobodies on twitter.
Seeing Twitter described as an improved, evolved form of blogging is like seeing someone awful peel the skin off the body of your dear friend and wear it as a suit.
Even if you post a link to your blog on linkedin, maybe 5-10% of people will click it, from my experience.
The latter of those two aspects (and the fact that it was aggregated with the former) is what made it unique.
And eventually, around the time I graduated college, I stopped using LJ and started using Facebook for everything I used LJ before because the social interface was even better. Actually, I'd been using Facebook for a few years before I stopped using LJ, but in the early days of FB, it wasn't really suitable as a blogging platform.
My timeline was basically
- 2003: I started college, decided to self-host a NewsPro blog on the LAN for my freshman-year roommates (freshman apartments at UTD at the time were four-bedroom units with randomly-assigned roommates... UTD didn't have dorms until after I graduated) and I to share stuff with each other. Halfway through my freshman year, I upgraded the blog to Coranto.
- 2004: Freshman year ended, roommates and I all went our separate ways. I ended up living alone in a one-bedroom. I briefly considered putting the Coranto blog on the public Internet as a solo blog, but I ultimately decided to start fresh and self-host a Serendipity blog for myself (and I chose s9y because I was teaching myself Postgres at the time).
- early 2005: Facebook came to my college, and I jumped on it in the first week (I was user #462 at UTD, and I know this because before usernames were a thing, you accessed someone's profile by a combination of their college and their number at that college... I was utdallas.facebook.com user 000462).
- late 2005: I got jealous of all my friends using LiveJournal, so I signed up for an account. I basically stopped updating the s9y blog, though I kept it around. I think I intended to keep updating both, but then one of the officers in the campus LUG that I was a part of decided to set up a Planet instance for us, and since I could only add one of my blogs, I just told him to add the LJ one, and I basically forgot about the s9y blog.
- 2007: I graduated college and basically stopped using LJ. It was a combination of things: more of my friends were on FB than LJ, and FB had picked up a significant amount of blogging features by then, including status updates, notes, the ability to share links, and even the ability to put personality quizzes in boxes on your profile (and yes, personality quizzes were a large part of LJ's meme culture... in hindsight, it's kind of embarrassing, but whatever). From that point on, I'd log in to LJ and post once every few months, and then after a while it was a year before I logged in to write something new, and I didn't want to admit it, but I let my LJ die. Also, at that point, I switched my Facebook account from "visible to anyone in my networks" to "visible to friends only". From that point on, I was starting to care more about my social media presence, and I'd only consider going to LJ if I really wanted to make something public (yes, you can make friends-only posts on LJ, but I'd decided that I'd put my friends-only stuff on FB and my public stuff on LJ... and by then I had little I wanted to say to the public).
- Late 2008: After a particularly awful Facebook redesign, I got a Twitter account and deactivated my Facebook account.
- Late 2009: After being on Twitter for almost exactly a year, my phone died, so I "temporarily" came back to FB to gather phone numbers, and I found that Facebook had been redesigned again to be less awful, so I ended up staying on Facebook. Shortly after I decided to stay, I made my tweets private and basically abandoned that Twitter account.
- 2011: Someone I had a phone interview with mentioned that he found my LJ and made a joke about my drinking habits. I logged in one last time to run a script to make my whole LJ friends-only and threw in an "everything here is outdated" line on my LJ bio.
Since then, I've touched Twitter a couple more times with a few different accounts, but I haven't been a heavy Twitter user because the Twitter ecosystem is just so damn toxic (my current account was created for the sole purpose of DMing with a single friend who I met on Reddit and wanted to stay in contact with after I killed my Reddit account; I don't tweet from it, and I don't follow anyone other than my friend). Other than that, everything has been Facebook.
> FB had picked up a significant amount of blogging features by then, including status updates, notes
Oh my. Is Movable Type really that forgotten by history?
I worked for Six Apart in NYC a few years after the LJ sale. By that point, Six Apart HQ (in SF) was nearly entirely focused on hosted platforms, and basically left Movable Type to the satellite offices. I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, but I could certainly imagine some of the former LJ folks interviewed here may have commented about all the resources being moved to TypePad. So perhaps TypePad kept naturally coming up in these convos, and who knows if the article author had any prior familiarity with Six Apart or MT.
MT was such an amazingly powerful static site generator. Honestly I'd still use it today if it wasn't Perl-based and license-encumbered.
Well sure, but a large part of the regular userbase (not religious folk) were not comfortable with adults writing pornography about fictional children, and having a LiveJournal became not cool because of that.
I seriously doubt that. It might have made it not "safe" for some small circles, but hardly "not cool" to the coolness-seeking people. Teenagers for example and younger people could hardly care about that.
(There's also the fact that you very easily skip all those. I read several LJ blogs religiously (e.g. ClickOpera), but have not chanced on the HP fan-fic ones at all).
Sites can get a negative reputation for being the place where certain strange and distasteful fanbases gather. In time, outsiders might come to identify the site with these groups inside of it making the place undesirable. Compare Tumblr.
At peak, going by public posts/day stats, Tumblr was about 5x larger than at present. It was more of a slow bleed than a sudden drop-off though.
Eventually the more mainstream userbase left for other platforms (primarily Instagram and Pinterest) which were better-suited for the specific use-case that these users wanted... especially on mobile, which Tumblr was slow to adapt to.
The remaining userbase was/is a lot more fanbase-focused and niche, and that can certainly be off-putting to more mainstream-leaning users.
This had a profound effect inside the company. Over the course of a few years, it went from a company where almost every employee was an obsessive daily user/poster, to one where many of the more backend-leaning engineers didn't use the product at all.
(Disclosure: I was an early Tumblr employee, but above opinions are my own.)
I never used it but why would a non religious activist do something about it, complain, sign petitions, or even waste a thought about what some character is doing in a fictional world they don't read. Most probably as always there is a vocal minority
Livejournal users, did, however, care about other adults who are sexually attracted to children.
My question was if there was a large of users that cared about the fictional characters or just very few. Or maybe was some social media thing that forced the company to change the terms. I know from recent events that Patreon and Steam were pressured by this groups, I think Patreon updated some terms but Steam did not.
What makes you say that the people writing the stories had a sexual attraction to children? (and by 'children' I mean as we commonly understand it: real children). I wouldn't say that a vore or zombie fetishist wants to be eaten, eat people or have sex with the dead, nor would I say that a My Little Pony fetishist wants to have sex with horses, and to use a more common example: people into incest pornography (which appears to be extremely popular online, much more so than the rate of incest crimes reported) don't generally want to have sex with their family members and people with rape fantasies generally don't want to rape or be raped.
The guy just used archive.org and posted a version with broken css as if it was a regular past screenshot of the site.