Earlier today on Livejournal, theferrett posted an interesting piece about the “death of Livejournal”. In this post, he linked to an article from the DailyDot on LJ’s decline. The article posited that the lack of new features was the reason for LJ’s demise. This prompted a really interesting discussion on LJ from die-hard LJs… and got me thinking…
I’ve been on the Internet since 1979. You read that right, 1979. In my sophomore year at UCLA, I started reading (don’t recall if I was posting) to SF Lovers. There are a few reading my FB who were with me around then. Later, in the 1980s, I was very active on another social media: USENET. I made many many friends on Usenet, and was active in a large number of newsgroups. But as with all things Internet, the folks from AOL invaded (:-)) and it went downhill. Usenet is still around today, but is filled mostly with spam and is a vast shadow of what it once was.
In 2004, my good friend Nicole (ellipticcurve) introduced me to Livejournal and I began blogging. As usual, the first posts were crap, but I soon developed a style and made many more new friends. It is what introduced me to long-form blogging, and I still treasure the people I met on Livejournal, the many comments I received, and the communities I participated in.
However, if you visit Livejournal today, it is a shadow of what it once was. Many people have left. Few people comment on posts. Those who remain there remain because of the communities, and it is because it is where friends they treasure remain. That’s why I still crosspost there. But it is clearly a platform in decline, at least outside of Russia.
Where did the people go? A few went to MySpace, when it was popular. Later, they went to Facebook. A few went to Dreamwidth. Some went to Twitter. A number created WordPress or Blogger blogs (I did the former). As the platforms proliferated, the communities splintered, and dialogue declined.
Today, I do what I can. I post on my WordPress blog, and propagate it over to Facebook (both manually and by RSS). I auto-crosspost to LJ. I manually share to G+. But I still get less interaction on my posts than I would like. I fear we’ve entered the “TL;DR” generation. Certainly I doubt that anyone has read this far.
Blogs continue to morph. I’ve recently been looking over at Tumblr. It is a different way of blogging, at least the way most people seem to use it. To experiment, I did create a Tumblr of my own; (cahwyguy) I’m unsure if I’l use it (just as I have cahwyguy reserved at Twitter, but never use it). I haven’t explored much there, so if there are feeds you recommend I follow please let me know.
So I’m curious about you — those who have bothered to read this far. What social media do you use, and why? Do you migrate to new platforms when they come out, or do you just stick with a tried-and-true? What do you perceive as the strengths of one vs. the others?