LiveJournal

For LJ's latest trick, they have managed to let people log into random strangers' accounts and comment/read their private entries. Several of my friends seem to be taking this opportunity to migrate over to Dreamwidth. I don't especially want to move because most people I read are LJ only, but on first glance DW do seem to have a better record of responding to users' concerns than LJ (it obviously helps that they're smaller).

Does anyone else use Dreamwidth and have thoughts about it? Is it mainly fandom that uses it?

I have one for emergencies, but I don't like it very much. It's clunky, I can't have the layout I want, the communities aren't very active, and most importantly, most of my friends are exclusively on LJ. Even if I could get it exactly how I want it, there's no one there to share it with. And all the different levels of access (subscription, reading) make me crazy. The tone of posts is different over there, too; everything feels more serious. Basically, it's more hassle than it's worth for me.

On the other hand, some of my friends have gone over and they're very happy. I think it all depends on what aspects of journaling are most important for you.

ETA: The security error seems more and more horrible the more I think about it. I don't think I have any personal info in my journal, but I'm going through now and checking for things to delete just in case. And that apology is a joke. "Oh, but at least the Russian users weren't affected!!" Why would you even say that?

blooey wrote:I don't think I have any personal info in my journal, but I'm going through now and checking for things to delete just in case. And that apology is a joke. "Oh, but at least the Russian users weren't affected!!" Why would you even say that?

Because in Communist Russia, privacy invades you?

LJ is actually a really big political blogging platform in Russia. So it would be a pretty big deal for some of those accounts to be compromised. The last big DDoS attack was at least partly thought of as a way to stifle dissent.

Why do the LJ folks always insist on tweaking stupid things every other week? It's so annoying and ends up pissing off most of their clients. Was anyone complaining about the info that shows up when you hover on someone's username? I liked the format of the info as it was, and now they've tweaked it rather uselessly.

Posterous seems more like Tumblr than LJ, but I've seen it suggested as an alternative to LJ in the past.

bbridges wrote:LJ is actually a really big political blogging platform in Russia. So it would be a pretty big deal for some of those accounts to be compromised. The last big DDoS attack was at least partly thought of as a way to stifle dissent.

But in the middle of the not-that-great-anyway English apology to the primarily international userbase (I assume that the Russian userbase would be reading the apology in Russian) it came across as very dismissive. Like we should sit back and shut up about the fact that our personal information was compromised, because at least the Russian userbase is okay.

The new comments look ugly and load weird. Also, what was wrong with subject lines? If a comm got into a really heated debate, it was nice to see any mod note pop out amongst the long threads.

Why did they change them? What was the matter with the old style? I thought Facebook was the social network for needless changes that nobody asked for.

Actually I like the new comments. I never used the subject lines although I don't think they hurt anything. If it had been up to me I'd have just made them a little less otrusive. I really like the ability to collapse and expand threads in groups. So I don't think the change was needless except for the subject lines.

I don't know, I'm really annoyed. I like the new comment pages fine, but wasn't that separate from the code change that removed subject lines? As far as I can tell, no one on either the Russian- or English-speaking userbase thinks taking away subjects is a good idea. At best, people are neutral about it, and at worst, they hate it. This isn't like their other changes, where they did something and then people freaked out and then they rolled it back. Here, they knew users didn't want these changes, but they went ahead and did it anyway. And it really has made the site worse. How are people supposed to run ficathons or auctions without subject lines? And I'm in a couple of communities where there is a lot of discussion of topics that require trigger warnings (sexual assault, abuse, etc.), and those trigger warnings usually go in the subject line so that people who want to avoid it can just skip on by. Ugh.

This is the first time through all the kerfuffles that I've actually thought about leaving LJ. It's not the change itself -- if enough users were on board, I would just suck it up -- it's the complete disregard for the opinions of people who use the damn thing.

I really just can't understand why they keep changing things for seemingly no reason. Are there people constantly bitching about subject lines or something? Why would they take those away? I like that the new layout is clean, but why does it have to look so unbelievably wide and white and large? I just don't see the point to updating things people seemed to have no problem with before. And then the fact that they knew lots of people were opposed to this particular tweak and still went with the change anyway? WTF is that about? I'm a paying member, dude. Don't eff with the stuff I pay for!

Trying to use LJ this morning, and the worst part isn't the missing subject lines. It's that they took away the drop-down menu with the alphabetized list of icons. Now if I want to use an icon, I need to wait for thumbnails of all 200 of my icons to load, and then I need to scroll through the unalphabetized icons to find the right one. They're not even in the order I uploaded them, so I can't just go to the bottom, top, or middle of the list and browse there. I have to go through every one. I really hate this.

The subject line removal thing is baffling and stupid. Roleplaying and fan fiction memes communities use them as a fundamental way of organizing posts. With those gone, those communities literally can't continue.

I'm a lowly free user, so the user pic thing barely affects me. I don't see the point of enraging pay users with hundreds of pictures, though.

I barely even use anything other than my default, but the mere fact that I pay for that feature and now they've fucked with the efficiency of it? That really pisses me off!

I've noticed a serious drop-off in the number of posts on my flist lately. I wonder if these changes have something to do with it? (Or maybe I've been filtered out!)

I've noticed that over the last 6 months or so, LJ has been way quieter. Of course, there's lots of activity today. My flist is covered with angry posts about the sucky new changes THAT NOBODY ASKED FOR.

I don't think so, inversed. I've noticed the same thing, and I suspect that people are simply moving on to Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr or other more shiny things. LiveJournal may be the big thing in Russia, but I'm afraid it's slowly passing away elsewhere. It's had a really long run for a social networking site. I don't think it's just one change, and I'm not sure it's really anything to do with stuff the LJ staff have done. Just part of the life-cycle of the internet.

There have also been semi-continuous DDOS attacks (because of the Russian reform bloggers), slowing down service on communities and even personal journals. But this latest change might serious drive fandoms off LJ. Give me back my subject lines!

Some people think LJ is trying to drive fandom off.

The thing is, I haven't minded most of the upgrades they've done, and even now I think some of the changes they've made have improved the look of the site, but I can't get over the fact that they're actually removing functionality and don't seem to care that they've upset both the Russian and English-speaking users. Still, I doubt I'll leave totally since there are still comms I want to follow and a few personal friends who won't move, but the bloom is definitely off the rose. I just need to find somewhere else to go for fannish stuff.

as a member of a big LJ community, the lack of subject lines pisses me off. You can't track anything now at all. I have no idea what the fuck is going on now.

I kind of like the new icon menu, but the stripping of subject lines and the change in the font size on comment pages are bothering me.

I've had a Dreamwidth account for a while and have been crossposting through there, but most of my communities and friends are still on LJ, which is part of the reason why I still have yet to buy paid time over there. I'm pretty sure that a lot of the post drop-off is due to Twitter and Tumblr, but then again, most of the people I follow over there are people I know on LJ. The thing that those two sites don't have that LJ does is plenty of space for discussion--sure, you can have conversations via Twitter, but that's limited to 140 characters. Yes, you can respond to someone's Tumblr post, but reblogging back and forth is so unwieldy. And (if you're a fandom person), posting your fic on Tumblr is just... awkward.

I don't know. I've been on the site for so long and been through so many of the changes and drama that sometimes I can let it roll off my back, but this is weirdly the thing that's starting to make me want out.

I personally haven't been posting much just because... I haven't been posting much anywhere. LJ gets more attention than Facebook, anyhow.

I have a hard time buying "LJ is dead" from someone who's apparently abandoned it for Tumblr (which even after years, is still confusing and nonsensical to me. At least comments function like comments still on LJ). As long as they're buying paid accounts, fandom money spends as good as mundane money, and I don't think it was a fandom comm that ever crashed the site (can we call ONTD a standom comm?).

It looks like if you un-disable customized comment pages, you get the subject lines back (at least that's what one comm I've checked recently has done, and it works). Plus, of course, you can control the layout so it's less, uh, institutional.

I don't think so, inversed. I've noticed the same thing, and I suspect that people are simply moving on to Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr or other more shiny things. LiveJournal may be the big thing in Russia, but I'm afraid it's slowly passing away elsewhere. It's had a really long run for a social networking site. I don't think it's just one change, and I'm not sure it's really anything to do with stuff the LJ staff have done. Just part of the life-cycle of the internet.

I think it's all of the above, including stuff the LJ staff has done.

But I feel like ALL the sites I've habituated get much less traffic now. grumble, grumble, why do people have to get lives?

Some communities seem to have gotten the subject line back by various html-means. Apparently this also depends on when it was created or what layout is used? I'm not sure.

I'm more pissed about the comment box fuckery, because I need people to leave comments. If the animated comment box is slowing their computer down/crashing it...they aren't going to bother. And I'm not html-smart to fix it.

My not very well researched understanding of LJ is that the company would like to be a social media thing like facebook, etc. And in Russia, it kind of is? But not elsewhere. And fandom, being made of 98% porn, is not something that jives with this goal. But the fandom money, of course, should stay.

In the community I'm on, one mod has been tweaking it in the code. Sadly not everyone is proficient in CSS like she is. But it's still horseshit. I mean, if you didn't want a comment subject head, DON'T TYPE ONE IN.