rfmcdonald | Entries tagged with livejournal

CityLab takes a look at Geocities, one of the first online platforms for websites, looking at how it tried to create and maintain online neighbourhoods.

Ars Technica looks at the promise--sadly unfulfilled--of pioneering blogging platform Livejournal. It really could have been a contender.

Think Progress notes, more than a month after the purge by Tumblr of NSFW blogs, the far right remains active there.

This Huffington Post India article looks at the rising presence of pro-Hindutva answers put forth by Indian users on Quora.

Ars Technica notes that researchers can now, even if you do not actively participate on social media, predict what your content would likely be.

Slate notes that the example of LiveJournal, a popular social networking site that went under when its owners cracked down on fandom, should concern the owners of Tumblr.

Hornet Stories notes that the crackdown on NSFW work on Tumblr will impact LGBTQ people disproportionately.

Nathalie Graham at the Stranger notes what the crackdown on NSFW content on Tumblr might indicate about the future of the Internet, among other things.

Sean Captain at Fast Company looks at the desperate efforts of archivists to preserve some 700 thousand NSFW Tumblr blogs for posterity.

This Wired article looks at alternatives to Tumblr, like Dreamwidth and Pillowfort. Each is promising but each lacks some of the specific advantages of Tumblr.

My own Tumblr, incidentally, is A Bit More Detail. It will still be online: I still find it useful, and do not find a need to abandon this community as I did LiveJournal.

Almost two hours ago, I deleted my LiveJournal. User rfmcdpei is no longer active on this site.

I do allow for the possibility that I might change my mind. Maybe I will bring it back temporarily, so as to convert it to some kind of personal docment via BlogBooker, or perhaps I will restore it in the name of minimizing link rot on the Internet and to continue to be able to read what few (ever fewer) people still write only on LiveJournal. This post, however, is the first post that I will not be crossposting from Dreamwidth over to LiveJournal, and no other post shall follow.

I did join the rush on account of the new user agreement unleashed earlier this week, of course.

Any number of news sources, like the Daily Dot and Boing Boing and Gizmodo and Charlie Stross at Autopope, have written at great length about the new terms of service agreement. That this agreement is not available, not in a legally binding form and not in a well-translated form, in the English language made the exodus inevitable.

Russia, as a classical dictatorship, wants to be able to restrict what people write about within its sphere, to do away with anonymity and to limit the range of permissible subject matter. LiveJournal, which happens to be based in Russia as a consequence of a long series of business decisions (bad decisions, I would argue, ones which kept LiveJournal from emerging as a lasting social network of worldwide scope), is subject. Therefore, anyone who is not dependent on LiveJournal is leaving a social network that appears to be fatally compromised.

(What is the opposite of soft power?)

I have had alternatives ready. Back in October 2012, I blogged about how I had moved away from LiveJournal as a primary blog, towards Dreamwidth for LiveJournal-like social networking and to WordPress for the more blog-like functions. I am losing nothing as a consequence of this. My regrets about this are not especially profound ones, characterized much more by wistfulness and nostalgia than by serious regret.

rfmcdpei has been around for a month short of fifteen years. It's amazing.

LiveJournal was always been there for me. I remember reading Tom's LiveJournal, and the LiveJournals of others, back in early 2002 when I was so desperate to connect with anyone. I remember how excited I was when I got an invite code from Darren back in June of 2002. I remember writing an online diary of my life there, and then, first slowly then with speed, transforming this diary into a blog. I know that I met all sorts of people who I know nd like even know there, came to learn all kinds of things there, helped other people learn through LiveJournal. In my life, LiveJournal was a huge net positive.

And now it's over. It's an era that was bound to end, I know, and what an era it was. Thank you, LiveJournalers and LiveJournal founders, too, for making this so good and fun.

Dwight on Facebook linked to a Metafilter feature noting that the servers of Livejournal--the social networking and blogging platform I got started on, the social networking and blogging platform that I still use--has moved to Russia. In light of that country's issues with basic freedoms, it's probably worth considering ending blogging on this platform.

As of a few days ago, the IP addresses for blogging service LiveJournal have moved to 81.19.74.*, a block that lookup services locate in Moscow, Russia. Now users -- especially those who do not trust the Russian government -- are leaving the platform and advising others to leave.

For years, the online blogging community LiveJournal -- popular in Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine -- has served as a key communications platform for Russian dissidents (the Committee to Protect Journalists earlier this month called on Russian authorities to release a LiveJournal user who has been sentenced to 2 years in prison for a critical blog post). Even after Russian company SUP bought it from California-based Six Apart in 2007 (previously), the fact that SUP continued to run the servers in the US meant that users felt relatively safe; a 2009 press release specifically said that LiveJournal, Inc.* would continue to run technical operations and servers in the United States (and claimed that 5.7 million LiveJournal users were Russia-based).

[. . .]

Tracerouting livejournal.com now points to a Moscow location and an ISP operated by Rambler Internet Holding LLC, the company that also owns SUP. (Former LiveJournal user Gary McGath says that a few days ago, he checked the IP location of livejournal.com, and it was in San Francisco.) LiveJournal's official news posts do not mention the change; users have begun to ask questions there and on their own journals.

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/5403716.html

Two weekends ago, I had to reset the passwords on my different social networks. My E-mail had somehow become compromised, and my Facebook was briefly used to post spam in a single discussion group, so everything had to be changed, immediately.

I had to go to Facebook; I had to go to Livejournal, that site that started everything; Google+ and my linked accounts at Blogger and YouTube had to go; Tumblr was followed by Instagram and then by Flickr; my Twitter and LinkedIn, more peripheral than not, had to be changed. Even the Dreamwidth that is basically a backup for Livejournal, and the other sites (Quora, Goodreads, Yelp) that are functionally closely linked to Facebook, had to be changed.

What about you? Where are you active?

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/5205851.html

Some time ago, Bruce Sterling linked to Anil Dash's essay (published at Medium) describing the many features of the early blogosphere that were lost in subsequent generations, but could plausibly be brought back.

Search

As extraordinary as it seems now, there was a point when one could search most of the blogs in the world and get a reasonably complete and up-to-date set of results in return. Technorati was a pioneering service here, and started by actually attempting to crawl all of the blogs on the Internet each time they updated; later this architecture evolved to require a “ping” (see Updates, below) each time a site updated. On the current internet, we can see relatively complete search results for hashtags or terms within Twitter or some other closed networks, but the closure of Google Blog Search in 2011 marked the end of “blog search” as a discrete product separate from general web search or news search. It’s easy to imagine that modern search software and vastly cheaper hardware make it possible to recreate a search engine for frequently-updated sites like news sites and blogs, with domain-specific features that general tools like Google News don’t offer.

Comments

In the early days of blogging, not every publishing tool supported comments natively; as a result, third-party commenting services popped up to meet the need. As the major tools incorporated their own commenting features, comment services came to be used primarily by big publishers using unwieldy content management systems that didn’t natively support commenting features. In the earlier era, comment systems were built without anticipating the ways that online communities would grow, and these serious design flaws enabled the widespread abuse that we see online today. Newer tools seem to be trying to put the genie back in the bottle, but large publishers are increasingly shutting down comments entirely rather than investing in building a healthy community.

Responses

One category of interaction between sites that’s nearly disappeared is the idea of structured responses between different authors or even different sites. Though Medium supports a limited version of this feature today, early tools like Trackback and Pingback made it possible for almost any site to let another site know that their story or article had inspired a response. Typically, those responses were shown under an article, similar to comments, but once Google introduced its advertising platforms like AdSense, links between sites suddenly had monetary value and spam links soon followed. A modern reinvention of Trackback-style features could connect conversations on different websites in the same way that @ replies work on Twitter.

I would also mention, as Dash did, Friends pages like those of Livejournal.

Thoughts?

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/5136267.html

Going through IWPR's recent archives, I was very surprised to see the article "LiveJournal Returns in Kazakstan, But Now Facebook is King", by one Botagoz Seidakhmetova, which noted that the ban on Livejournal had been lifted in Kazakhstan in November after four years. That it had been banned at all is something I had been unaware of--Global Voices had noticed this back in September 2011, but I had not seen it.

The authorities in Kazakstan have unblocked the LiveJournal blogging website, four years after shutting down access to it.

A government statement on November 11 said the decision was taken after unlawful material – religious and extremist propaganda and information about weapons – were deleted.

[. . .]

Commentators suspect that LiveJournal incurred anger because opposition leaders based abroad used it as a platform for attacking the government. One was Rahat Aliev, former son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbaev, who went into exile after being prosecuted, and proceeded to publish allegations of wrongdoing by Kazakstan’s leaders.

Aliev is no longer a threat to the government – he committed suicide in a Vienna prison in February 2015.

In all likelihood, LiveJournal is no longer relevant since most of its users have shifted to Facebook.

Pavel Bannikov, a Russian-language poet who used to use LiveJournal, recalls how influential it used to be – literary journals would find new content on the site and approach writers to seek permission to print their poetry.

“It’s good that LiveJournal has reopened. But in Kazakstan, LiveJournal won’t become what it was in 2007, when everyone used it as a news source,” Bannikov added. "I’ve noticed that in the last three years, virtually all the active, engaging users – the ones you’d like to read and hear their views – have gone over to Facebook.”

In that Livejournal, no longer a global contender, seems to be now substantially limited to the Russophone world, that it has been so thoroughly kneecapped in one of the largest Russophone countries about is not a good sign. The damage inflicted just can't be reversed, not without some further and wholly unexpected shift.

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/4725062.html

At the beginning of the week on Livejournal, first Keith R.A. Decandido then Steve Roby took part in an interesting meme. What are my Livejournal userpics, and what are their backstories?

This, my default icon was posting, is a crudely grayscaled version of a photo originally taken of me by Bill Pusztai in January 2005. We were just outside the CIBC branch at 90 Danforth Avenue when I got a phone call from some telemarketers I was working for part-time, telling me that my week-long trial was over and I was done with them.

This icon, used for my [FORUM] posts, is drawn from a photo was taken by my ex, G., as I was leaning back against his balcony on a warm summer night.

This photo, which I use for my [PHOTO] posts, was a selfie, taken as I was standing in front of the shiny gold-impregnated windows of the South Tower of the Royal Bank Plaza complex.

My [CAT] icon is taken from a photo I took of Shakespeare when he was young, barely more than a year old, swiping at my visiting mother's leg.

I do not use my [OBSCURA] icon much any more. It's a shame, since there's so much photography I see on my Flickr feed that I would like to highlight, but not such a shame, since to my embarrassment I can't remember where I got this photo of a vintage 19th century camera. I hope it was from the Wikimedia Commons.
obscura forget where

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/4628113.html

Back in October of 2005, Livejournaler Heather Cooze posted in the Toronto Livejournal community a complaint about the steeped tea sold by Canada-founded chain Tim Horton's. This post has since been revised, apparently in response to criticism the author received, but in the original version she said that the decision of Tim Horton's to sell tea without including teabags--an option added, it should be noted, alongside their--was like rape. Also, it was something that the Nazis would have done.

The post got quite a lot of criticism. A petition that Cooze had started was taken down, as she complained people were taking her choice of language too seriously. A common opinion in the Toronto community, and in my Livejournal as well, was that the language she used was irresponsible. How, exactly, is selling steeped tea like rape? Why would it be something that the Nazis would do? The language used, evoking violence and even genocide, was ridiculously at odds with the actual subject matter. The people who said that a person who had only this to complain about was lucky were right.

I've been thinking of this misguided post more and more recently, as I've seen language get misused in similar ways in online forums and mainstream journalism and public life generally. Too often, words are used without regard to their actual meaning. "Colonialism" describes a specific set of circumstances, say, as does "fascism", as does "racism". Using terms like these as catch-all phrases to describe situations that a speaker does not like, without providing actual evidence for these terms' real-world relevance, conveys only that the speaker does not like a situation. That's it.

What do we lose through the misuse of the language? We lose an ability to actually understand what is going on. (Greece in 2015, for all of its travails, is going through nothing like Haiti's experience of slavery-driven colonialism.) We certainly demonstrate our profound lack of understanding of the situation that has been mistaken to provide the incendiary analogy. (The sale of steeped tea is nothing like sexual assault.) Ultimately, we lose an ability to actually talk about things. How can we, if words with established meanings are taken to mean anything at all?

What do you think about this? Is there any way we can fight against this misuse? (Fighting against specific examples of misuse, perhaps?)

Thoughts?

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/4361620.html

Via Nicholas Whyte I found Lindsay Gates-Markel's essay at The Toast. It's a sensitive essay, about the importance of LiveJournal to her--as a person, as a writer--and one that evoked substantial amounts of nostalgia for me.

(Oh, if only the platform hadn't been left to decay! My friends page is still populated but it is no longer what it was.)

Reading back, of course, it’s all a little precious, all a little LiveJournal. I was figuring out that I was a writer, but I was also young, I was very sure about many incorrect things, I felt ready for life without having any realistic idea of what life was actually like. In short, I was a teenage girl. It reassured me to filter everything, as it happened, through words. The best way for me to comprehend my own life was to read it back to myself.

And I knew I wasn’t alone. The girls who read my LJ, and vice versa, were doing the same; they, too, believed their lives were at least worth documenting, and so we were hungry together, reaching out toward the details in one another’s lives like vines toward the sun; we loved each other, celebrated surprise joys and consoled atomic hurt. We joined communities to learn to knit and to share poetry and to post photos of ourselves. We created new usernames to symbolize new directions in our lives–one for college, one for poetry, one for only extra-secret secrets. LiveJournal was a neverending sleepover for us sentimental storytellers, teenagers who were feeling every feeling. The sun was just about to come up. We had plenty of snacks. We passed our diaries around the circle.

In the LJ archives of my dear friend Courtney, there’s a post she made in 2002, as a teenage girl:

man this thing works. its like all the badness escapes when you write it down.

I stopped using LiveJournal years ago, though I gave it up in fits, came crawling back to create temporary friends-only journals that now sit dormant with only four or five posts. LiveJournal ended with a whisper; all the other girls I’d gotten to know over nearly a decade on the site stopped using it, too, seemingly within the same few months. Many of us moved to Tumblr, where there was no comment function, and our personal posts became rarer and rarer and—in my case, anyway—eventually stopped.

Last fall, after hearing about TinyLetter, a personal newsletter service, I signed up for an account. For several weeks, I sent out letters that were bad versions of other people’s fascinating TinyLetters. Finally, after some weeks of floundering, I sat down at the end of a hard day at work and wrote a letter about how I felt—very scared and lost at thirty-one. I stared out my office windows. I cried a little. I just feel like I see these lives I imagined for myself all over the place sometimes, walking around, being real. Where I’d normally sent several draft iterations to my inbox, I barely even proofread this letter. “Are you sure?” TinyLetter asked. I wasn’t. I clicked Yes, send it now and went home.

More, much more, at the link.

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/4208930.html

Mathew Ingram suggests that Medium is starting to occupy the online space once occupied by Livejournal. (I really should get back to my account there and see what's what.)

When it first emerged, and for most of the time since then, Medium has been seen as primarily a place for long-form posts or articles, in part because the site has a clean and flowing design that encourages large images. Most of the content that the site itself commissioned and paid for has also tended to be long-form, and Williams has often talked about his vision for the site as being similar to a magazine.

On Tuesday, however, Medium announced a number of new additions to the service, including a very Twitter-like instant post-creation tool that appears on the front page of the site, with a simple box and the phrase “Write here,” and allows users to publish quickly. In a blog post, Williams said he wanted to make it easier “to start writing whenever you have an idea?—?and also to make it feel like less of a big deal to do so.”

Another feature is more of a redesign of the individual author pages, profiles and tag pages — the latter being the new name for what used to be called topic “channels.” Now authors and editors can add tags to their posts and those posts show up in a feed that is arranged by tags such as Tech or Media or Photos, and then filtered by an algorithm based on how many users shared or recommended each post. The redesign of tag and author pages turns them into more of a stream, Williams said — in fact, a very blog-like stream, with a mix of the shorter posts that the site is trying to encourage and longer posts that readers have to click through to view. Much like tweets, the shorter posts can be read within the stream in their entirety, and readers can click to recommend or share them without leaving the stream.

Although Williams didn’t say this, it seems fairly clear that Medium is trying to lower the barriers to creating content on the site — in much the same way that Twitter has been trying to decrease the friction between new users and the service, in order to increase engagement. Although Medium doesn’t really talk about numbers, it seems likely that it wants to broaden the reach of the site beyond just people who feel comfortable writing a 1,000-word blog post, choosing multiple images, etc.

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/4168730.html

In May and then again in September and finally in November, I blogged about Livejournal’s efforts to become something like Medium, a blogging platform for long-format journalism and writing.

This hasn’t happened. Livejournal has not evolved into a more flexible and suitable blogging platform. There has been, so far as I can tell, no renaissance. What I have noted is that twice in the past two weeks, my Livejournal has been suspended for day-long periods. After I reported this suspension the first time, I got my LJ cleared and unsuspended on the 29th of November, receiving this E-mail.

Thank you for your inquiry. Your journal was placed in readonly mode by an automatic anti-spam system that LiveJournal uses. However, this action was incorrect, caused by a malfunction in the script. I have now removed the readonly status and I'm sorry for any frustration this situation caused you.

Regards,
LiveJournal Abuse Prevention Team

This morning, after my Livejournal went dark yesterday, I got this one at 9 o'clock in the morning my time.

Thank you for your inquiry. Your account was suspended when one of our anti-spam systems flagged it as a potential spam account. However, a review of your journal shows this was incorrect. I have now unsuspended your journal and adjusted a background flag for your account to prevent this from happening again. I apologize for any inconvenience this situation caused you.

Regards,
LiveJournal Abuse Prevention Team

I could perhaps take these suspension to be a sign that I need to generate more original content. I may take this lesson in any event. I am also taking away from this a sense that Livejournal is just not working. Had things gone differently, it might have preempted Facebook. Instead, it's succumbing to DDoS attacks and misfiring bots.

I'm starting to wonder if maintaining a Livejournal separate from my Wordpress blog is worth it. Should I just avoid the hassle, provide a redirect to the places I actively maintain content, and just use this one for reading and commenting?

My readers, I leave it to you.

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/4012902.html

In May and then again in September, I blogged about Livejournal's efforts to become something like Medium, a blogging platform for long-format journalism and writing.

(This hasn't happened.)

I have been thinking about starting to put content, not links but posts involving writing and analysis, over on Medium. What are my reader's opinions of that platform?

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/3955420.html

Sisi Wei's ProPublica article from last month noting how Livejournal has blocked access to Alexei Navalny's Livejournal blog inside Russia makes unsurprising use. It does represent many fears, legitimate or otherwise, of Livejournal users of undue Russian influence on the site.

The company, LiveJournal, shows an error message to users inside Russia who try to read a blog maintained by prominent activist and politician Alexei Navalny, a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Navalny uses the service to post about Putin, the Russian government and politics. Users in other countries can read Navalny’s blog without seeing the error message.

[. . .]

An early social media pioneer, LiveJournal was once popular in the United States but is now dwarfed by sites like Tumblr and Wordpress. The site does retain a smaller, dedicated following among Americans users, including George R.R. Martin, author of A Game of Thrones, who regularly posts on his LiveJournal blog. In Russia, LiveJournal is the most popular blogging platform – so popular, in fact, that the Russian name for LiveJournal has become synonymous with "blogging.”

LiveJournal has a history of being blocked by Russian authorities, and may be self-censoring to minimize the parts of their site that are unavailable inside Russia. The entire service was blocked in parts of Russia at least twice as a result of regional court decisions meant to block individual users. On March 13 of this year, Navalny’s blog, along with three Russian news sites, were officially ordered to be blocked by Russia’s telecom agency at the request of Russia’s Prosecutor General.

When it was blocked by the government, users inside some Russian cities trying to visit the banned LiveJournal site would have seen an error message from their Internet provider, saying that the page was not accessible.

But in the current case, the error message appears to come from LiveJournal itself, at a LiveJournal URL and on a page that includes the company’s logo and design. The error reads, “The page is blocked due to the decision of authorities in your area.” The error message is in English, though Navalny’s blog is in Russian. Attempts to reach Navalny’s blog from a U.S. Internet connection were successful.

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/3896043.html

I'm planning on posting an extended look at Ello later this week. I'm on there and I find the site interesting, but I'll reserve judgement. Meanwhile fengi's post suggesting that Livejournal fills a niche is worth noting. Livejournal's ongoing efforts to reestablish itself in the non-Russian blogosphere might come to fruition. Or, they might not: as one ex-Livejournaler noted on Facebook when I shared the link, people left LJ for a reason.

It has the features ello testers and disgruntled Facebook users want now. After 15 years of experience, it has slowly learned from drama and errors. It survived the original dot bust and seems ready for the next one.

The free-to-paid membership model has provided ad-free, adult-friendly options for a decade plus, something earnest manifestos usually don't (see tumblr's broken promise).

So why deal with more inflated startup promises and fumbling? Say goodbye to Facebook and hello to Livejournal -- a customizable global social network that doesn't require real names and provides an easy, logical way to avoid ads. [Forgive me for the infomercial language.]

As a longtime user and occasionally harsh critic, I think LJ is flawed but less adversarial and predatory towards users than Facebook, Google and others. Yes, it has an "old meme" image and notorious past service dramas, but in the long term it's become a solid product.

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/3895675.html

On Saturday, James Nicoll--ruling blogger of English-language Livejournal--linked to a new video advertisement on YouTube for Livejournal.

"What Is LiveJournal?" (Watch on YouTube)

In it, an anonymous narrator suggested that Livejournal would meet the needs of people who would like to write at length in anonymity, to shed the public identities of Facebook and the like for something pseudonymous, even anonymous.

I said in the comments of that YouTube video that I wished Livejournal had done it before now. Visiting that page again, I see that it recorded only 647 views. That's up a few hundred since the first time I saw the video, but still. The commenter at James' blog who suggests the whole thing is moot until the people who left Livejournal for Facebook come back is entirely right.

I mentioned in May that Livejournal was also being positioned as a competitor to Medium, as a host for long-format writing. This new use is not incompatible with that previously-stated use, yet I have to wonder. Does Livejournal know what it is doing? Or is it desperately casting about for something that can keep it going in the English-speaking world?

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/3862479.html

James Nicoll linked to a Techcrunch article describing how the new CEO of Livejournal wants to position this blogging platform as a kind of Medium, as a place for long-form writing.

LiveJournal is hanging out the “under new management” banner yet again. Last month, the company announced a new CEO, Katya Akudovich, who previously worked at Google, Box and Microsoft. Akudovich was confirmed in a unanimous vote by the board of directors, who believe her international experience at these major tech companies will help her make LiveJournal a top social media platform yet again.

“My Box experience, where I started the Deal Desk department, gave me unique insights into how a company turbo-charged an amazing product,” she tells us. “At Google, it was about bringing the right content in the right form to brand new Google Play markets. And this is exactly what we’re planning to do at LJ,” Akudovich says.

In addition to the new services Akudovich teases, LiveJournal is also rolling out new iOS and Android applications next month, designed to appeal to both writers and readers. And the company is hopping on the ‘anonymity’ bandwagon, now in vogue thanks to services like Whisper, Yik Yak and Secret, noting that LiveJournal “will remain anonymous and will never ask its users to identify themselves.”

[. . .]LJ’s new strategy for 2014 and beyond is one where it hopes to promote itself as a platform for longer-form content and self-expression in an era when users can’t seem bothered to post status updates, preferring Instagram selfies, looping Vine clips, GIFs and texts over longer articles, lengthy videos, and the like.

But that, thinks LiveJournal, is the opportunity.

“There’s a big market for this that really only we and Medium are filling – and with significantly more personalization, while still being easy to use,” says Akudovich. “Our users generate an amazing amount of deep content - half a million long-form posts a day – these are not tweets, these are real long-form posts where people write some very interesting things. We have amazing communities too,” she says.

Hmm.

This proposal certainly does seem to reflect the way Livejournal is now used. Of the people active on my friends list, most of them are people who write long-form entries. Many of them are, in fact, published authors. Rejigging the non-Cyrillic functions of Livejournal to service this demographic does work.

And yet. Is this an innovative effort to position Livejournal as a platform of choice for long-range writing, perhaps even social journalism, or is this trying to take some advantage of the fact that the users who have remained are too locked to their journals and communities to move? I've migrated already: this text is being entered into a window at Dreamwidth, which then automatically posts to Livejournal, and will be cut-and-pasted over to WordPress. Making Livejournal an active hub for me again, as opposed to a second-order backup with a friends page I visit, will take some doing.

There's also the non-trivial question of whether or not Livejournal can make these changes without alienating its user base. Not a week ago, I was perturbed to find out that Livejournal had switched the user interface entirely. I couldn't locate my aforementioned friends page. It was only when I found out, via a LJ friend's post, how to switch the user interface back to a usable format. I fear that Livejournal may yet change it back. I had no idea this particularly was coming, but the idea that Livejournal's administrators would unilaterally change something critical of the site without letting its users know is sadly not a surprise. The commenters at Techcrunch shared their own stories of how the site has let them down. Navigating a revamp of the site without angering frequently disappointed long-time users is going to be an issue.

I hope Livejournal can survive in some form, but I will need to be convinced. We'll see what will happen.

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/3740378.html

I began my online presence on Usenet, but my first participation in formal social networks. began here on Livejournal. I've remained on Livejournal, but since then there have been migrations, of blog content to WordPress (secondarily to Dreamwidth) and of everything to Facebook. There's some specialty networks I take part in at a low level--Flickr and Tumblr for photos, Goodreads for books, Yelp! for reviews of restaurants and stores, Quora for debate--but that's it.

You?

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/3686803.html

I found out via fellow Livejournaler tilia-tomentosa that Livejournal's Cyrillic-script section will be altering the metrics it displays so as to avoid Russian censorship. The situation is examined in detail by Global Voices' Andrey Tselikov.

A bill that will equate popular bloggers with mass media [Global Voices report] has passed Russia's lower house of parliament, the Duma. All that remains now are the rather perfunctory steps of passing the Federation Council, and approval by President Vladimir Putin. It now appears a fait accompli that starting with August 1, 2014 Russian bloggers with over 3,000 daily unique readers will be required to register in the same way an online newspaper does. However, some RuNet giants are already fighting back, proving ahead of time that enforcing such a law will be a logistical nightmare.

Earlier, Yandex.ru, Russia's most powerful search engine, stopped ranking blogs [Global Voices report] on its website. Now, on April 23 Dmitry Pilipenko, head of LiveJournal Russia, posted [ru] the following news in his LJ blog:

Starting today, all blog and community profiles where the number of subscribers ["friends" -ed.] is larger than two and a half thousand, will display 2,500+ instead of the actual number of users who are “Friends of”. The actual number will be available only to owners of blogs or the moderators of communities.

I must add that these changes only affect those users who use the Cyrillic services of LiveJournal.

The rating of users and communities, which was formed based on page-views, will also stop.

The above changes are based on plans to take measures to optimize the service. All coincidences are accidental.

Not coincidentally, Alexei Navalny--a Russian social critic and aspiring politician who uses Livejournal for his blog--is shifting from that service. Again, Global Voices' Tselikov notes.

Russia's most famous blogger (or as he describes himself: “corruption fighter, son, husband, father”) has been forced to move away from LiveJournal, the popular blogging platform that launched him to fame in the first place. As a result of government mandated censorship [Global Voices report], and notwithstanding attempts to counteract such censorship [Global Voices report], Alexey Navalny's team has started a new standalone blog, navalny.com [ru]. Because Navalny is still under house arrest, the blog is technically run by his wife. According to the first post [ru], this blog is an attempt to create a clean slate with Russia's Internet regulators, who claim that Navalny's old blog contains calls for unlawful rallies. At this point, Navalny's LiveJournal account [ru] has stopped updating with original content — it simply links to new posts on navalny.com.

I've been using Livejournal for just under twelve years. I quite like the service, and the communities associated with said.

I'm also wondering whether it's time to give it up. All of my content has been copied over to Livejournal clone Dreamwidth. More usefully, it's all on WordPress, here. If Russian censorship continued to undermine Livejournal, will I have any more reasoned to stay with an increasingly compromised platform? Tselikov notes that, proclamations of Internet freedom aside, the Russian government can always intrude on Livejournal's servers at will.

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/3686266.html

io9's Robert Gonzalez linked to a recent paper arguing that the growth and decline of Facebook can be predicted by epidemiological models.

By drawing similarities between Facebook's rapid adoption and the proliferation of an infectious disease, researchers at Princeton have devised a model that predicts Facebook will lose 80% of its users by 2017.

"Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models," write authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler in an article recently posted to the preprint database arXiv. The basic premise is simple: epidemiological models, the researchers argue, can be used to explain user adoption and abandonment of online social networks, "where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery."

The authors have based their models on data that reflect the number of times "Facebook" has been typed into Google as a search term. Checking Google Trends reveals that these weekly "search queues" reached a peak in December of 2012, and have since begun to level off. Plugging these figures into a modified SIR model for the spread of infectious disease – the researchers call theirs an "infection recovery," or "irSIR," model – yields the chart at the top of this post, and "suggests that Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017."

The researchers tested their model by comparing Google search query data for "Myspace" against adoption/abandonment curves predicted by both traditional and infectious recovery SIR models, demonstrating "that the traditional SIR model for modeling disease dynamics provides a poor description of the data." By comparison, the search query data matches up rather neatly with the proposed irSIR model.

I read about WeChat's dynamic growth in David Barboza's recent New York Times article. In its, Barboza argues that WeChat has not only preempted Facebook in China, but that it might well be one of the first Chinese global Internet brands. (Longtime readers of the blog might remember that both of my cell phones have been Huaweis.)

Weixin is the creation of Tencent, the Chinese Internet powerhouse known for its QQ instant messenger service and its popular online games. Tencent, which is publicly traded and is worth more than $100 billion on the Hong Kong exchange, is now seeking to strengthen that grip in social networking and expand into new areas, such as online payment and e-commerce.

[. . .]

Tencent, meanwhile, is so confident of its messaging app that it is promoting Weixin overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia, where there are already tens of millions of users. The company also plans a marketing blitz in Europe and Latin America, using the name WeChat. The company declined to say whether or when it would promote the service in the United States.

Weixin could help change global perceptions of Chinese companies. Although Chinese Internet companies are still considered knockoffs of Google, Facebook, Twitter and eBay, analysts say they are quickly transforming themselves into dynamic, innovative technology companies with unique business models.

Weixin, for instance, is no mere copy of an existing service but an amalgam of various social networking tools: part Facebook, part Instagram and even part walkie-talkie. Rather than send a short mobile phone message by typing Chinese characters, which can be time-consuming, users simply hold down a button that records a voice message.

“Chinese Internet companies are no longer behind,” says William Bao Bean, a former technology analyst who is now a managing director at the venture capital firm SingTel Innov8. “Now, in some areas, they’re leading the way.”

Crossposts: http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/3573699.html

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Page Summary

[NEWS] Five Internet links: Geocities, Livejournal, Tumblr, Quora, predictions
[NEWS] Six links about the decline of Tumblr (#tumblr)
[ŴRITING] On the end of my LiveJournal experiences
[META] On one impending good reason to move from Livejournal
[FORUM] What social networking sites are you active on?
[WRITING] "The lost infrastructure of social media"
[WRITING] On the death of Livejournal, part x (Kazakhstan)
[META] What are the stories behind my Livejournal userpics?
[FORUM] What do you think about ridiculously misused language?
[WRITING] "In Celebration of Old-School LiveJournal"
[LINK] "Medium gets a little more Twitter-like, and a little more blog-like"
[META] On how Livejournal is just not working for me now
[META] What do you think about Medium?
[LINK] "U.S. Company [Livejournal] Helps Russia Block Prominent Putin Critic"
[LINK] "instead of chasing Ello, why not push LJ?"
[BRIEF NOTE] On Livejournal becoming many things, hopefully doing at least one of them well
[BRIEF NOTE] On Livejournal being made into Medium, or Tumblr with text
[FORUM] How has your social network usage changed over time?
[BRIEF NOTE] On how Russian censorship is killing Livejournal
[LINK] Two links on the decline of Facebook and the rise of WeChat

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Assorted Personal Notations, Essays, and Other Jottings

Entries tagged with livejournal

[NEWS] Five Internet links: Geocities, Livejournal, Tumblr, Quora, predictions

[NEWS] Six links about the decline of Tumblr (#tumblr)

[ŴRITING] On the end of my LiveJournal experiences

[META] On one impending good reason to move from Livejournal

[FORUM] What social networking sites are you active on?

[WRITING] "The lost infrastructure of social media"

[WRITING] On the death of Livejournal, part x (Kazakhstan)

[META] What are the stories behind my Livejournal userpics?

[FORUM] What do you think about ridiculously misused language?

[WRITING] "In Celebration of Old-School LiveJournal"

[LINK] "Medium gets a little more Twitter-like, and a little more blog-like"

[META] On how Livejournal is just not working for me now

[META] What do you think about Medium?

[LINK] "U.S. Company [Livejournal] Helps Russia Block Prominent Putin Critic"

[LINK] "instead of chasing Ello, why not push LJ?"

[BRIEF NOTE] On Livejournal becoming many things, hopefully doing at least one of them well

[BRIEF NOTE] On Livejournal being made into Medium, or Tumblr with text

[FORUM] How has your social network usage changed over time?

[BRIEF NOTE] On how Russian censorship is killing Livejournal

[LINK] Two links on the decline of Facebook and the rise of WeChat