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Comment by oytis | Hacker News Reader

In Russia the popularity of livejournal has also dropped with the advent of Facebook, and there it has nothing to do with obscene fan fiction. Facebook has just found a more addictive model with a lower entry barrier. On the bright side we now have Telegram, which allows for a similar communication style, just without comments (which is IMO a good thing as well).

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Strongly disagree. The reason people moved from livejournal is simply company policies, they messed with peoples freedoms. People got used to be able to say whatever they want and rely on ratings by popularity, but LJ excluded some political bloggers from public ratings and limited their abilities to grow. The audience didn't like it and started to look around for alternatives. In addition at that time LJ was already heavily outdated in terms of design and usability.

Summing up it's not because facebook was better, it's because livejournal got worse, and secondarily forgot to become better technically.

Yes, there were some reasons for dissent, but still most people chose to migrate to Facebook, and not to Dreamwidth or Blogspot, which were closer alternatives to LJ.

If i remember correctly nobody advertised those platforms at that time in Russia, so most people had a simple choice, you leave LJ because it sucks and you choose most popular alternative with sane audience, for most ex LJ users it was Facebook imho

In my own case, I moved from LJ to Facebook not because of any change in LJ policies but because I found myself naturally gravitating to Facebook. More of my friends were on Facebook, the UI was better for social stuff, and I found that I was more interested in writing shorter status updates than I was in the longer blogs that were popular on LJ.

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on my entire LiveJournal as friends-only, ran it, and threw a line in my bio saying that everything in there is years out of date, and that was that.

Telegram, which allows for a similar communication style, just without comments

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.

In what way is Telegram similar to Facebook or LiveJournal?

In how people use it (isn't it the most important thing about a social network?). In Telegram channels one can find really interesting blogs about pretty much everything from evolutionary biology to book reviews or music theory. It is very similar to how people used to use LiveJournal and quite unlike how people use Facebook (mostly posting photos or tiny pieces of text about themselves).

How do you discover such content? I use Telegram just for chatting and never saw such 'blogs'

People advertise them in other channels and on other social media (VK, FB). Hugely popular channels get mentioned or even cited (cf. news channel Mash) by online news outlets.

There is also a channel search feature in telegram web something. IIRC.

E: like this https://tlgrm.eu/channels

I think Telegram is very unfortunate platform for blogging. Discovery is mostly nonexistent, and access from the web to it is impossible, you need a separate client to consume it. Then again, people manage to blog on Twitter, so Telegram certainly would be an upgrade. But I wish real blogging platforms - like yes, Dreamwidth - would get more love and popularity.

Thanks for that answer.

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.

It also has to do with LJ being taken over people who don't understand the users, don't care about the users (beyond a couple of high-value ad-churning ones) and didn't value the communities existing there while they existed, seeing LJ solely as a traffic monetization platform. So people moved on. And of course the move to Russia - with all content being now rules by Russian law, with its internationally famous regard to human rights and freedom of speech - hasn't helped much for international users either. But I think the main decline started when the platform moved from people for whom it was a beloved child to people to whom it was just a milking cow for producing ad dollars. All we see now is just the final stages of that decline.

yes, I was peripherally involved with that world, and fundamentally there was a disinterest in the users prior to the Russian takeover - and with the Russian takeover, it was clear that things weren't okay anymore.

Isn't vk more popular than Facebook in Russia ?

Oh yes, VK as well. The same model as Facebook. Somehow people whom I used to read on LJ would tend to migrate to Facebook rather than VK, but that can be just my bias. In general VK is more popular, true.

VK.com is facebook of Russia

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