[LINK] "The demise of a social media platform: Tracking LiveJournal's decline"

[rfmcdonald]

Circulating about on Facebook is Aja Romero's grim essay at the Daily Dot tracing the reasons for Livejournal's ongoing decline to Livejournal admin's very poor handling of what was--at Livejournal's peak--a very devoted fanbase.

From roughly 2002 to 2007, a core part of discussion-heavy fandom and writing communities existed entirely on LiveJournal. LJ was unique among social media networks for a long time because so much of fandom communication happened in a central location. Though other journaling platforms like DeadJournal, GreatestJournal (both now defunct), InsaneJournal, and JournalFen existed, LJ was the central fandom hub due to the ease of combining community discussion with fanwork.

Over the last half-decade, however, that community has eroded. LiveJournal has been mired in dysfunction and bad public relations. Especially prominent since Fitzpatrick’s departure in 2005 has been an ongoing cycle of friction between LJ and its userbase:

1) LJ makes business and site design changes without notifying or listening to its userbase.
2) When the userbase responds with outrage, LJ fails to acknowledge or respond in a timely manner; when it does respond, it often acts like nothing is wrong or fails to apologize.
3) Eventually, LJ retracts its latest decision and things go back to normal, but with the trust of the userbase decayed.
4) Repeat steps 1-3.

"It's always a work in progress,” Petrochenko offered. “I've been working for LJ almost five years, and I remember times when it was so much worse in terms of technical process. I see a huge progress. There is a user backlash, but it's more about people liking or not liking the features. I see a huge progress in terms of how increasingly successful our product releases are.”

It’s true that LiveJournal has made strides in recent years toward improving its page load times and responding to issues. But although Petrochenko believes that this cycle of dysfunction is past, the effect it has had on users is still being felt.

The most notoriously bad decision of all for LiveJournal, the one that many users see as the beginning of the end, came in 2007. LiveJournal, systematically and without warning, deleted and banned hundreds of journals for impermissible content in a PR fiasco that made national headlines and came to be known as Strikethrough.

Many fandom journals were wrongfully targeted and deleted, and although most of the journals were restored, not all fans chose to return. In protest, the community fandom_counts was created to send a visible message to LiveJournal staff that fandom was a major part of the site’s userbase. Within 24 hours, over 30,000 accounts joined.

Even worse for many users was when the same thing happened all over again just three months later, in an incident known as Boldthrough. This time the outrage was even more sustained, and it didn’t help that several LJ staff showed disdain and lack of understanding of the userbase.

[. . .]

Just as Russian company SUP, who bought the struggling platform from SixApart in 2007, began to make progress in restoring LiveJournal’s integrity, the site was crippled repeatedly in 2010 and 2011 by DDOS attacks aimed at Russian bloggers. At the precise moment when LiveJournal happened to be unusable for many people due to the DDOS attacks, the growth of Tumblr and Twitter as social platforms began to draw more users in.

LiveJournal staff had to adapt, and fast. “Our response time is so fast now that we have one of the best DDOS protections on the Internet,” Petrochenko said, “just because we have been attacked so many times. Our OS team reacts immediately and most of the time our users don't even know that something even happened, because we've improved so much.”

But despite overcoming such a huge obstacle, LiveJournal can’t seem to overcome ongoing tension with its userbase.

I still post here, but I also posted at WordPress, too. If only I could figure out how to export my past decade of posts to WordPress ...